Have you ever had one of those moments where an idea hits you at the strangest of moments?  This hap­pened to me recently when my fam­ily and I were enjoy­ing break­fast at one of our favorite break­fast eater­ies.  When our food arrived at the table I asked the wait­ress for extra nap­kins, and it hit me.

Does ask­ing the server for more nap­kins increase the chance that you will need them?  Or is it sim­ply being pre­pared in the event that they are needed?  At what point does pre­cau­tion become self-fulfilling prophecy?

At first, I dis­missed the idea as the silly ram­blings of a man who hasn’t had his cof­fee yet, but it stuck with me.  I began to won­der if hav­ing a safety net would increase the like­li­hood of risky behav­ior or care­less­ness rather than sim­ply pro­vide a level of pro­tec­tion.  Does the safety net make the trapeze artist more bold, more care­less?  Does the seat-belt or airbag act as enablers to the lead foot?  What about gov­ern­ment spend­ing and the lack of account­abil­ity? (more…)

I’ve decided it is time to change the look of “The Burn­man Expe­ri­ence” yet again.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the old design and since I’ve decided to start blog­ging much more reg­u­larly, I fig­ured it was about time to make the switch.  So far, I am pleased with the new theme and will be cus­tomiz­ing it over the next few days.

What do you think of the new theme?

I finally got around to renam­ing the blog to some­thing which bet­ter matches the domain upon which it resides.  “The Burn­ing Blog” is now known as “The Burn­man Expe­ri­ence.”  When I first named the blog, I thought incor­po­rat­ing my name with a bit of bib­li­cal word­play would be fun.  In truth, I would most likely have kept the blog’s old name had it not been for the BDSM porn site which chose the same name AND pur­chased the match­ing domain name.  Nobody wants their site con­fused with another one (unless they are try­ing to scam peo­ple), but I was espe­cially unhappy with being mixed up with that par­tic­u­lar site.

And while I will miss the blog’s old name, I must admit that “The Burn­man Expe­ri­ence” bet­ter suits the place.  I sup­pose refer­ring to my blog as some­thing akin to God speak­ing through the burn­ing bush may have been a bit con­ceited any­way. 

I have been spend­ing a bit of time con­tem­plat­ing The Burn­ing Blog.  I have been think­ing about why I decided to begin blog­ging in the first place, and whether or not I have achieved any of my orig­i­nal goals.  I orig­i­nally intended for The Burn­ing Blog to pro­vide me with an out­let for ran­dom thoughts and philo­soph­i­cal pon­der­ings, a place where I could cre­atively explain how I see life.  Well, the redesign of the blog and removal of all pre­vi­ous con­tent should be a good indi­ca­tion of how i feel that went.

I have decided that I will put both The Burn­ing Blog and TheBurnman.com to bet­ter use than I have in the past.  I hope to post more fre­quently, and with a style that is more my own.  I have a lot of dif­fer­ent projects which in the works, and will be dis­cussing those to some degree here as well.  I was sur­prised at how dif­fi­cult it was to remove all the con­tent I had posted here, but now that I have done it, I feel much bet­ter about the blog’s future.

I look for­ward to see­ing where this new direc­tion takes me.