Who the hell do I think I am?
This is my personal site, where I will discuss ideas, movies, books and video games. The views exposed here are of course my own and not that of my employer, whoever that may be when you read these lines.
If you must know, at the moment I'm a software developer at Microsoft. I've been dealing with software development on and off for about forty years but in other past lives, I've been a physicist and a teacher (I have a PhD in mathematical physics).
This being said, I would very much like it not to matter at all: credentials and experience are merely proxies for competence or authority but ideas should be judged on their own merit rather than on who expresses them.
What does VuLu mean anyway?
VuLu is a portmanteau from two French words that mean "have seen, have read". Couch potato version of "been there, done that" if you will. It's supposed to convey the topic of the blog: random thoughts about stuff I see and stuff I read.
The rules of the game
I will publish most comments that are not obviously spam or illegal, not because of any constitutional right you may have (this is a private blog so your freedom of speech does not apply here in principle), but rather because I welcome debate and I know that I will be wrong sometimes if not most of the time. Truth matters to me and that goes through accepting to admit that I'm wrong when I am.
I would prefer if people could apply the same constraints I will be applying to myself, namely: no ad hominem (debate the ideas, don't attack the persons) and a certain carefulness about logical fallacies. That's my preference but this is the Internet so I know very well these can't be completely avoided.
Still, there will be people who will hijack a thread and try to coerce it their way through spam-like insistence. I reserve the right to decide when to stop a discussion and even to ban some commenters if they repeatedly show that they are not interested in dialog but rather in stubbornly pushing their agenda. Get your own blog for that.
One last thing: I am going to talk about religion and atheism in these pages. I think religious ideas, like all ideas, are open to debate and criticism. That does not compromise your rights to practice religion: respecting that right is an entirely different thing from respecting religion itself.
Credits
Many illustrations on this site come from various Internet public domain archives. If you think my use of illustrations that you own are outside of the range of fair use, please contact me and I'll take them off the site.
-- Bertrand Le Roy