TMPI . . .

Until now, I had yet to delete any posts on any of the blogs that I've kept. Those "that I've kept" is perhaps the key phrase here: I have deleted entire accounts, but not individual posts. It's a long story, and not one I care to tell today, but that's a perfect introduction for what I do want to say.

I posted an advertisement that I received in email by sending it onto the blog. I've developed a special fondness for blogging by email -- it's like writing to a friend, except that it doesn't reply with all the reasons that it couldn't really read your message. Hopefully, if one cultivates an audience, this is the feeling one begins to develop for those readers -- a feeling of friendship and a genuine desire to inform them in such a way as might help them -- but with a knowledge that one needs not give up too much and that the general quality of the posts (like magazine articles, but hopefully less formal) determines the kind of feedback one does receive.

The advertisement was one that was generally helpful to me, but I became hesitant to leave it because it was based on my buying habits at the Amazon.com ecommerce site. I could have extracted the essential and helpful information, but part of the reason that I posted it in its entirety was to see how it would be treated in the conversion from email message to blog post. It was pretty good, I'll share that much with you. Maybe I might even blurb something on the specific (C++) books, later, but the fact that I was once interested in a pair of black pants in my size may not be too interesting to you. Also as they say, it was TMI.

I think we need a new acronym that is more specific to the complaint expressed by TMI -- I thought the post contained too much personal information or TMPI.

So I deleted it.