1. Comments have a very low threshold for barriers to entry into discourse. This encourages thoughtless replies. I wanted thoughtful replies to what I’m doing.
2. I don’t have to handle comment spam. I mean, Akismet pretty well kills comment spam for me these days, but any time I spend fighting comment spam is time I’m not spending being creative [or, well, slacking off].
3. Relating to #1, I think comments get a lot of me-too-itis, and for the most part, that’s not worth it to me.

Let’s take a case study here on GFMorris.com: my entry about my iPhone music disappearing and showing up as other. This was a temporary problem for me, but it continues to be a problem for other users. [Whether they're lusers or people jailbreaking their phones, I don't know.] But read the comments for the entry: no one is addressing my original post at this point. Google is bringing people to my blog, which is nice and all, but the content that people care about is from other people, not me.

Is that a problem? Well, I think that it is, in a way. While I do use Alex King’s Comment License plugin to say, “Hey, I own your comments, thanks,” I have some problems with that, in a way. I use the license to say, “You’re licensing your thoughts to me,” mainly so I can say in kind, “I can police the comments if I choose, fella.” I’m not really doing it to aggregate knowledge. This place is about me spewing out ideas, not so much what you have to say about it.

I want to go back to my first point, though. It’s not so much that I don’t want to own the discourse [which, again, I don't], but I want a higher level of discourse. What comes to mind is my post about the recording rig I’m using here in early 2010. The following thoughts come to mind:

1. The initial comments I’m likely to get are “That’s cool” or “That sucks, go get better gear like X” comments. Neither of those are terribly productive.
2. Future comments are likely to be irrelevant, because my rig is continually changing. That post would’ve looked different six months ago [mainly, I was too stupid to have battery boxes in the rig, plus I didn't have all the cabling I do now for soundboard patching]. I’ve learned. I will continue to learn, and I will make followups.
3. I want to encourage discourse on what people do with their own rigs. I don’t want someone describing their budget rig in the comments on my blog—I want them writing their own posts. Is that too hard? With free blogging tools out there like WordPress.com, I don’t think that it’s too much to ask. Why do I want this? The comment box is awfully restrictive [as it has to be to avoid the comment spam problems---again, low thresholds and all that]. I want freedom of discourse.

That said, I’m going to leave the comments open on this post and see what I get. How very meta.

Well, to the two desktops, I slave hard drives. And, well, I’m a bit of a geek, so …

Discovery has:

• HAL 9000, the internal drive for the iMac.
• Discovery II, the every-night-cloned-by-SuperDuper! backup drive that ensures I’ll keep running if HAL 9000 goes, well, insane. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …”
• TMA-1, which used to be my Time Machine drive until it became full and unwieldy. I recommend a TM drive be 2-2.5x of the base HDD, and I had only 1.5x with TMA-1. So she became the Moon, and now I have …
• TMA-2, TMA-1’s bigger cousin, a 1.5TB miniStack v3.

I also have a Drobo, which, if you’ve followed me on Twitter lately, has been giving me all sorts of hell. Something is amiss, and I’m sure that we’ll fix it. Anyhow, the drives used to be named lame names, until I came up with the following naming system:

• Io, for audio.
• Ganymede, for storage I let anyone use. [Well, not just anyone ... just the people I give a CrashPlan backup code to.]
• Europa, which doesn’t have any cool pun to it, but is used for storing my Aperture libraries.

It would be cool, you know, if that worked right now. But I’m not bitter.

What about Atlantis, you ask?

• Atlantis’s internal HDD is Plato.
• Atlantis’s backup HDD is Cave.
• Atlantis’s Drobo, which is working just fine right now, is “Drobo”. I should rename it Timaeus.

Endeavour gets backed up to an unnamed Time Machine. Lame, I know. I’m actually preparing to sell it to fund an iPad purchase, and also to prepare for the day when I can utilize corporate’s interest-free loan plan to buy a 27″ iMac, which will get the Endeavour name. I’m trying to keep myself to three main machines, because otherwise, this house would be full of computers and all my money would go to Cupertino.

[Shut up, all of you.]

Not only do I use Fastmail, but my whole family does. Mom can attest to the fact that it works.

If you’re thinking that this Fastmail thing might be cool, there are special upgrade prices available now through the end of November. Seriously, if you care about email, it’s worth it. [Shameless affiliate link is here if you want to give me a kickback, eh?]

There’s a freedom with free software—customizations, etc. But you are also enslaving yourself to the upkeep. If you’re not committed to that, then don’t do it.

[And I let people pay me to keep up with WP installations. It pays for a server that I lease that lets me do lots of wacky things for free.]

Maybe.

[This is one of those "I blog out loud and hope it makes sense to someone else ..." posts.]

If I made a band’s Web site, I would have, at a minimum:

1. Lyrics to the songs. This is so unbelievably important, and it’s so unfuckinglybelieveably frustrating that more bands don’t do it. Let me give you a hint, bands: hiding your lyrics from the Web will just have some fanboy put them out there for the world to see, and the people who will get the traffic [and the ad revenue] are the shady jerks with the “Congratulations, you have won a free Nintendo Wii!” ad that screams at you the moment the page loads. You want that traffic. Why? You want them to know who you are.
2. Tour date listings. Essential. It’s a pain to update them, I know. There’s many apps out there for that, but I would choose Yahoo!’s Upcoming if I were you. Upcoming is searchable, scriptable, extensible, and also pretty darn easy to update. Then there are folks like me who use All Crazy Style to mash up Upcoming data with Last.FM plays to find out when bands I like are playing near me. Real simple: you load the data in Upcoming, and you can spit it out on your site. You can update Upcoming from anywhere.
3. Links to listen to your stuff. Don’t fire music at me when I load your site. I know you’re a musician, but the Web is largely about text. Let me choose to listen, and give me that option, but that auto-load bullshit is for MySpace. [And don't get me wrong, MySpace has value.]
4. Links to buy your stuff. These need to be everywhere: main site, discography pages, album pages, individual song pages. If you create a page per song, that individual song page should have a link of a place to buy that song—iTunes, eMusic, what have you. You want to cater to the fan coming in to Google some obscure lyric they heard on a commercial or in a Zach Braff vehicle—they’re gonna buy that shit if you give them half a chance.

The way to think about it is this: most people aren’t going to load up your main Web site and have that be their entry point. They just aren’t. Google is going to send them to you. So, think about a song you really love, Mr. Band Guy, and Google that. So, if you love Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, you get Last.FM’s page for the song … which has … BINGO … iTunes link. Last has done the heavy lifting for you here. But they’re gonna do that for Page and Plant … chances are they won’t for your garage band.

Some thoughts: if you get a song picked up for Grey’s Anatomy or Kyle XY or whatever, you want to 1) have that fact listed on a page about that song, and not just in a news feed/blog 2) lyrics of the song on that page, so the Googlers who are bad with names but good with ears for mumbled lyrics can find it and 3) a quick, fast way for them to buy that song and 4) relevant links on that page to find out more about you. The scenario is this: “I heard this killer song on Scrubs last night. Let me find it on Google … ooooh, there it is. 99 cents? Sure, I love that song. Hmm … who is this guy? Let me read more about him …”

It’s hell getting found in the music business. It’s hell getting found in the blogging world, too—which is why this entry is named like it is. Chances are that, if you’re not one of my regular readers, you got here from the Goog, too … so you should be nodding your head.

Okay, okay, okay, examples.

Bad: M. Ward: LOUD MUSIC, can’t find shit. Damn shame, because I love M. Ward.

Poor: Shearwater, which has a lyrics page for their stuff, but … in PDF. I know, you want art. I want to cut and paste the lyrics into iTunes. Don’t make me work, dammit.

Okay: The Mountain Goats, who have lyrics for The Sunset Tree available, but that page does not get you anywhere on that site. There isn’t a link to be found—not to the rest of the site, not to a place to buy the song you Googled, nothing. Kudos for posting the links, though.

Good: Andy Osenga, and not just because he uses some of my photos on the site. But he’s still not to great, because lyrics … Andy Osenga lyrics on Google don’t get you anywhere near him. [Or, for that matter, near andrewosenga.net, which is a problem Chris Hubbs and I should fix...]

Great: well, hell, no one really comes to mind. Leave suggestions for good band sites in the comments.

Folks, I know … this shit is hard. But it makes you money, so you better work at it.

1. I can have access to my email anywhere. Really. They IMAP over SSL, SMTP, and pretty much every other protocol over most any port you’d want to try—including port 80, which is not going to be firewalled by even the most draconian of network situations. If you can touch the Web, you’re gonna have full access to Fastmail. I use OS X’s Mail on all my personal machines, Mobile Mail on my iPhone, and Thunderbird on my work laptop. The experience is seamless.
2. The spam filtering of Fastmail is not only good, it’s actively trainable. I’ve used some AppleScript I cobbled together in 2007 to train Fastmail’s spam filtering: once or twice a day, I make a pass at the junkmail, just to make the system work better for everyone else. For those too lazy to check the link: you can have certain folders set up to learn that stuff is certainly spam in Fastmail. I have a ConfirmedJunk folder that only gets junk in it if I’ve reported it through that AppleScript, which also shoots stuff to spam@uce.gov to help the Feds bust people if they choose. Also, all my archive folders are set to train as non-spam, so if I get a false positive, I just make sure that it gets archived. I find this vastly superior to whitelisting solutions, and frankly, I’m actively helping those who use Fastmail.
3. It’s not Google. I’m not a tin-foil-hat-wearing Luddite, but I don’t want to rely on any one provider for anything. Monocultures are harmful, y’all.
4. Fastmail replicates their data, even though setting that up was a pain in the ass. I’ve actually since had my server die and be saved by replication—and I only knew about it because of the posts on Fastmail’s status weblog.

If you’ve got any other questions about it, I’m happy to answer them. I heartily recommend Fastmail if you care about email as much as I do.

Frankly, I’m always stunned that people who aren’t my local friends would follow me on Twitter. I post a lot, and I say a lot of bad words. It can’t be pretty. It can be funny, or so I’ve been told.

I used to post tweets here; I decided that made no sense for me once I locked the account down. Even since then, my thoughts have changed — I feel like Twitter is its own channel, and you either want to follow me there, or you don’t. So when I look at Mark replicating his tweets on his blog, well … it makes me a sad panda.

If you don’t follow me, here’s what that looks like, for the last week …

Published with Wordle by Andy Vandergriff

If you follow me on Twitter, well … you’re probably surprised that FUCK isn’t the largest word on there. Y’all, I am, too.

I use Twitter to keep touch with my friends. It’s fun for that. It’s casual. I don’t feel a burden to truly keep up with it, but I try. If I miss stuff … I miss stuff. It’s just gonna happen. I think of it as a narrowcast channel: it’s not really there for one-to-one, but it’s not a broadcast, either. That’s not to say that there aren’t a bunch of ways to use Twitter.

But while I’m on the “ways to use Twitter” bandwagon:

1. RT’ing, or re-Tweeting, annoys the hell out of me in most situations. I think via is okay; it does, as chockenberry notes, force the user to provide context.
2. Yes, there are some shady marketroids on Twitter. There are follower whores. However, this isn’t spam. It might be unwanted, but on Twitter, you choose who you follow. If it bothers you that people can read that you were just at the pub downtown, well … either make the thing private or stop caring about that. Just don’t call it spam. Spam sucks, but this isn’t that.

If this were actually posted on Twitter—and it’s not, because it’s well over 140 characters—IT WOULD PROBABLY BE IN ALL CAPS AND HAVE LOTS OF SWEAR WORDS.

FakeGFMorris is kinda funny. It drove me nuts until I learned who was behind it.

I’m just scratching the surface of what AHP can do, I know. I’m using Quick Record to do this because, well, I’m lame. But in my case, AHP is taking the audio output of Firefox and recording it as an Internet stream, 128kbps stereo AAC. It does everything in one big chunk, which I then feed to …

… Fission, which claims to be “Fast, Lossless Audio Editing”. And for what I used it for, it’s quite, quite true. Now, as a note, I’m okay with the lossiness here because 1) this is a transport medium and 2) I’ve already pre-ordered the CD. I am also that person who, when coming in contact with, shall we say, illicitly-gained audio, listens and makes a quick buy/trash decision. If I don’t like it, I trash it. Very simple. Again, I’m gonna want [and buy, and cherish, and let you pry from my cold, dead fingers] the lossless version, so what’s happening here is a net win. [Looking at you, RIAA.]

Suffice it to say that I’m a happy dude.

JPG : RAW :: MP3 : FLAC

JPGs [and GIFs, and PNGs, and the like] are great for transport, as are MP3s [and M4A/AAC, WMA, etc.]: both trade fidelity for filesize. Good is the enemy of great, though. I’m sometimes asked why I don’t buy many digital downloads of music, or why I hoard hard disks like they’re gonna stop making them. The answer is pretty simple: I want all the bits. I believe in a future where our compressed copies are gonna be like the 8-track—we’ll remember them fondly for their portability, but we won’t have anything to play on them.

I am, also, the same person whose first act on opening a physical CD is to make a copy of it; after ripping, that CD goes back into its case and is rarely seen again.

Don’t make me cut you.

Update: Hunter smacked me later, noting that PNG is indeed lossless. I will now light myself on fire.

How I Transitioned to My Current Setup

Recently I bought a Drobo and 4TB of HDDs; I originally thought this would go to my home file server, but my newer Mac mini is still acting up. [Grrr.] Once I brought the Drobo online on my iMac, I created three 1TB volumes: geoFstop media, iTunes, and Residual. I think they’re named appropriately and don’t need discussion. I made use of Apple’s instructions on moving one’s iTunes folder and this Flickr discussion on how to move Aperture libraries. I still need to migrate the vault and my residual iPhoto library, but this has me up and running. Simply put, I went from only 90GB free on my iMac’s HDD to 338GB at the time of this posting. Yeah, I had a lot of data to move. Why? Well, my concert recording and photography is chewing up data like nobody’s business [but my own, heh]. I got serious about jumping my HDD capacity up when I saw myself eating 10-20GB a month on the iMac, between shooting RAW and recording in CD quality.

Software I Use

I’ve posted about backups before, and as I did then, I love SuperDuper! It really is what its name implies. Having a bootable clone of my iMac drive protects me against that drive dying in one important way: if my iMac’s drive dies, I don’t have to wait for a GeniusBar appointment and a replacement HDD to be put in to keep using my machine. This minimizes any downtime to get a working drive back in the iMac. I’ve even thought about swapping to the external drive for my main drive, hoping that the drive that would fail would be the one that gets more regular use. After all, external hard drives can be replaced in the time it takes to swap cables out.

On my Leopard-running Macs [which is everything save the iBook I'm about to find a new home and my older mini, which I will upgrade from Tiger soon], I also implement Time Machine, which is native to the OS. I wouldn’t use Time Machine as my sole backup system because of the time involved in restoring from a backup, but it works very well and can save your hide when your hard drive dies. Apple deserves kudos for baking a solid backup solution into its operating system, and I think this is a major, major selling point of using Apple kit. If you’re running Leopard and not backing up, you need to punch yourself in the face … repeatedly.

Hardware I Use

In short, I am using:

• My iMac’s base HDD, 500GB
• A Newer Tech miniStack v3, sized 500GB, to clone the iMac HDD to prevent downtime from that drive’s data loss.
• A Newer Tech miniStack v3, sized 750GB, to serve as a Time Machine backup for the iMac HDD in a belt-and-suspenders approach. This might seem like overkill until you realized that you deleted a file three days ago, which means your nightly-cloned 500GB HDD backup is going to be useless in saving your bacon. Time Machine has bailed my ass out several times, and it also made migrating to the iMac from my newer mini a very nice experience.
• The aforementioned Drobo, which is a FW800-capable 2nd-generation box. This is primary storage, as noted above, and I get about 2.7TB out of the four 1TB Western Digital Green HDDs I have in there.

For those really curious, the FW800 chain is: iMac > Drobo > 500GB miniStack > 750GB miniStack. I also have a Lexar FW800-capable CompactFlash card reader chained off of the end of all that. I’m thankful that the 24″ iMac blocks the sun and my view of most of the cabling.

Suggestions

Remember the joke about punching yourself in the face, repeatedly? My friend Bryan is doing that right now. This entry is written in part for him and for other friends of ours who’ve been a part of discussing Bryan’s misfortune today.

Obviously, what I’m doing with backups is expensive: the Drobo setup ran me about $900 [$500 for the Drobo and $400 for the drives], and the miniStacks ran me about $350 when I bought them. Throw in the $27.95 for SuperDuper! and this ain’t cheap, but I bet that, right now, Bryan would pay $500 to not be facing full data loss, maybe more.

If you’re running Leopard and are on a budget, I strongly recommend getting an external HDD [obviously, I love the miniStack, as I own five of them] and use Time Machine. Buy what you can afford, but I feel that your Time Machine backup solution should have 150-200% of the space your primary drive has. So if you have a base MacBook with a 160GB drive, get at least 320GB of backup space. At this point, the major price breaks in drives start happening past 750GB, as 1.0TB and 1.5TB are the top line of the marketplace right now. As of this posting, the 250GB miniStack v3 is $135.99, where the 500GB version is $154.99. $15 is not too much to spend on backup—and if it is, well, you’re probably also the person who uses the cheapest car insurance that you can and spend your time hoping to not ever be in a wreck.

If you have a bit more of a budget, I recommend a belt-and-suspenders approach, utilizing SuperDuper! to create nightly backups and Time Machine to create the incremental backups. This requires at least two drives, as SuperDuper! makes a complete clone of your main drive and can’t be used for anything else. If you have this, use a drive close to the size of your main drive and a second that is at least twice the size of the first. I was thinking about going to a 1TB miniStack for my iMac until I realized that I needed far more space than that. Now that I’m down to only 125GB of data on my iMac’s internal drive, I’m good for quite some time with 750GB of Time Machine goodness.

If you’re a semi-professional or a professional, you need to be RAID-ing or using a Drobo, but you don’t need me to tell you this. And if you’re one of those, you’re probably thinking of something like what I want in the future …

Vision of the Future

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want: encrypted, incremental, offsite backups. Ideally, I want small boxes [Linux or minis, I don't care] that I take and put in my friends’ houses. I want to have an encrypted baseline backup when I place those machines in the field, and then I want to send encrypted incremental backups over the Internet to them. In return, I’m willing to host similar boxes for them. Here’s why:

• Offsite: if a natural disaster befells my house, I want my data backed up somewhere else.
• Incremental: I can back up offsite now [taking drives to a safe-deposit box, for example], but doing it incrementally means I’m never more than 24 hours out of date. Most of the time, I’m not generating large quantities of data—except, of course, when I go to a show and record. But you know, that’s the risk I take.
• Encrypted: because someone who breaks into my house, or Jeff or Stephen’s, doesn’t need to get my data and their data. Also, while I obviously trust these guys with my data, I don’t want to give them, oh, bank statements, passwords, etc. They don’t want to give that to me, either, and I wholly understand.

But this is still probably a few years away, yet, from reality. Yes, there’s Tarsnap, but he’s a single point of failure. Plus, I would rather host with people I know and trust than those I don’t.

Questions or comments? Love to hear from you on this.

I’ve seen stuff like FriendFeed do this as well: conversations about content done by third parties. And while this is, at some level, no different in you writing a response on your site to something I wrote and the discussion happening over there [which can and does happen; my favorite recurring one of these is when Mark T links to something Karyn wrote, and his entry gets 10x the comments his does], but then you’re making me work to keep in touch with the conversation.

Chris pointed out that the new Disqus model isn’t that at all.

Whenever I find myself reacting in such a knee-jerk manner, I try to remember that, hey, maybe I need to re-think these things. [Not all the time, mind you. I'm forever in danger of blowing out an ACL with all the knee-jerk responses I have in my life.] This re-thinking brought me to a point I’d like to note and amplify for a wider audience:

Hm. I should not criticize that which I haven’t test-run, I guess.

And as long as comments reference back to the URI, I guess that’s fine, right? I mean, all comments are remarks about a URI, whether or not they’re appended inline or left elsewhere.

Dammit, now I’m re-thinking this.

I’ve been thinking about this at idle times. What is a comment? A comment is a reflection—positive, negative, or otherwise—about something. If Chris writes a reflection or a rebuttal on his blog in the morning when he reads this, it’s a comment, but just one not posted on my site. What’s the difference in a comment that Chris posts on his blog versus a comment that he leaves here? It’s merely the control I have over that comment’s publication. I can leave his comment be, edit it [possibly reversing his point, if I'm feeling nefarious], or delete it altogether. These are all understandable responsibilities for me to have as the person providing the place for the commentary. After all, when you’re posting your comment on my place, I become responsible for it as the owner of this domain. This is why I use Alex King’s Comment License plugin.

Extrapolating from this: pingbacks and trackbacks are merely automated systems for notification of externally-hosted comments, prone as they are to spamming. But if we went to a world where we leveraged the power of GOOG and others to find all URLs that reference our source URI as commentary, well, that list is gonna get spammed. Highly-influential articles are going to get smacked and linked to in the hopes that people see the incoming links and think that there’s commentary there [and the GoogleJuice that comes from that], and low-traffic articles become ghettos for comments. In other words, nothing changes.

But what’s the result of this different thinking on my part? Merely that it doesn’t really matter where the conversation happens—just that it happens somewhere. So any third parties that seek to intermediate this, you have two responsibilities to producers:

1. Limit the spam. [Good luck.]
2. Make it dead easy for me to find the commentary.

That’s it. No other responsibilities are really necessary.

But even those who once said “I would go raving nuts trying to use the iPhone as my mobile device” are now consuming on their iPhone:

I credit Brent and the excellent NetNewsWire for iPhone for my newfound ability to (almost) keep up with my feeds again.

Mind you, I don’t expect that Alex wrote the post on his iPhone … or his Crackberry. And this is not an argument that Alex should make the switch. He can’t get the hang of the iPhone keyboard, and he’s used to the Blackberry. Arguing that he should switch would be like me arguing that he should drive a manual transmission—just because I love it and think that it’s awesome doesn’t mean that it’s for him. I’d just argue that, well, he should know how in an emergency—and I’m sure that he does.

[Okay, I've only ridden with Alex a handful of times, and I can't remember whether or not his car is an automatic. I'm fairly sure his wife's is, but I won't hold that against him.]

[[And Alex, yes, I wrote this so I could tweak you and go all "iPhone FTW!!!" You know you're laughing.]]

So if you need to email me, well, hit me at work or GMail. And if you don’t have either, well, tough for you—not putting those here on the site.

Update, 0747: And we’re back.

Update, 2032: Indeed, now they’re going to work on redundant uplinks, as that was the issue. This is why I spend my money with them.

I don’t think I’ve ever told the story, but IndieRiver was a domain that Bryan picked up in early 2006. Around the same time, Ron picked up Indiemand.com, and Casella was pushing what ended up becoming the Square Peg idea. [To be fair, I think this is something that all the Pegs were considering, but I distinctly remember having more discussions about it with Jerry than anyone else.] As you might expect, we decided that it made sense to combine forces; as such, IndieRiver sorta sat on the sidelines, unused, and then when I fell in love with BitTorrent for distribution of allowable concert bootlegs, well … torrent, river, you got it.

It takes a village, people.

As a proponent of NoiseTrade and Matthew Perryman Jones’s Throwing Punches in the Dark, I’d like to offer you the opportunity to get it for FREE.

Found via Amy, who also points to where to get your own.

At lunch, we talked about a variety of weird subjects—after all, this was a table full of nerdy engineers. But I think I out-nerded them all. The subject of earthquakes came up [in the context of a what-to-do-in-an-earthquake discussion about some safety slides that NASA/MSFC had circulated, because we're in such a dangerous zone here in Alabama ], and someone talked about the New Madrid earthquake. I then brought up Kentucky Bend, and then …

“How the hell do you know this stuff?”

“I read Wikipedia late at night when I can’t sleep.”

“And you tell me that I need a hobby?”

Heh. I come by it honestly. Dad used to read the encyclopedia as a kid. [So did I.]

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

I think my favorite thing is how Stephen just matter-of-factly points to Baio’s entry, too … me, I wouldn’t have been able to resist discussing how I would be freaking out if internal emails were getting posted on the Internet. Of course, I realized long ago that I was only one forward away from any of my emails being read by the one person I least wanted to see them, privacy disclaimers I might make to the contrary.

An aside, because I think it’s worth considering: email from 25 years ago was far more likely to be for-the-record, memo-style stuff than what you typically see today in business. There certainly was a lot less of it sent [as we were less used to it as a communication medium], and so everything was more focused—and, sometimes, strident. I think this accounts for some of the tone you see in some of the emails that Andy reproduced, and I think the following quotation makes my point:

I just wanted to clarify in writing what we discussed about “Restaurant” last Tuesday — what I will and will not agree to.

I will not sign a blank sheet of paper: I refuse to take responsibility for “Restaurant” in the state it presently is in — not knowing who is creatively in charge, how much thinking has actually been done, or how much of a script is written. …

– Amy Briggs

Consider the difference between this opening and most of the business email you send and receive. Do you write stuff like this from time to time? Sure, we all do. But those are the emails that we stay after hours to write—or, better, sleep on and write first thing the next morning. But it would be a mistake to not recognize that many of these emails were of a for-the-record nature, the kinds of things that make positional statements, and as such sound more assertive than we’re used to.