You will be relieved to hear that there’s a 79 percent chance that this blog is written by a man.

Of course, there’s a 55 percent chance that my sister-in-law’s blog is written by a man, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

Tennessee Technology Center at Shelbyville has announced its fall schedule, including various computer courses. One of these, at the very bottom, is a course described this way:

Intro to Blogging - Covers how to start a blog, use RSS and Twitter

The class will run Sept. 18 and 25 from 6-8 in the evening. Apparently, they had trouble finding someone to teach it, because they settled on this guy.

Meanwhile, the specifics haven’t been worked out yet, but it now looks as if I’m going to teach a United Methodist lay speaking basic course this fall at a church in Shelbyville. That one will have more than two sessions — instead of teaching the basic course over a full weekend or two consecutive Saturdays, the Murfreesboro District is going to try holding it on a weeknight, over a span of weeks, as part of the host church’s regular schedule of (typically) Wednesday night activities.

This will be the first time I’ve ever taught either of these courses. In both cases, I was approached and asked to teach; neither was my idea. We’ll see how it goes.

Many different web sites, bulletin boards, blogs, instant messaging programs and what have you encourage you to post an image avatar or buddy icon of yourself — some people use a photo, others, citing privacy concerns, use a cartoon avatar or some other image.

Gravatar (for Globally Recognized AVATAR) is a site which proposes to help you keep these images straight. You upload your chosen avatar (photo, cartoon, logo or what have you) and associate it with a particular e-mail address. Then, whenever you register with, leave a comment at, or otherwise log into a Gravatar-enabled site using that e-mail address, that site queries Gravatar and automatically retrieves your avatar of choice, without you having to upload it each time. If you want to change your avatar, to reflect your mood or situation, you can do so at any time, quite easily, and it will automatically be updated at all of the different Gravatar-enabled sites where it’s being used.

You can have a different avatar for each e-mail address if you like.

This is one of those ideas that could be really successful or could fall flat on its face, depending on whether it achieves the critical mass needed to make it an Internet standard. If web sites don’t enable Gravatars, there won’t be any benefit to the user.

However, working in Gravatar’s favor is that it was just acquired by Automattic, the people behind WordPress and Akismet. I assume that Gravatar is likely to be closely linked to future updates of WordPress. WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has recently enabled Gravatar for the comments on his site, which is not surprising since he just bought the company. I have also enabled Gravatar for the comments here.

Someone left a comment on Ginger’s blog. She’s checked the IP address and, yes, it appears to be the real deal.