hughmacdougall.com

 Hi everyone.

That means my old friends, family, young friends, Chinese friends I have collected in my travels, my newest friends (my students and the staff of the University), and blog friends who I haven’t even met. My oldest friends are my most neglected friends but they are also the ones who know I never forget them and will always turn up again one day. I love you all and Christmas is a great time to think of you all and try to communicate how precious you all are to me. If people could put their friends in a museum and display them to the world I know I would have the best museum of all. Thanks.

Well, maybe it could. A news item in the Brisbane Courier-Mail tells the story of a young Czech speedway driver who woke of after a crash to amaze ambulancemen by speaking perdfect English. He had begun to study English but had not made much progress. He lost his new found skill but he believes the language must be imprinted on his unconscious and he can get it back again. I wonder if a bump on the head could help me learn Chinese and my students learn English. Do you think I should try it? Here’s the website  http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,22422260-5013016,00.html

Critical or other comments, so long as they are genuine, are always welcome. Readers, please watch out for sploggers among the comments. They are people with small brains who spend their time wasting the time of others. In this case they have decided to waste yours by putting nothing at all in their comments except a link to sites that offer nothing of value to you. You can pick them by their silly names. I will delete these comments when I notice them.  Just click on the ‘no comments’ or ‘comments’ link to leave your contribution. Sploggers, if you want to make a lot of money from the internet and think it would be great to attract links from sites like mine, and if you are so unintelligent and amoral as to be unable to understand what a nuisance your unprincipled greed is to me and my readers, just go away and think about the consequences to you if I ask the powers-that-be on the internet to track you down and ban you from the entire net. They can do that.

It is traditional to celebrate one’s two hundredth of something by talking about it but in this case it is talking about blogging. Blogging is talking! So I’m talking about this form of talking. I’ve come to like it a lot since I began earlier this year and learned a lot about what I don’t like about blogging too. I am very reluctant to talk about how to make money blogging because it seems to me to be a thing that lacks integrity, to talk about how to make money blogging in order to make money from blogging. Most bloggers are in it for the cash and I am very glad that temptation led me along that path so that I could find out that I enjoy blogging for itself. I would love to know how to make it more obvious how people can reply to my blogs on this site because that would be a bit of a thrill, too, having friends and strangers tell me how they feel about what I write, how they feel about the contents of what I write, and how they can add to what I have written. It would even help me keep going because I am getting a bit of a guru high lately as if I were becoming an authority. Well, I am not an authority but maybe I have something to say and it would be good to get some feedback so I don’t get a guru ego but estimate myself reliably in line with something St. Paul wrote. I feel good about blogging and it has launched me into the world of website building and if you feel inclined to find out more about the mind of this peculiar being whose words you are reading just get into clicking on my weblinks on the right hand side panel and find out more. You’ll see more examples of my writing and ideas on the sites and maybe there you will agree with me. The secret of commenting here is to click on the words, ‘no comments’ so that you can help others because the words will change to ‘comments’ after you write one. One of those real computer talking people over at WordPress came up with that good idea. I think it is a bit confusing but maybe that’s because I like English, not geekspeak. I’m going to keep blogging and it will definitely be here for now though components of the site might well migrate soon. Don’t worry, I won’t go far and maybe this one will just change form. I can’t wait to find out what my next two hundred blogs will be about. Comment and maybe you will inspire me.

I’ll blog here about WordPress. First the good stuff. It’s great software and this blog would have been nothing without it. For people to make such a product available for nothing is laudable and I thank all the people involved with its creation and distribution very much for their generosity. There is one very big problem, however. The people at WordPress don’t seem to understand that the language of the computer world is a complete mystery to most of us. I accuse them of computer elitism. They have a forum and help areas that leave me gasping at my own ignorance instead of being a great place to find out how to do what I can’t do. As a result I can’t use the programme to its full advantage and cannot find out how to use all the marvellous plug ins and improvements and easy shortcuts that apparently can be attached to WordPress. One day I will change this site completely using a very easy programme called Site Spinner which is the free web building programme I built my other sites with. Now I have figured out a way to use it for blogging with the help of Personal Brain, a wonderful neural networking programme I have used for years and that has recently reached new heights in the latest version. It is one programme I have no hesitation paying for. The help section is wonderful. As there is no manual specifically for Version 4 yet, I had to ask them some dumb questions and received personal replies in less than a day. Now if WordPress were like that you would understand that ‘no replies’ is where you reply or I would have changed it to ‘respond here’. I would also have more ads and have them in the right places on the pages. Thanks again WordPress, you are a great thing for computer linguists but one day hugh@macdougall.com will have its own style because you don’t speak my language. I’m an English specialist.