About

Small change was going to be a blog about counting pennies in the hope that somehow they would grow into dollars. After several attempts to launch the blog, I realized that what I knew about money was not worth sharing. Still, taking the notion that a penny saved has a way of turning into something bigger, I thought that I might try to register, like in a ledger of sorts, those small changes around me that might be the new currency of trade for bigger things in the works for what it means to be human these days.

The driving spirit behind this blog is a bit like the urge behind beachcombing: scavenging in the shallow flotsam and the narrow band of sand, always at the edge of water and land, and claiming a position in neither realm.

I have been writing in this form (blog style?) since 2000, first on a homemade platform, cobbled together from an Access database, a little bit of ASP, and liberal doses of HTML. Back then, I mused a lot about the poetics of blogs and how blogs were going to change the world. I wrote something about “authenticity & voice,” which garnered about 5 seconds of fame for me.

Eventually, I moved on to MovableType as alembic, which is how I came to be known in cyber circles, some of which have persisted longer in friendship than those in the offline world. Managing MovableType as an installation became a chore and, as I kept pondering my next move into new blog digs, my hosting company pulled the rug from all virtual accounts, leaving me virtually homeless. So then, here I am … and will stay for a while.

By the way, some of you might also know me as the author of Mapmaker of Absences

Tom Montag’s appreciation
of Mapmaker of Absences
and INTERVIEW with me