The Columnist Manifesto

Incredibly, I had two emails in my inbox, from people I don’t know – who actually read my blog! This is a red letter day.

L, a law student whose email handle suggests that her law student persona is, to quote the movie Dr. Zhivago, “a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid,” writes to tell me that

your link to Conglomerate,like the Wonkette link, contained an extra 'http://'...so you need toedit that and the link should work fine. Much as I love a good microsoft conspiracy theory, this appears to be a code problem. You seem like someone who ought to be a mac person, anyway.

How nice is that? Dammit, I should be a Mac person. Unfortunately, I learned personal computing in the context of law practice, and found myself locked into the world of PCs. Why lawyers don’t use Macs I don’t know, but back in those days, there were huge compatibility problems between the two brands. Perhaps I should check again.

Meanwhile, Microsoft shows how evil is capable of patience and long-term planning. My preferred word processing program, Corel Word Perfect, is on its way to extinction. Despite Word Perfect’s having gained the lion’s share of the lawyer market back in the day, Microsoft will drive it out of business in a few years. How? By capturing law students, those penny wise but pound foolish consumers, who use MS Word because it comes free (or very cheap) with their PCs. I’m guessing that even you, L, use MS Word for Mac, don’t you? All students now use Word, and I spend many, many minutes converting my Word Perfect documents into Word to post them for my students.

By the way, L was quite right, my link to Conglomerate did have “http” twice. My bad. And yet, L, one has to ask, when there is a coding error in linking to a blog, why does it go to Microsoft, rather than, say, the AOL/Time Warner home page? What’s more, I fixed the code problem, and the Conglomerate link still goes to Microsoft. Hmmm...

Another emai,l from TB, explains that many of my purported “referrals” may come from hitting the “next blog” button at the top of most blogger layouts. According to TB, doing this yields a lot of

set-up-and-immediately-abandoned blogs, blogs probably contrived to increase someone's Google page rank (your "Shoes" example), and incomprehensible stuff set up by teenagers

TB likens hitting my blog instead of "Shoes" to finding $20 on the sidewalk. I cannot imagine greater praise in cyberspace.

Ironically, I found these notes the night after a conversation with a fellow blogger about the anxiety of having your blog catch the attention of some obsessive guy who bombards you with emails. I’m happy to report that L and TB both provided helpful feedback and seemed quite well adjusted.