I'm generally helpful and welcome questions and requests.  If you ask me a favor I will do what I can, which may or may not be enough to satisfy you.  My goal is to at least try to help anyone who asks; mostly because a lot of people have helped me out in my time.  Since I can't pay it back, I'm trying to pay it forward.

     I always welcome feedback.  I'm well aware that I don't have the final answers to anything; whatever I say generally represents the best of my current knowledge.  Of course, if all you do is flame me, I'll politely ignore you until you have something constructive to say.  (Well, OK, maybe I won't always politely ignore you; I reserve the right to print especially funny and/or stupid flames and mock them.)

     My opinions are not set in stone.

     I claim the right to set boundaries for myself.  If I get too overwhelmed, I will take time off to get my balance back.  During such times I will be much less available to anyone who wants me.  Deal with it.

     I'm strongly in favor of free speech.  I believe this should be a universal right.  However it does have limits, generally when it somehow tramples on other people's rights.  See my rants and musings for much more on this topic.

     I hate spam!  No, not the artificial lunch meat, though I'm not especially keen on that stuff either; I'm talking about junk on email and the Usenet.

     I try to respect everybody's beliefs.  However, I don't always agree with them.  If you get mad at me for disagreeing with you, that's your problem!

     I generally don't make personal attacks on people.  If you feel that I've disrespected you personally, let me know and I'll try and clear it up.  You may be misunderstanding me, or I may have misunderstood how you would react.  Like anyone, I sometimes will fly off the handle if my buttons get pushed; although I believe that it's my responsibility to control this kind of thing as much as possible, something may still slip through sometime.

     Politically I'm somewhat left of center, although I believe the usual one-dimensional continuum is so limited in descriptive power as to be almost useless.  For instance, I don't like the idea of abortion, but I don't believe I have the right to make that decision for anybody else.  (I'm sure I'll rant about this whole issue sometime.)  I'm for gay (and other minority) rights, though I'm leery of government solutions to this huge problem.  I favor reducing the military and working with other countries rather than acting on our own.

     Probably my ideal for of government would be no government at all, provided that everybody respected each other and there were sufficient tools and traditions to keep unscrupulous individuals from taking advantage.  However, I think the chances of this ever really happening on a large scale are pretty damn small.  More's the pity.

     I try not to take myself too seriously, but don't always succeed.

     I use sarcasm and irony a lot.  If you have trouble with what I say, this may be a source of it.

     I do not believe that there are easy solutions to complicated problems.  Well, OK, there are easy solutions, but they're sure to cause more problems than they solve.

     Very, very few things can really be known for sure.  Maybe nothing at all.  I think I can prove to myself that I exist, but I can't prove it to anybody else (or prove to myself that there is anybody else.)  I just take it on faith that you all really are out there.  :}  So far that has proved to be a useful strategy for living.

     I tend to think we have a lot larger role in determining our reality than we usually believe.  The implications of this kind of scare me, though.

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