About this Blog

I started this blog back in 2003 shortly after reading How Blogs Work. I was, at the time, trying to read every article on How Stuff Works, a goal I never accomplished. I find it interesting to read back over my old posts -- they are, for the most part, short and dry, and have grammar mistakes that I would be embarrassed to make today. The most annoying of these mistakes is my improper usage of "who" when I should have used "whom."

I generally stuck to the policy of never mentioning anyone explicitly -- I will often say "the network lady," or "my best friend," avoiding names. This is an artifact of my being told (by well-meaning parents) that one should never use names on the Internet. In reading through my old posts, I found two violations of this policy.

Recently, my posts have been written as a one-sided conversation. Sometimes, there is a spoken conversation that inspires a post. However, more times than not, my inspiration to post has been my having a topic I wished to discuss, but having no one at hand who would be interested in such a topic. Sometimes, I will post specifically because it would have been helpful to me if someone else had posted on the topic. An example of this is my MATLAB R2007b on T61 with Vista.

Another thing that I have tried to do is to include helpful links in-line when appropriate (never using text similar to "click here" as the anchor). I have also encoded the expansion of any abbreviation or acronym in an <abbr> tag so that when one hovers an abbreviation with a mouse, a tool-tip shows the expanded version. Also, in all of my more recent posts, I have tried to choose a descriptive title. Sadly, I was too lazy to do this with my earliest posts. Additionally, for brevity, I will often use "he" when I speak of the third-person singular. This is what I was taught to do when I was in the third grade (which was before the modern advocacy of the more politically-correct "he or she" variation.)

In very recent years, I have tried to use proper grammar and spelling. These things are technical, and I have no excuse for getting technical things wrong, especially when I expect and want others to get them right.

This post will probably end up being my "about page" for this blog.