Manifesto for a Web Log

I decided to give this blog the ironical name "Expert Opinion" to poke fun at myself. In principle, I am an expert. I have two Bachelor's degrees, one in Computer Science and one in Electrical Engineering, and I have Master's and Doctoral degrees in Computer Science. I'm an Associate Professor in Computer Science at a major university and have been teaching CS students for 12 years. I've been programming computers and building computer-controlled hardware for something like 26 years. However, I'm also the person who said, circa 1992 or 1993, "Why would anyone buy books from Amazon.com when they can go to their local bookstore and browse?" Needless to say, if I had clued in on the commercial prospects of the WWW a bit earlier, I'd now be paying someone else to write my blog (or maybe I'd be funding Spaceship One, instead of Paul Allen). Well, I found myself wondering recently, "Why do people spend so much time on blogs? They're just self-publishing taken a bit to the extreme, and likely a massive waste of time." So, I've started my own to find out. Like 90+% of the other blogs, this will be filled with rambling discourses on whatever topics strike my fancy at the time. If you enjoy it, please let me know. If you don't like it, you might as well keep it to yourself; I get enough negative feedback for the papers I send to scientific journals.