About

I write mostly about politics and technology, although I’ve a tendency to stray into security and current affairs at times (and where the four intersect is my favourite place – eVoting, for example).

I’ve been on the web since 1995, and, while this is my only personal blog, I’ve contributed to a few group blogs (including IrishElection.com) and spent years moderating and administrating discussion forums.

Granite What?

No, there’s no particular reason behind the name.  The domain is something I’ve had for years, so I just made up something that fit the tld I have and was slightly wierd.  The history behind the tld is that it was one of the few keith.?? domains still available when I first went to register.

Philosophers only interpret the world – the point is to change it

The quote (well, not an exact quote, but close enough) is from Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach XI (as edited by Friedrich Engels).  Full text here.  While I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist by any means (I endeavour to read Marx and Adam Smith in equal proportion, and would consider my self more Keynsian than either), that quote always struck me as a fundamental reason for being involved in politics.  Speak all you like about the problems of the world, but if you’re not prepared to muck in and fix them, it’s a bit pointless.

For balance, here’s one of my favourite Smith quotes, which I like reciting to IBEC people whenever they go on about free market capitalism:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” (Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 10, Part 2).

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