Ray Butterworth No Ads. No Pop-ups. No Cookies.

As I approached 50, I began to realize just how much I understood things that other people appeared not to. So many things that seemed complicated or confusing seemed rather simple and obvious to me. It certainly wasn't everything, and I definitely couldn't offer solutions to the world's problems, but many things that were contentious or required much discussion for others were trivial for me.

I know that as people age, their views become more solidified and their opinions become more like facts to them, but this was more than just that. Years later, I'm still capable of being wrong, and of changing my views. When someone or something proves me wrong, I don't consider that a bad thing. It means that I've learned something new, unlearned something old, and now have an even better understanding of the world.

Perhaps it was due to my highly analytical personality and my desire to understand how things work in terms of cause and effect. Many people see problems in a personal, emotional, and social context. I happen to be very poor at such skills, so perhaps that lets me see the underlying problems more clearly.

Many people conflate multiple problems into something large and complicated, and then spend their time worrying about these symptoms. Whenever I see a symptom, I naturally wonder about its cause. I can often separate multiple symptoms, each possibly with multiple causes, into many small, easy to solve, underlying problems.

Over the following years I dug up old e-mail conversations, news-group postings, work projects, and other things I'd written, organized them, and turned them into web pages. This process led me to similarly record other inspirations as I received them, if for nothing else, so that I can someday look back at how I used to see the world (and either impress or amuse myself).