Well, here we are. Just sitting up late tonight after finishing a chapter of The Lord of The Rings. I feel like coding. It seems the fair mist waters of Lothlórien are washing over me, and I am thus stricken to pour forth the hidden substance of my soul.

Seriously, I love these books. I just finished the Harry Potter series, and I immediately picked up Tolkien’s masterpiece again. When I opened it up, I found an old ticket to the Golden Gate Bay Cruise that my dad and brother and I rode back from Sausalito after we biked through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

Come to think of it, many of my memories filed under “Coolest Things Ever Done” find their home in the Pacific West. Swimming with my brother through the shallow rock caves on the crystal shores of Lake Tahoe, crowding around a smoldering clam chowder-filled bread bowl on a chill evening on Pier 39, standing smaller than dust against the shadow of Half Dome. My family took trips out to the Bay Area and Reno/Tahoe for several years in a row when I was younger. Man, I cherish those memories.

“Hello World” is a sort of inside joke with programmers. It’s the first and simplest string of characters you get a program to output so you know things are working. So I suppose that’s exactly what I’m doing. Giving this new phase of my online life a little test, cause we all need to know that things are working, even if it’s just 11 little characters.