My new keyboard is so awesome that I am actually going to dedicate an entire post to telling you all about how awesome it is. (And no, I’m not being paid for it; I really do like this keyboard this much.) I didn’t think it was actually possible to get this excited about a new keyboard, but it is. This keyboard is just that cool. It’s called the diNovo Edge, and it’s made by Logitech, which already has a pretty nice niche in the mouse and keyboard market.

If you bothered to follow the link above, you probably noticed that this keyboard looks incredibly cool, and it’s also very expensive. (Although I didn’t pay sticker price.) One might reasonably wonder how you could possibly spend over $40 on a wireless keyboard, let along almost $200, and I was pretty surprised when I noticed the price myself. However, in my humble opinion, it really is worth it.

First, a little background. I go through keyboards really quickly. I’m a writer, so I need a keyboard which can withstand a high number of keystrokes and some serious hard use. I am also just hard on electronics in general, partly because I have a nasty temper and I tend to slam things around when I get irritated; I go through mice at an astronomical rate, for example. So when my latest keyboard failed, I decided that I was going to set out to get the most durable, high quality keyboard possible.

First, I looked at Das Keyboard, because it has mechanical keyswitches and it is incredibly durable. And it also makes that oh so satisfying clackety sound when you type, which is an important part of the computing experience for me. But it’s not wireless, and I really need a wireless keyboard. I don’t like cables, and I don’t like feeling tethered. I also stash my keyboard and mouse when not in use so that my desk stays tidy, because I likes me a tidy desk.

So then I hit Amazon and looked up keyboards by user reviews, and the diNovo kept coming up on top in pretty much every category. Despite the expense, it comes in #2 in popularity in the wireless keyboards category. So I decided to just go for it (Tristan egged me on, pointing out that it is, after all, a write off). It also has a three year warranty, which is good news for me. It’s also pretty sexy looking, but I swear that’s not why I got it.

Like most wireless keyboards, it comes with a USB dongle and it worked right out of the box, although I also installed the keyboard’s management software to take advantage of the extra features. The diNovo also uses a built in rechargeable battery, so it came with its own charging station: I just checked the power management software, and it says I have 54 days left on this charge. Which is pretty amazing, if you ask me.

The reasons this keyboard is so awesome are myriad. For one thing, the keys are incredibly responsive, and it’s a fairly quiet keyboard, considering how hard I pound the keys. I imagine that more sedate users probably generate a faint whisper of sound. Like most keyboards these days, it also comes with hotkeys, which are nice but not terribly exciting. What makes the diNovo especially cool is the built in TouchDisc, which you use to mouse and scroll with. The TouchDisc is pretty much awesome. The volume controls are also activated by touch, which is nice; the slider is really intuitive and very responsive. The brushed aluminum armrest doesn’t hurt either, because it stays nice and cool, and I’ve noticed that my wrists are not as painful after a day of work as usual. So not only does it look awesome, it’s also apparently helping my repetitive stress injuries.

The one flaw with this keyboard is the lack of a number pad. I really do like number pads, and I hope that Logitech issues a version with a number pad soon. Other than, it’s pretty much perfect, and totally worth every penny of the seemingly insane price. So if you happen to end up needing a new wireless keyboard in the future…

Now that I’ve had more time to play with my XO, I feel like I can expand on my initial impressions of it. My impressions may also be hampered by the keyboard; I suspect that I have a case of the infamous “sticky keys” which have been plaguing the XOs, so I’m going to use it for another week or so and then decide if I need to ship it out for a new keyboard. Apparently there is a process for this, although given my general frustrations with OLPC, I’m hoping my keyboard settles down so that I don’t have to deal with it. Given the way I slam through keyboards on the desktop, I feel like a functioning keyboard is a pretty critical need for me (a replacement keyboard just arrived today for the one that’s crapping out on me; expect a review on that in the near future, since it was quite expensive and it’s supposed to be very good).

One complaint I see from a lot of users is that the XO is slow, and in comparison with a lot of computers, it is a bit slow. But it’s not intensely slow. It’s very easy to switch between activities (XO users who have not figured out the Alt+N trick should start using it, because it saves a lot of time). Booting up and shutting down are a bit slow, but not unbearably so; of course, I’m not one of those people who needs everything to work instantly, so maybe my impression there should be taken with a grain of salt. The activities launch quickly, and they are pretty speedy; the only time my XO has really lagged is when I’ve confused it.

I continue to be intrigued by the Sugar interface, which is very different. I actually kind of dig it. I don’t use my computer for anything terribly complex, and I like the simplicity of Sugar. It’s very straightforward, simple, and clear; even using the terminal is not terribly challenging, and this comes from someone who is not very adept with manipulating things from the terminal. Navigation from within Sugar is clear and logical; I’m actually rather surprised that people have had issues with it.

I’m sad to hear that OLPC is partnering with Windows, because I feel like that violates the organization’s open source goal. And I don’t think Windows is a good choice of OS for the XO. It’s bloated, it crashes, and, er, it’s not very good. Rather than trying to build a lean, stripped down version of windows, I think that OLPC needs to concentrate on refining Sugar (ha ha). To go back on the open-source pledge would be a pretty major compromise, in my opinion.

When I was at the coffeehouse with the XO the other night, a friend noticed that the networking capabilities are pretty formidable. Since this is one of the main features of the XO, it was nice to note that I could see six networks from Headlands while my friend could only see three, and I was getting a pretty strong signal from five of those networks. No other XO’s in the region, of course; I don’t think anyone else up here has one, which is kind of unfortunate, because I would like to play with the mesh networking and collaborative features of the XO.

I have not tested out the e-book reading mode yet; I know that’s a topic of interest to some people, but I don’t really do e-books, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. At some point I’ll need to open a lengthy .pdf and maybe I will check it out then, assuming my loathing for .pdfs can be overcome.

My major complaint about the XO at this point has to do with the power management. I really think that the development team needs to sink some serious energy into power management, and I hope it’s a priority for the next build. I can get about three hours on a charge, which is alright since I have ready access to electricity to recharge. People in developing nations, however, need more serious battery life. What if people can only charge their laptops every few days? Or once a week? It’s kind of silly to provide kids with laptops that they can only use for three hours between charges.

I’m interested to see reports from school deployments, especially from the perspective of educators.

So, for those of you who could not figure out what yesterday’s cryptic post was about, my XO laptop finally arrived.

You can learn more about the XO at laptop.org. In short, it’s an extremely rugged laptop designed for deployment in schools in developing nations; I got mine through the Give One, Get One program, by donating funds and getting a laptop in return. I have a lot of criticisms about the way in which the program was run, but I’m not going to talk about those right now, because I would rather not dwell upon them. I want to talk about my shiny new toy, instead.

The first thing you need to know about the XO is that it is small. Very small. It is designed, after all, for children. Here’s a shot of it with my wireless keyboard and monitor, to put it in context. That keyboard, by the way, is a very small slimline edition which most of my friends can’t use because their hands are too big.

The whole thing is only about nine inches (23 cm for my metric readers) across, and the keyboard is tiny. Really tiny. I started writing this post on the XO and stopped because it was taking so long; while I will get used to the keyboard eventually, right now I’m a very slow typist on it. I keep hitting “S” instead of “A” and having trouble with the shift key.

The other important thing to remember about the XO is that it is really not designed for computing in the industrialized world. It is slow. There’s no way around that. I think that later builds and beefier versions will improve on this, and considering what the XO is designed for, I think that the speed is perfectly acceptable. After all, I can’t drop my desktop onto a stone wall from four feet and calmly pick it up again and start working. It is not insanely mind numbingly slow, but you do need to wait a moment for it to open programs, and sometimes it has trouble switching between activities…

…which brings me to the really interesting thing about the XO, the interface, Sugar. Sugar is a stripped down form of Linux which takes some getting used to. I worry, actually, that kids will get used to it and then be unable to use more widely available operating systems, including distributions of Linux. It definitely makes me rethink the way I compute, what with “activities” instead of programs, and all. But it is an easy interface to use, as long as you are comfortable working in the terminal. I am finding it very intuitive, and that may be because I am reasonably comfortable in Linux; I think that some folks are really struggling with it, which is unfortunate.

As soon I got my XO booted up, I was off and running, exploring the interface and playing with various commands. It feels extremely native and logical to me, and I like a lot of the features. I like that I can push a button to view the source of any program I am in, for example; I think that’s pretty neat.

XOs have a whole lot of other neat features, like mesh networking, which make them amazingly cool. They really are innovative, and I am proudly geeky about being able to obtain an XO, because it is fun, even though I think I will be using it mainly for the novelty and less for computing. I was hoping that mine would arrive before the G1G1 program ended so that I could gloat and convince y’all to get one, but instead you’ll have to look on eBay, alas, although there is talk of reviving the program later this year (hopefully sans the kinks I had to deal with).

I originally got the XO for work, actually, but I don’t think that I am going to be able to do work on it, unless I can adapt to the keyboard. I am also concerned about the potential for causing repetitive stress on the small keyboard, which is an issue for me. It’s still pretty damn awesome, and it will be great for sitting on the porch in the summer, because it has a screen which is specifically designed to be highly visible in daylight. Wahoo!

The other amazing thing about the XO is the user community which has grown around it. People are really helping each other out in forums, leading each other on a voyage of discovery and making resources for Sugar readily available. I was able to install Opera and Finch right after I booted up, by following very precise directions from people who had already done it, and I happen to think that is really neat. I think that developers in the industrialized world are going to contribute a lot to the XO, as we play with it, tinker, and think about ways to retool it.

Some criticisms of the XO and One Laptop Per Child have been raised, and I do think some of them are valid, but I’m not going to address them just yet. Right now, I just want to explore my new toy…I’m sure I’ll have more posts up about the XO as I play around with it and learn more about it.

For now, I’ll leave you with the truly awesome warning screen which comes up when I shut down:

I especially like the one with the baby.

My geek readers will know what this post is about. The rest of you will just have to wait until tomorrow.

I’ve noticed a lot of Internet users are really, really dumb. I personally refer to this as the “untelligence level quotient,” as in “my, this is a very untelligent question.” I’ve been reminded of this issue lately by two separate things: my site logs, and the NaBloPoMo* forums. Really, I think that the issue of stupidity is larger than the Internet, but the Internet provides some glaring examples of how idiotic people can be.

I recently noted that my site logs reflected a sudden jump in hotlinking, which I found extremely irritating. For those of you who don’t know what hotlinking is, it refers to making a direct link to content on someone else’s site. In other words, someone could directly link to an image hosted on my site to embed the image in a post on their blog. This means that they get to use my bandwidth for free to host the image; and most people who hotlink don’t credit the authors of the work they are stealing, either. If you’re still confused, here’s a handy tutorial on hotlinking.

I think that most people hotlink because they are stupid, not because they are malicious, but there’s no excuse for this practice. By hotlinking, you eat up someone else’s bandwidth and you steal their own original content. There are tons of free filesharing services; if you really want to use an image taken by someone else, ask their permission, download the image to your hard drive, and then upload it to a photo sharing service like Flickr. When you want to embed the image on your site, link to your very own Flickr file and use your own darn bandwidth allowance.

People who hotlink to material on my site now get an unpleasant surprise, although I’m not nearly as malicious as some people who loathe hotlinking. New bloggers tend to hotlink a lot, because they don’t really understand what they’re doing. I think that companies which produce blogging software could help to cut down on the practice by offering a brief tutorial in etiquette which includes a discussion of hotlinking and why it’s not nice.

In terms of the NaBloPoMo forums, I’m sorry, but I just have to rant. I keep seeing the same stupid questions, over and over again. All of these questions are answered in the FAQ, and all of them have been repeatedly answered by patient people in the forum. I am all for helping people out, especially when they are exploring new things, but people need to learn to read directions. The NaBloPoMo directions are very clear. There should be no confusion, and yet I repeatedly see variations on the following questions:

Q: “Do I really need to post every day?/I missed a day, do I still count as a participant?”

A. Yes./No. Here’s the quote from the front page of the NaBloPoMo site: “By the way, ‘every day’ means Saturday and Sunday, too. Hence the above reference to ‘cheating.’ Not that you would.” People who skip days can keep up with the challenge, if they want, but they are not eligible for prizes, or credit as participants.

Q: “Does my blog need to be on Ning or can it be on my own site?”

A: You can post on your own site, or on Ning, or on both. Please stop asking this stupid question over and over and over again when the answer, again, is on the FRONT PAGE: “You can do your posting here, you can do it on your blog, or you can cross-post in both places, it’s completely up to you.”

Q: “I can make scheduled posts, right? Or backdate my posts?”

A: No, that would be cheating. See above.

Q: “How do I get my blog entries to show up on Ning?”

A: As I have repeatedly pointed out, Ning has a field for people to enter RSS feeds from their sites. It is in the left hand column of your user profile page.

There are plenty of valid questions in the forums from people who are new, or confused, like “what kind of blogging software do you recommend,” or “how do I do x or y in my blog.” I like helping people with questions like these because while the answers seem obvious to people who are experienced, it can be confusing for new bloggers. And I’m all about helping people, not insulting them when they ask for assistance.

But for Pete’s sake, people, learn to read. So many stupid questions could be answered by actually reading FAQs and informational pages on websites, and you just look like an idiot every time you ask a dumb, obvious question. Idiots, you’re bringing the internet intelligence level down. Please, restore my faith in humanity by using your brains once in a while.

I cannot believe that this many people are actually this stupid. It’s just not possible.

*NaBloPoMowha? For those of you who aren’t aware of this, I am participating in National Blog Posting Month. There’s a website for NaBloPoMo which is hosted on Ning, a social networking site. Ning includes forums, profile pages, and other features which let participants communicate with each other. Have I mentioned that I hate Ning? Because I do. Yet, I still use it. I am a hypocrite.

Every morning, I log on to read my spam. First I read the subject lines of the spam in my email, which sometimes read like a haiku. A selection from this morning: “Cataclasis/finally a little justice.” I’ve been getting a surprising amount of spam in my Gmail lately, all of which seems to be getting caught and dropped in the spam box, but it still intrigues me. Someone somewhere got my email address apparently, because I have a determined line of sales pitches for watches, Viagra, and…I don’t even know what. I don’t wear a watch, I don’t have a penis, and I don’t think I need any more je ne sais quoi in my life, you know? I’m reminded of a vindictive friend in high school who would submit the email addresses of her enemies to tons of newsletters and so forth, in the hopes of deluging them in spam.

Then I pop over to my comment management interface to see which spam has slipped through the filter. I actually have a fairly good spam filter, but every now and then it apparently doesn’t catch something, which is especially surprising when it contains words like “Cialis” or “mature vagina.” I’ve noticed that I seem to be getting more spam now that Movable Type 4.0 is out, and I’m wondering if it’s a subtle ploy by SixApart to get me to install 4.0.

I have to say, I’m pretty unimpressed by comment spam. It’s always instantly recognizable; I don’t even need to click on the comment to read the whole thing, because I already know that it’s spam. You’d think that comment spammers could use some imagination, since the whole point is to slip the comment past the webmaster. Correct spelling and grammar would be a start, as would the pretense of a comment. At least enough to make the snippet which appears in a management interface look genuine. Like “The issues discussed in this post lead me to consider…” or something.

And it’s especially weak when the spammer doesn’t even include a link, just a string of nonsense words or garble. I’m not exactly sure that this is supposed to accomplish; perhaps someone could enlighten me?

Obviously comment spam is working for someone, somewhere, because I get a lot of comment spam, and I imagine that other people do as well. I have, in fact, thousands of spam comments in my junk folder, which is pretty impressive. It profoundly skews the ratio between real and fake comments, that’s for sure. I do wish that there was more aggressive action that could be taken, since spam drives me totally batty. I can see why spammers get hunted down and murdered, I really can. And if spam irritates me, I can’t imagine how annoying it is for webmasters who handle sites that are actually popular and heavily trafficked.

Not that I am advocating mass murder of spammers, but it would be pretty awesome if I could somehow charge a spammer for every spam email/comment I have to deal with. After all, they’re eating up my bandwidth and server space with their spam. Surely I should be able to levy a fee. I know that a couple of attempts have been made to somehow legislate spam, and as far as I can see, none of them are working, because spam just keeps proliferating, like kudzu.

I wonder what percentage of the Internet is actually just pure spam?

I was talking with a friend recently about something or other, and it reminded her of an advertisement she had seen.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Did you see the advertisement for [product]?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

And she went on to explain what had been in the ad, and why it was relevant to our discussion. This exchange, of being asked whether or not I have seen a television ad, happens a lot more frequently than one might imagine. Every time, my response is in the negative, because I do not watch television.

“Oh,” someone will say, “like you only watch the news?”

“No,” I explain. “I don’t watch television.”

“But you keep up with shows, right?”

“Uhm, not really, no.*”

“But…how can you not watch tv?”

It’s pretty easy, actually, when you do not own one. I would like to say that I am taking some profound moral stance here, that I turn up my nose at television whenever I see it, that I do not want to contribute to the downfall of our culture by giving in to the mass media beast, but this is not really true. Like most people who were raised without television, I am actually fascinated by televisions and advertising. Every time I get in proximity to a television, I am sucked in, there to sit vacantly staring until someone leads me away. This causes a deep and intense shame in me, because I see it as a personal weakness.

It troubles me, and it is one of the reasons I did not want to acquire a television when I moved away from home. I very briefly had one, right around the time the war in Iraq broke out, because a friend was loaning it to me for an assortment of reasons which I will not go into. Lo and behold, the house I was living in happened to have an active cable connection. After a week, I gave the television back, because I did not like the person that I turned into, endlessly seeking something to watch, constantly glued to the television at the cost of a social life, eating, going outside, living.

Television is such a topic of controversy in Northern California, but it is also such an accepted part of people’s lives. Most of the people I know, including the hippie-dippie liberals, cannot comprehend the idea of not watching television and not owning a television. The boob tube is so integrated into their lives that sometimes they have a difficult time relating to me, especially when I do not get references to commercials, television shows, and television culture.

I have always been so steeped in books that the appeal of visual media has never quite gripped me like it does other people. I like movies, but I also do not think that I would care if I never saw another movie again. Not that I want this to happen; I think I am greatly enriched by a lot of the movies I watch, and the entertainment that they offer me. When I want to watch a movie, I do it on my computer, as a general rule, and more rarely in the theatre. My father and I are very similar in that regard, with both of us having little interest in movies, television, and similar media.

I value silence, stillness, sitting calmly and contemplating things, and all of these values seem to be antithetical to people who have televisions in their lives. They fidget, they twitch, they cannot stand sitting across from each other at a table at the Headlands, reading silently, not talking. They bore easily, waiting for the channel to change and something new to happen. When they ask me what I did all day and I say “I sat on the deck and read,” they look at me with pitying expressions, because sitting on the deck and reading sounds like a form of obscure torture to them.

They never seem to read, which is totally alien to my way of life. I read, at a minimum, five books a week. I read in the morning before I start work, I read in the afternoon, I read into the night. And these people…my God, they think that finishing a book in a month is an accomplishment! When someone asks me if I have read anything good lately, I can recite a litany of books ranging from popcorn fiction to serious, dense, no-foolies non-fiction tomes. This makes me sound rather elitist, I realize, but I think we have already established that I am a snob, in some senses. To be blunt, I don’t really like people who do not read, and many people who watch television do not appear to read, or at least not in any serious volume.

There is a fundamental divide, for me, between my television using friends and my reading friends. The two rarely overlap, and I have to say, I would rather spend time with the readers, because we have more in common. Similar values and experiences, for example. But also because my reading friends think that a day hanging out at the house drinking tea and reading is a day well spent, even if we exchange only a handful of words, while my television friends want to be out and about and doing things, constantly seeking entertainment, never sitting still for a moment. While I certainly like adventuring, there is something to be said for taking time to pause and reflect upon your life. There’s something to be said for reading a challenging book, rather than sticking to fiction and pop science. For me, every day is an opportunity to learn something new and intriguing, but apparently other people don’t feel that way. I really feel that the television has a major impact on the way people live, behave, think.

What about you, gentle readers. Television or books? Am I just being a culture snob here, or is there some thread of truth to my thoughts on television watchers and readers?

*Technically this is a lie, because I do watch a few shows on Innertube, the online interface which CBS uses to post their shows. But I would argue that this is only “watching television” in the most abstract sense, since it lacks many of the defining characteristics of “television.” Although perhaps I am only trying to justify my fondness for CSI.

[television]
[books]

Being without Internet for a week, I completely missed the explosion over Google Streetview until yesterday afternoon, when Brendan pointed me to it. If you do not know what Google Streetview is, you can check it out: here. Basically, it’s a collection of photographs taken at street level in several major cities, including San Francisco and New York.

At first glance, it’s a neat concept. I promptly checked out all of my favourite hangouts in the City. It’s pretty awesome, you can navigate around, walk down the street, see what’s on sale at the Body Shop. Whatever floats your boat.

However, concerns began to arise as I jaunted down a sunny street in the Castro and peered into a friend’s window in the Mission. First of all, I noticed that all of the pictures in San Francisco were uniformly sunny, which I think is not representative of the spirit of the city. In order to accurately depict San Francisco, Streetview really ought to have grey, sullen skies over the Sunset, for example. And the Golden Gate Bridge is bathed in golden sunlight, a far cry from the fog it is usually swathed in. This is only perpetuating the stereotype of California as a sunny place, which is patently not true.

As I cruised along the streets, my concerns only deepened. The pictures, of course, capture a static moment in time, and are not a live stream. But they still disturbed me.

One of the reasons I left San Francisco was the imminent adoption of CCTV downtown. I assumed that it would only be a matter of time before the technology spread throughout the City, and it made me deeply uncomfortable. It’s not that I am constantly up to nefarious deeds, I just like the illusion of privacy. The idea that unknown individuals could be watching me while I went about my business made me uncomfortable. We Americans are big on our privacy, you know.

I am aware that stepping outside subjects me to observation. I am not asking people to avert their heads when they see me on the street. But it makes me uncomfortable to be in businesses which use cameras, and I do not like the thought of cameras on the streets. My old house isn’t in Streetview, which actually rather surprises me, since Treasure Island is a neat place to look at. But I know that finding it would have unnerved me, and that looking into my windows would have been a little upsetting.

Clearly, other people are riled up about this because their houses are on the Internet. Brendan, for example, was chatting with a friend, and said “I can see your house! It’s the one with the yoga ball in the window!” And the friend said: “What?! That’s my yoga ball, man, that’s not cool. That freaks me out.” I’m sure that Streetview will reveal crimes in progress, half naked co-eds, and other objects of comment (and delight) as people peruse it. It already appears that official complaints have been made, since I see blacked out chunks. But this “post first and retract later” policy may not be the best one.

Is it really…necessary? I mean, I suppose you could use it to give directions to your house, saying “look for this sign on the corner” and “my front door is this one.” There is certainly no law which prohibits Google from taking pictures from the street, but it still makes me feel a bit squicky. Google, it is clear, is slowly taking over the world. I’m sure that I am on there somewhere, given the nature of my adventures in San Francisco. And I am not sure that I am comfortable with that.

The level of resolution is insane. You can read license plate numbers, see who is walking into Planned Parenthood, and see the date on a bus transfer. I’m not sure that this is entirely necessary, or safe. Someone could be seen walking into the psychologist’s office for counseling, and be questioned about it by an employer. A young woman looking for birth control at Planned Parenthood might be spotted by her conservative parents. A stalker could find a victim’s house by identifying a car in a driveway. Does Google really want to bring this on? The information age is bringing about a profound lack of privacy for us all…the question is, how much are we willing to take?

[Streetview]

I woke up this morning to a phone truck outside the window, and a burly telephone company representative making concerned clucking noises and buckling on a tool belt.

Apparently, there had been no active phone service at my new house since 1999, so the phone man suspected that my phone line might not actually work. He clambered around on the roof for quite some time, making ominous humming noises, and finally descended and said “I’ll be back.”

“Oh,” I said. “Er, well, ok.”

“Yes,” he said, darkly, before vanishing down the alley.

When he returned, he had even more implements, and a set expression. After rattling around with the phone box for quite some time, he emerged with an “ah-hah,” and had me plug an implement into the jack inside.

“We’re going for a light,” he explained, “either red or green, I don’t care. If it doesn’t light up…”

I plugged it into the jack, and my heart sank when the light remained unlit. However, I happened to remember a secondary jack, which was rather decayed, and hidden under a box of sweaters. I managed to dig it out, I plugged the device in, and lo and behold, the light was green. I skipped outside to relay the information and the phone man looked visibly relieved.

“Well then,” he said, “that’s that.”

Although my internet isn’t supposed to be turned on until tomorrow, I decided to give it a shot anyway, and plugged the router in. After a tense minute or two, a reassuring bank of green lights flashed and then stayed on.

I have, at last, internet. I am a little embarrassed about how happy it makes me.

We will be experiencing a service interruption for several days, gentle readers, as I am in the middle of nowhere and only have access to dialup. Once things settle down again, I’ll back for a real, honest to God update.

I had forgotten how…excruciating…dialup can be. I must say, I am impressed with the lean configuration of the Movable Type interface, yet another reason to love Movable Type. It takes around, oh, 10-15 seconds to load a page. As opposed to three minutes for my Gmail. It’s a good exercise in calmness. I am trying to view it as a chance to meditate.

At any rate, it is overcast and gloomy where I am, with thin threads of fog winding through the trees. And quiet. I had not realized that the Bay Bridge creates a dull hum in the background which whispers to me throughout the night until I wonder why the night is so quiet. The cats have been peering out the windows here, longing to come outside. It’s also a bit cold, a far cry from the blasting warmth of central heat. I imagine that I will probably go for a walk later, feet slicing through tall, damp grass.

I looked up the Chronicle’s online edition today (3 minutes to load). I see that nothing is collapsing in my absence, although I am intrigued by the trials and tribulations of Ed Jew. It’s beginning to seem like something out of some fantastic film. I am waiting for some new revelation, like a whorehouse in Noe Valley or investments in crooked toaster manufacturing companies.

Over and out.