WallyPhesto

 I'm sure that you've heard me refer to a WallyPhesto.  What exactly is a WallyPhesto?

A WallyPhesto is a long stream of consciousness post from Wally that makes sense to him and hopefully makes sense to you.  It typically contains background info as well as important guiding thoughts and analogies.

Have you heard of a manifesto?  A manifesto is the fist generation of a WallyPhesto.  A manifesto is a public declaration of policy and aims, especially one issued before an election by a political party or candidate.  We've heard of communist manifestos, various killers who have put out manifestos, or the most famous manifesto of all, the Unabomber's manifesto.

A WallyPhesto is not very serious.  WallyPhestos came out of my writing books and moving to magazine level articles.  Magazine articles tend to have relatively short lengths, approximately 1000 words for a regular article, or more for a major article.  Because the articles are printed on paper in magazines, the articles can't really be infinite.  I found, especially with my magazine articles, that context was important.  Because of the important of context, I added background information.  My 1k word articles were hitting 2.5-3k with source code.  Printed articles, which should be around 3k of words and top out at 3.5k, that I wrote were topping out at 5k words, much too much.  I think it was Michael Desmond, then editor for MSDN Magazine, who said something like "Wally, I love your passion, but these long WallyPhestos are getting too hard to work with." A term was born.  

Thanks Michael.  You have created a monster.