Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who's writing all this?

Just a man, born in the 1950s
Ethnic: American Midwest mongrel.
Half a century's lifetime gone, now laying low in Silicon Valley.
More clues in the archaic Places page of online journal from 1999.

2. Why do you do this?

Gotta respond somehow.

3. Your blog doesn't look like most. How come?

'Most' use community software like Blogger, with its easily-enabled comments, etc. I still do my web publishing the old-fashioned-way, composing my HTML in a text editor.

4. You don't seem to be pro-anything. Aren't weblogs by definition political?

Not at all.

Don't blog-writers always have an agenda?

Initially, they didn't, but after 9-11 a lot of people hopped on the blog band wagon. Previously, weblogs were more personal, the purpose being to log links to interesting things found on the web, as well as any personal details or thoughts of the day. Mine is of that old-school variety and it was inspired by the original, Robot Wisdom, logged by Jorn, who put some thoughts into how things've changed in a poem.

5. Is that you on MetaFilter, in the green?

Yes.

6. What's with the carrots?

Weekday mornings, first thing I eat is generally a handful of those lathed-down mini-carrots, slowly munched to and even through lunchtime. And then almost every afternoon I juice a pound of carrots.
Update -- as of early '07 I've fallen out of the mini-carrot habit, so dropped the blog's "Breakfast" label. I'm still juicing, however.

A note on syntax, and the way I write:

Weblog entries often get tweaked in the day or two following the initial posting... even so, an entry only gets that "updated" note added to the top if I've changed it so much, new URL(s) were added.
Italicized text indicates a book, newspaper or magazine title, whereas "quotes" delineate the title of a movie, or (rarely) a magazine article or short story.
Direct quotes lifted from web-sites are usually marked in a different color, and if it's more than a sentence fragment it's usually offset between <blockquote> tags. Sometimes, the source of the quote isn't indicated, but can be accessed via a hyper-linked asterisk at the end.