OK, not thirty minutes ago I was completely unable to write a coherent email message. Let's see how this goes.

Leslie Walker, who writes Washtech.com's “.com” column, discusses the future of fee-based Internet services. (Hint: it looks good.) Meanwhile, Salon reports on MPEG-LA's decision to charge $0.02/hr for the use of their compression method. Yeah, I know, this is more geeky than I usually am. Stay with me.

Wow, man. Two days without updating. Adding a blog to the web site sure does change things. I've been running my own web page in one place or another for about six or seven years. I've never felt guilty about taking two days between updates, but now I feel like a slacker.

I had an interesting cultural experience yesterday evening and this morning. I submitted a photograph to waferbaby's city project. Daniel asked readers to take a photograph of someplace in their city and send it to him along with a description. I sent him a picture of the inside of Union Station because, let's face it, there are way too many photographs of the Washington Monument, Capitol Building, and White House.

First of all, some changes to the web site: I've updated the About page. Also, the blueyonder skin has been available for the last day or so. I haven't said anything about it because I was still toying with it, but today I added a subtle background. That made all the difference. So take a look.

Ladies and gentlemen, today I want to inform you of a great and terrible environmental problem we are facing. This new pollution snarls our traffic, impedes our progress, and threatens our very well being. I am speaking, of course, of bicyclist pollution.

Sarah and I went for dinner at “Anita's New Mexico Style Mexican Food” yesterday afternoon. Two drinks, two meals: $24. The food was excellent, and it reminded me of Boston. Not in a good way.

I got to live the high life in Boston for four days last weekend, and what I discovered was the high life is a lot more expensive and a lot less satisfying than dinner at Anita's. As my boss said, “the more high-brow the establishment, the more they nickel-and-dime you to death.” Prices at the four-star hotel we stayed at were unbelievable: $4 for a liter of Poland Springs water. $5 a minute for long distance phone calls from your room. $170 for a bottle of Jack Daniels. $30 for a meal in the downstairs restaurant with atrocious service - - the poor waitress was trying to keep track of half the tables in the place. They must have laid people off because of the recession and recent drop in travel, but not hired more people for the very large convention we held there.

I'm back from Boston! Not that I felt I was really ever there – I stayed within walking distance of the AAAS Annual Meeting's location at the Sheraton/Hynes Center near Copley Place. The photograph above was my view Friday from 22nd floor of the south tower of the Sheraton. I managed the Internet Access Center for the meeting. It's not the first time I've run a general-use internet access center.

Oh yes, now I remember. I was going to write something about surgery. Last Saturday I had a wisdom tooth removed. I've been putting it off for about ten years. Always thought it would be expensive and annoying, I guess. I've heard so many horror stories – like the girl who told me she was dazed for a full day after they sedated her. Apparently her mother caught her just as she was about to walk to the 7-11 and get a Slurpee. At three in the morning. Wearing her night gown.

Yup. Well, the movie reviews and rants and such were fun, but sometimes there were things I wanted to put online that just didn't warrant that kind of treatment or focus. Hence, this web log.

I looked at quite a few different packages. PHP-Nuke, phpweblog, greymatter… for one reason or another they just weren't suitable. It's nice that there's so much effort going into open source programming, but creeping featureism seems to be an unfortunate side effect of this development model. Most of them were overkill for what I wanted: a way to automate saying things like “Hey, is George W. a fool or what?”