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Sorry for sidetracking you here. If you haven't seen this page
before, I'd appreciate it if you'd skim it. But first of all: do
not send me HTML-formatted email.
Send me
mail (for real this time)
I receive a lot of mail because of this site and most of
that is thoughtful and deserves an answer. While I'd really love to
be able to respond to every letter I receive, it just isn't
possible. So if I don't answer you it isn't because I hate you (as
one guy assumed once) but because yours was one of the 75 letters
per day I can't answer instead of the 25 or so I do. (And sometimes,
in order to answer more letters, my answers have to be brief. That's
not intended to be rude; it's just practicality.)
As a general rule, i'm much more likely to respond to a letter
if:
It's short. I simply don't have time to read
letters which are a hundred lines long. (Yes, I know my own posts
are much longer than that.)
It isn't HTML formatted. If I have to
cut-and-paste the message into FrontPage to even figure out what's
it about, I'm more likely to skip it. (Letters which are doubled,
with both unformatted and formatted versions, are fine.)
It isn't abusive. Whether you agree with me or
not, if you curse at me you go into the bozo bin. If you can't
present your disagreement civilly, I'm not interested in talking
to you.
It only talks about one
subject.
I assume that letters sent to me may be published in whole or in
part unless you say otherwise. If you have a web site and I know
where it is, I'll use your full name or online pseudonym and link to
you. If you don't have, I will refer to you by given name only (so
that there's credit but also plausible deniability). If you want to
be totally anonymous, you better say so.
But if your letter is abusive, I may decide to post your full
name and email address.
There are certain kinds of letters I receive a lot and I thought
it would save everyone time if I provided a few stock answers
here.
You mispelled "prestidigitation". Please don't
send me comments about spelling and grammar mistakes. (Haven't you
got anything better to do?) I do want to know when I've loused up a
link in a new article. On the other hand, I don't want to hear about
link rot in old articles.
Hey, did you see this that Instapundit linked
to? If you found a link on Instapundit or Little
Green Footballs or Daily
Pundit, I will see it when I visit those pages so you don't need
to send it to me.
I'd like to send you a contribution, but I can't find
your tip jar. I appreciate the offer, but I neither need nor want contributions.
Have you ever read anything by Ayn Rand? Yes,
and I have no interest in doing so again, and I have no interest in
discussing why it is that I have no interest in doing so
again. I'm not an Objectivist, and I'm not interested in
reading about Objectivism, and I'm not interested in
discussing Objectivism. (The same thing goes about any
other kind of zealotry. No, I haven't spoken to Jesus lately, and I
don't plan to start.)
...anything about CDMA... That part of my life
is now over, and I'm not keeping up with the industry and in fact
have pretty much lost interest in it. I remember it and I do mention
it sometimes on my site, but I can't tell you which cell phone
company to use, or which handset to buy, and I really don't want to
hear about the latest anti-Qualcomm venting in The
Register. And no, I don't know how to break the subsidy lock on
your phone and I wouldn't tell you even if I did.
You really shouldn't have posted this article or
You really shouldn't have expressed this opinion. I
post what I want to post. It's my server and my site. Maybe you
don't like what I say, and that's fine; we can discuss the issue on
the merits. But telling me to remove something from the site is not
OK, whether it's because you found it offensive or because you
thought I demeaned myself by posting it. Don't waste your time.
I'd love to see you write about this. I'll
consider it. I really will. But I can't promise anything. I do not
deliberately choose what I write about,
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