I‘ve been a lot more interested in making podcasts than I have been in writing anything lately. I feel guilty about that on one level, but on the other I’m not a trained monkey who updates this blog for anyone’s entertainment other than my own. I am here to jerk off my ego, and that is all. If I don’t feel like killing kittens, then no kittens will be killed.

The easy thing to do would be to post an inflammatory, incomplete thought that would draw 55 comments, but the only interesting thing about that would be to take bets on when and how the comments thread would derail. Just about the only way to get a discussion going is to make people want to say, “goddamn it! you left this out!” or “goddamn it! you’re wrong and you didn’t even explain your point very well!” Write something lengthy thorough, and people tend to doze off and/or tune out.

I visited a friend in Tennessee this weekend, and he said he does the same thing at his IT job: he knows how to repair a certain printer, but will bring it around another guy who knows more about printers than he does, and intentionally go about repairing it the wrong way so the other guy will want to correct him. The other guy takes over, and he gets out of repairing the printer.

I’m sure there’s a name for that technique, but I don’t know what it is. I utilize it frequently.