Not On This Blog

Aside from in-depth, highly technical articles of an academic, scholarly quality, this blog of mine lacks a few other things as well, some of them deliberately. Let me list some the deliberate omissions:

--Sometimes I will refer to someone I personally know by their name, but only either in passing when referring to something else or if I am praising or congratulating them for something. I do not use this blog as a forum to personally criticize or gossip. However, public figures are an entirely different matter! But even with those, you may have noticed that I hold back from the personal gossip about them as well.

--Everyone has gripes about this thing or that in their work and school lives. So do I. And I may write about these gripes to some extent, while couching them in general terms. But identifying specific people is not for this forum of mine, although I do feel justified in discussing some of my opinions about non-family people in positions of authority over me in my past (such as teachers), without naming them.

--Consider the extremes of emotions that pretty much all of us regularly experience. I experience the whole range, all the way from ecstasy to deep funks. Relating, from one day to the next, what emotional state I’m in and why I’m feeling this way or that doesn’t belong on this blog.

--The above also applies to the gamut of health issues I regularly confront over the course of a day and over a period of days. If others want to do this with their blogs, then that’s cool with me. I just don’t think that this sort of thing would be very interesting.

--This isn’t Facebook. I have a Facebook account, so if I want to do the social networking scene with the pictures and little blurbs, then that’s where I’m going. Not that I won’t occasionally stick a picture or two here as well.

--From time to time I will feature an embedded music video on this blog. But I am careful to only feature officially-sanctioned videos put on YouTube by the concerned artist/company and for which the embedding codes have been provided. Most of the material I see on YouTube, regrettably, is not authorized by the artist responsible for the work. Also, most of the official stuff has the embedding disabled by request. I don’t see how this helps them, because all I am doing by featuring their already released material (on YouTube) on my blog is to lavishly promote them! Oh well, go figure!

--A few months ago, I changed my blog’s title to my initials, hence “WMI Blog”. Later, I discovered that Windows has some kind of software application with the name “WMI” and even has a website with the same name (but whose URL is simply “.com”. Seeing how I was WMI since back in 1956, I feel I have a bit more legitimacy to the usage of this as my title. If confusion about this inadvertently brings computer geeks and customers over my way, then so be it. The “commercial” WMI can always change ITS name. I’m certainly not.

--I notice a lot of blogs freely using photographs they’ve found elsewhere to enhance their writing (e.g. show a picture of Obama next to the article about him). But it appears to me that practically every photo I run across is the intellectual property of someone else, even those I run across in the general news flow. So I avoid using them. But, of course, no such restriction applies to pictures I have taken myself.

--I am not above using sarcasm or some moderately strident language (such as “crappy”) when criticizing a public figure (or my local newspaper). But using profanity or extreme comparisons (e.g. to Hitler or Satan or “terrorist”) is not only inappropriate, it’s stupid!

So what does this leave me to write about on this blog? Pretty much everything else!