They didn't quote *me* on that, aka "There is an underlying, unspoken fear of what is to come."

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/03/02 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/02/7982775.aspx

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I had a reader tell me they had found some quotes by Michael Kaplan and they wanted to know if I had said them. The quotes:

• "There is an underlying, unspoken fear of what is to come."
• "I'm pleased we prevailed. There was more than just technical deficiencies here."
• "That's off the table right now"
• "You don't have to have sex in order to survive, but it's a very important measure of the quality of life"
• "We're tapping into nostalgia -- on the adult-toy aspect, on the low-tech aspect of it. Yet it delivers an image better than what you can get in any medium"

One of those emails that just leaves you speechless, especially that last one!

I told her that while I probably have said something like the first and third quotes, and the second quote without the word "pleased" since I seldom admit I am and never would say it that way irregardless, at some point, I doubt I was the one being quoted to any of these instances. It must be one of those many other Michael Kaplans.

I'm just not famous, certainly not the quotable kind!

The source of her quotes? The thinkexist.com site, which actually has other quites by a Michael Kaplan that sound like they are from a doctor (which I am not)....

The site has a button where you can get the source for the quote, though it does not work (it claims the Source information is coming soon), so for now I guess it is a collection of kind of unsourced citations....

In other news, I have mixed feelings about the effect on the blog of the whole current process:

1. Enable trackbacks/pingbacks
2. Post a blog at the expected time
3. Disable trackbacks/pingbacks

It does save me all of the random pingback spam (and by report there is more and more all the time which the spam filters don't seem able to do much with). Which is a very good thing as far as producing a blog that does not have lots of annoying spam to ignore.

Though I kind of miss knowing when people are referencing me who aren't spam, sometimes. Sometimes I look at the fuller list of referrals (MSDN blog authors, you can just go to the referrals list for any one post of your and then replace the postid=<postid> with postid=-1 and you'll see them all), it is how I notice both 1) how much of my traffic comes from search engines and 2) how much of that traffic is Google rather than Live. But I see the occasional thing to add a trackback to. It is just too exhausting to do very often....

But the above is not overstated -- Google refs outnumber Live/MSDN refs by a 40-to-1 margin!

Popping the stack a bit, I guess you could quote me on any of the random things I say here (like that last thing). The question, however, is "Why the hell would you want to?" :-)

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