Was I going to be called to task for something? I thought my Mindjet user forum and community postings were remarkably free of bitter invective. Would the "must have been some other dethomas" excuse work? Or maybe "it wasn't me, I wasn't there, and if I was I was riding a bicycle" would fly this time? I mean, those excuses worked in high school. Sort of. Sometimes. Well, almost never. And that was a long time ago.
But that wasn't it at all. I was just demonstrating how the guilty flee where no man pursues. Even when they haven't done anything and don't run very well.
When we finally talked, what Michael had to say was surprising, even complementary. By some lights, anyway. He offered me this blog. As I recall, his words were "If you want a spot on the Mindjet Labs community site, give me a title and I'll make it happen."
Which may only show how desperate he is for content. As observed elsewhere, it's not a community if Michael is the only one posting.
But why me? I'm a blog virgin, what can I bring to the party? What is valuable about the viewpoint of a mid-western white boy with a mechanical engineering degree who's been doing software for twenty-odd years?
Oh yeah, that's right. I'm a Mindjet customer.
In fact, I'm the worst kind of Mindjet customer - a software developer who has worked on substantial software projects, products and architectures, has written macros and add-ins against the MindManager object model, and has created XSL transforms against MindManager map markup. A reasonably informed customer with opinions on how some things in the product can, could and should be easier to understand, use and leverage while applying MindManager to a variety of problems.
Without reading the user manual.
So asking me to write a blog is actually a somewhat gutsy move on Mindjet's part. Or at least on Michael's. Mindjet has promised to keep their mitts off the content, within reason, and I've promised that posts will deal with interesting problems in the use, application and extension of MindManager. Within reason.
Or at least problems I find interesting. The prerequisite here seems to be that I do something with the product and blog about the experience. Well, I'm doing the first part regardless, maybe by doing the second I can learn something about the product that will help with the first.
After all, this is the Internet, one of the great levers of history. And MindManager is an interesting product - useful, clever and worthy of the effort.
So here's the deal. I'll do my bit and put up interesting content dealing with MindManager functionality, particularly extensions and enhancements. For your part, as the spirit moves you, feel free to post comments, suggest topics, point out fat fingered mistakes and correct errors of commission, omission, and simple ignorance. Or not.
And we will see how it goes.