Welcome

Welcome to CryptoCellar Tales. You probably think, YAB — Yet Another Blog, and of course you are right. So why do I add to the Internet noise?  There is no simple answer to this but since a very young age I have been impressed by the gentlemen (and ladies) on their soap boxes at Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park in London. So I guess I too want my soapbox.

Five or six years ago I had the idea of adding a more populist forum to my Web page CryptoCellar where I could muse and rave at policies and ideas close to my heart, but also speak and educate in an informal way about cryptography, intelligence, history and declassification. This corner of my Web page was to have the name Pandora's Box. However, due to lack of time it never materialized.

Another reason for creating Pandora's Box was to be able to post short notes and inform the readers of information or happenings that I found interesting. My Web page, which still is in the same simplistic form it had when I created it back in 1995, did not easily cater for short messages of this type.

So here we are. The idea has finally materialized as a Blog: CryptoCellar Tales. However, I should warn you straight away that this will not be like your daily newspaper. First of all I will not tell you anything about the neighbour's cat or what I think about Paris Hilton. I sense you are already disappointed. Sorry about that. And furthermore, I will not post daily — probably not even weekly. You see I am slow thinker; some even say — just slow. Another problem with me is that I am rarely serious and when I am, you probably will not be able to tell. However, when I do post, serious or not, I hope you will find some of it of interest, thought-provoking or just plain amusing. So watch this space.

This is what I wrote back in 2008 when I initially created this blog. The idea was good but the timing was poor. Due to an ever increasing workload I quickly realised that I would probably never find the time to keep the blog running. If the timing is better now only time will show, but at least I will make a serious try. Five years has passed but not very much has changed, I am still the same chap I was back in 2008 thou with more wrinkles and less hair; so I think the welcome is still valid. Perhaps I am a bit faster now than I was back then, I have realised that to accomplish all the things I want I had better hurry up. I have already wasted five years.

So welcome to this space. What it will bring I have no idea, it will entirely depend on what crazy ideas I get when I wake up in the mornings. Hopefully something interesting will come out of it all.

The first thing to report is that my Web site CryptoCellar is living its own life at the moment. It is still on a Web server at CERN but when I retired last year, after 40 years of service, I was, like all other former employees, stripped of all my access rights. So I can do nothing more than you, use the content and watch some of the links go stale. So this is yet another important goal for this year, let CryptoCellar get a new life, preferably in some new clothing to make it more attractive to readers who would like to access the site on mobile devices. At least that is my aim.