We may also use the Personally Identifiable Information you provide to (a) administer and manage your account, (b) pay commissions to you, (c) include you on mailing lists and (c) advertise and promote our services.
What's that supposed to mean? I mean, apart from meaning "we don't proofread things before we post them".
This is part of CafePress's newly updated privacy policy. It says, later, that they allow opt-outs. It says that you may opt out when you register.
So... If they intend to always ask for permission, why not phrase it as an opt-in thing, and say "send you only those advertisements you request"? Well, if they're anything like lots of other places, it's because the Lure Of The Dark Side has enthralled them, and they are about to start spamming.
We'll see. The new privacy policy takes effect on July 1st. I have already heard of two questionable mailings involving these people; let's see if they do a big fat spam run. If they do, I'll obviously have to remove the shop... but it'll be interesting to see whether there's any feedback. After all, a lot of blogs and comics do CafePress.
Isn't it nice to think that everyone who has ever bought a t-shirt from you has an address which is now in the hands of people who feel they have the right to unilaterally change their privacy policy? Isn't it nice to know that they've made a clear committment to opt-out, also known as "spam"?
So, I get a fairly large amount of spam. I mean, nowhere near the thousands upon thousands some people get... but maybe a few hundred a day. Yesterday, 257 that were identified as such. Some days, maybe twice that. I've already gotten one spam since I started writing this piece.
And, of course, this is with a few filters already in place.
The record day this month so far was May 19th, with a total of 388 spams; the lowest was the twenty-fifth, on which I only got 248.
Oh, that's not including the 50-100 a day that I get in the inbox for comp.lang.c.moderated.
Or the double-bounce messages.
Or a lot of stuff, really.
So, I finally got around to grabbing and installing SpamAssassin on my mail server. This isn't just for me personally; we get a lot of complaints from users about the amount of spam we have to deal with.
It's not doing all that much good, but the majority of the spam reaching me is now at least tagged. It'll be a few days before I trust it enough to throw out the spam without reading it... after all, there can be false positives.
But frankly, there's false positives when I try to scan my mailbox by hand, and I'm slower at it to boot.
A curious trivia point: I believe that, if every single human who had ever intentionally decided to spam a large group of people simply dropped dead, the world would be a better place.
Are there any otherwise decent folks who just screwed up? Sure, probably. But most of these people... have you ever talked to them? I used to sometimes bother calling the mainsleaze people - big mainstream companies that figured that, since they were a "legitimate business", their mailings weren't spam. The people who make these decisions are terrifying. They are simply unable to comprehend that other people's stuff might not be theirs by right. They do not understand privacy. They do not understand permission.
We would not miss them for long.
My friend Dave has been working on a new Mandelbrot generator, the eventual goal of which is a continuous-zoom generator which "zooms in" the way you expect things to, rather than refreshing all at once. This is insanely ambitious, but it's been very interesting watching the development.
We went out for dinner, and afterwards, we decided to head back to try his Mandelbrot program on the big industrial Mac I use for art and such... His wife said "sure, let's hang out for a bit, but no more geek stuff". Dave and I made kicked-puppy faces. I said "Oh, come on, we want to see how that looks on the dual G4". She said "okay, just a little geek stuff".
Dave married well.
For those who missed it, this blog was briefly named "The Brain of Seebs". And it was indexed by several search engines under that name.
And I had a link to Real Live Preacher. And a story about some of my wife's new pictures.
Which meant that, when someone searched Yahoo! for "real live pictures of brain", all of his search terms matched this humble site, and he came here.
And a day later, someone searching for "brain picture nice" on Google found me as well.
It's not as good as "fucktard nerdy redhead twat", but it's a good start on weird referer entries in logs.
And, no, sorry - no real live pictures of brains.
I have a favorite toy. Well, I have tons of them, but my recent love is GeoMags.
Too lazy to follow a link? Imagine two objects. One is a magnet, just about exactly an inch long. The other is a metal ball about half an inch in diameter. The magnet is in a plastic shell that makes the ball snap sharply into place on either end. Now, get a whole lot of these. They stick together. They make pretty shapes.
Among the shapes you can make with them are regular polyhedra - that's polyhedrons (multi-sided objects) whose sides and faces are all identical. There's five of them, in total. Tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron. As the names suggest, these are 4, 6, 8, 12, and 20 sided. And they make great dice... So, an icosahedron is sometimes called a d20, mostly by gamers.
You can, in fact, make any of these objects out of GeoMags. For a d20, you need twelve balls and thirty rods. (Freudians, stop here and get the snickering over with, then continue.) No problem; you build this out of GeoMags, and it sticks together, and it's solid.
But wait! What if it's too small? Well, you can always use two rods for each side. (Okay, I was wrong; now it's time to stop snickering. Really.) So, you build an icosahedron using 60 connecting rods, but still 12 balls. Only, this one's weak; it has a lot of junctions that aren't very sturdy. So, we add another 60 rods and 30 balls, and we "fill in" the sides; each side has an inverted triangle in it, with balls at the junctions. It looks sorta like this:
*---*---*
\ / \ /
*---*
\ /
*
Now, there's something interesting here. If you actually build one of these, you'll find that it tends to wobble and fold until you're almost done - and then it becomes pretty solid.
However, you will most likely discover that it's still a little weak in spots. To understand why, we must remember that these are magnets. Ever play with magnets much? North ends attach to south ends; north ends repel north ends.
Now, let's say we've got a couple of magnets attached to a ball:
S--N*N--S
This will actually work! Although the north ends are repelling each other, they're actually still both able to glue on to the neutral metal ball... However, they won't attach as strongly as they would if you kept the polarity straight:
S--N*S--N
Thus, the puzzle: Taking our icosahedron two units on a side, how do we maximize its strength? Casual observation tells us the following:
How close can we come? Casual introspection suggests that the vertices should be able to be within one charge of balanced, and the others should be able to be perfectly balanced. Well, at least, that's the best we could possibly hope for. Is it really possible?
The naive solution to this involves a 2^120 problem; just count charges on an icosahedron with magnets in a given orientation, then try flipping them at random.
You can do better.
Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical single-unit icosahedron in which each of the 12 vertices is nearly-balanced - it's either got one excess north, or one excess south. If we extend it to two-unit sides, nothing has changed. If we put joints in the middle of each side, the whole thing becomes foldy and unstable, but the magnetism hasn't changed, and in fact, each of the middle spheres is balanced... That gets us faces that look like this:
*---*---*
\ /
* *
\ /
*
Obviously, since they're in the middle of pairs of magnets facing the same way, the center joints are balanced. Now, if we add three bars to the middle of this, and ensure that they are all facing the same way, we get back to our "correctly" faced side, and each point remains balanced.
So, if we can build a single-unit icosahedron which is maximally balanced, we can build a two-unit icosahedron which is maximally balanced.
On the single-unit icosahedron, we need each vertex to have two north and two south poles touching it, and then half of them need one extra north, and half of them need one extra south.
One way to pursue this is by construction. Make a pair of triangles in which all the magnets are facing the "same" way (clockwise or counterclockwise). Now, attach two magnets to each vertex of these triangles, one north pole, one south pole. (The orientation of these matters in a way I am too intellectually lazy to figure out.) Attach balls to the six magnets attached to one of the triangles, and join them with six magnets all facing the "same way" (counterclockwise or clockwise)... and attach the magnets from the bottom face to them. Every vertex now has four magnets attached to it, two north, two south. If it doesn't, then take pairs of magnets attached to one of the two triangles you started with, and swap them. You should eventually succeed. :)
Now... You have an icosahedron missing exactly six magnets, each of which will connect two of the twelve vertices together. Since all the vertices are balanced before you do that, afterwards, each vertex will have precisely one extra north or south magnet attached.
That's it! The rest is simple construction, and the result is a maximally-strongly-connected icosahedron, with two-unit sides.
If someone sends me a 184-piece white GeoMag set, I'll write about how to do this with three-unit sides, which I believe to be possible.
This entry is sort of an expansion on this thread over at ChristianForums, but also a bit of thinking about some other issues that came up one day. The thread it was based on was lost in the Great Crash of 2003; sorry.
There's no way to say "it all started with" for this one. It started in a dozen places at once, and the threads tangled so quickly that I really don't think any narrative of it could be both coherent and true - things are like that.
Let's start with a quick look at a humor page: Fundies Say the Dardnest Things!. This page is maintained by a guy who goes by WinAce on a number of boards, including ChristianForums. As of this writing, I'm never quoted there, but I'm listed as a contributor. Why? Because, at one point, I sent the guy a link to a particularly hilarious claim someone had made.
Keep this page in mind. We'll be referring back to it later. Of particular importance are the following points:
Now, let's go look at one of the other threads. One of the people who called me an honorary Catholic is a woman who goes by Annabel Lee online. She's a regular at ChristianForums. She's a Catholic now, but she went through a number of years as an atheist. When C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, wrote "Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.", I think he must have been thinking of a woman much like this.
Annabel, as you might guess, has very little patience with people who make sweeping and insulting generalizations about atheists. She's Catholic. And she's occasionally a bit liberal-minded. All of these come together to mean that many fundamentalists despise her, and are firmly convinced that she is not a real Christian at all, but some kind of faker. For instance, in this thread, people pretty much told her to her face that she should have died a horrible, painful death.
And, of course, they get away with it. No one has ever explained why it is that attacks on people like Annabel go unpunished on a board with a strict "no flaming" policy, but people can get away with nearly anything. One user said "oh, you just ignore the Bible and make things up as you go along", and the moderators decided that the post was not actually a flame, citing Annabel's sarcastic "That's about right" as proof that she agreed.
The board has forums which are reserved for "Christians only". And, one day, she posted an article in a Christians-only forum, and it got deleted, on the grounds that she wasn't Christian. Whe she asked what was going on, the moderators formed ranks against her, and said, with one voice, that they had concluded that this was the case. They started finding "evidence" in her old posts - statements or positions that didn't hold with THEIR dogma. And, since a majority of them are Protestant Fundamentalists, it wasn't too hard to find things she'd said that they were not okay with.
The prize, of course, was a post on another BBS where she described herself as a semi-heathen. Now, anyone watching this, anyone paying the slightest attention to her posts, her history, and the abuse heaped upon her, would have heard this for what it is; bitter sarcasm, a last defense of a woman under attack, and the only way to keep sane when your "friends" (and fellow Christians are supposed to be good friends) are dogpiling you in an effort to kick you out of the club. And, in the midst of this betrayal, of this attack, she resorted only to bitter self-deprecating humor. Even then, she never attacked them. They could have understood this, and learned from it.
But they didn't. They cast her out. And, and this is the beauty, they never asked. No one actually stopped and said "Annabel, some people are unsure of what you believe. Are you Christian?". No one thought her opinion mattered; they could judge, and condemn.
Most of this happened behind closed doors. Most of my readers won't see this, but there are special forums over on ChristianForums for the staff, in which they can discuss board administration issues and policy. These forums are not merely closed for posting - they are invisible to the rest of us. I was on staff very briefly (yay politics!), and I can't say what I saw - I was told it was confidential, and I will honor that. I think I can say, without violating any confidentiality, that some of it was very, very, wrong.
Okay, you're wondering when I'm going to bring in the WinAce thread. Well, I can't show you anymore, because the moderators, in their apparent randomness, have deleted the discussion, but someone started a thread on the board warning people about WinAce's funny site. I mentioned that I had sent in a quote or two to it, and several people jumped on me for "backstabbing".
Several moderators. You guys know who you are.
You see, by talking about people behind their back, or contributing to a site which mocked them, I was being a Very Bad Person. Especially because mocking people is like judging them. And, most importantly, it's wrong because the accused cannot respond on WinAce's site.
Now, the thing is, I happen to have seen what those people are like behind closed doors, and at least a couple of them have played the "this person isn't Christian enough" card before. More than once. And when they did it, the accused not only couldn't respond, but wasn't even told she was being accused.
Now, before we continue, let's stop and take a close look at what I did. This isn't all that important to the story, but it's important to me, and probably to God. I'd like to specially thank Blackhawk, one of the staff at ChristianForums, for taking the time to actually discuss this, rather than throwing stones. And he convinced me that I was probably wrong to contribute to WinAce's site. Because, in the end, the purpose of the site is only ridicule. It's not constructive criticism. It's not intended to help people learn, or grow, or change. It's just taking pot-shots at people. And a lot of these people, saying these silly things, are not bad people. They are not all evil, or hateful. Maybe they're ignorant, but making fun of people for being ignorant is not an especially helpful thing to do. And, in retrospect, contributing to the site probably didn't really do any good, and may have done some harm. So, yeah, I shouldn't have done it.
But can the people who gossip and accuse and discuss things behind closed doors be the ones to tell me that? Are those who condemned Annabel Lee to Hell without a second's thought really ready to look down on me for backstabbing? The staff of a site which never issued so much as a warning for people saying things like "does it bother you that you won't be remembered in heaven" to a good Christian woman, can they really judge?
My God, people! THEY NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZED. None of them did.
Was I wrong? Sure.
But it seems to me that I'm not exactly the center of the backstabbing, gossiping, and judging problem here. No, not at all.
Perhaps these people are calm and content, happy with their position, happy with the way they've treated other folks on this board... but that calm is the eye of the storm.
When I first started hanging out at ChristianForums, I made a few friends fairly early on. One day, they informed me that they'd declared me an honorary Catholic.
See, I'm not Catholic. I do not believe that the Catholic Church is infallible in matters of faith and morals. I believe they sometimes fall into errors, and it sometimes takes them a while to recover. I am not particularly convinced about the idea of Apostolic Succession (the idea that the current Pope has the same authority Peter did, etcetera). I don't quite reject the Immaculate Conception (the doctrine that Mary was born specially free of sin in some way), but I don't really believe it to be likely. I am pretty sure the Church is wrong on celibacy of priests, not allowing women priests, and their stance on contraception. I favor legalized abortion, although I oppose abortion as immoral. (I believe law should not cover purely moral decisions, only the framework society needs to survive.)
But I'm not Catholic. I don't agree with them on some issues, and I don't think they have authority.
And yet... In a lot of ways, I think they get things right most Christian groups don't. Take homosexuality. I personally don't need to know whether or not God has an opinion about gay sex, but it seems pretty clear to me that homosexuals are people first, and that the Christian response to them should be one of compassion and love. Even if gay sex is a sin, so what? Lots of things are sins. Me sitting here working on this blog when I should probably be working on my paying work, and providing for my family, might be a sin... Hmm.
(500 words about wireless LANs later.)
The Catholic teaching on the issue, as I understand it, is consistent with what scientists in general accept as patently obvious: Homosexuality appears to be something that is the way some people are, and is not generally subject to change. We don't know all that much about causes, although genetics plays a measurable role. The Catholic teaching, then, is that because the Bible appears to condemn homosexual sex, homosexuals are called to a life of celibacy, and should receive compassionate support from Christians.
Many Protestant groups feel that, since the Bible says something involving gay sex is a sin, that it is reasonable to assume that homosexuality is something people intentionally choose, and therefore, that being gay is in and of itself a sin, and that gay people should be pressured and harrangued until they "change". From this we get all sorts of horrors and abuses.
Which of these positions is more consistent with the teachings of the Bible? Clearly, unambiguously, the former. To say otherwise is to deny the entire point of the Gospels, and nearly everything Jesus ever did.
So... A lot of the time, I end up agreeing with Catholics, or at least agreeing with them more than with some Protestants.
But I'm still not Catholic.
This creates some very weird interpersonal dynamics, because a lot of people seem to think that Protestants are somehow duty-bound to oppose whatever the Catholics do or say. On the lunatic fringe, we have people like Jack Chick who claim that the entire Catholic Church is an invention of Satan to persecute Christians. It's terrifying the nonsense people will believe.
What drives me nuts most of all, though, is Protestants who feel they can condemn other people for promoting "heresy". The things on which Protestant teachings generally differ from Catholic teachings are generally more significant than any of the stuff they persecute others for. The question of whether or not Christians should submit to the authority of the Pope is WAY more important than the question of where guys should stick their private bits.
So, there you have it. I don't actually agree with the Catholics, but I find myself sticking up for them when ignorant bigots attack them, and I often see a lot of wisdom in their positions. I think people are way too quick to jump from "I do not accept the authority of these people" to "these people have nothing of interest to say". For better or worse, the Catholics have been around for roughly 2000 years, and they've done a lot of hard thinking about some very tough questions. To disregard them casually, or dismiss them as irrelevant, is foolish in the extreme.
So, I've looked through the logs to see who visits this site, and I've found something interesting.
The #1 visitor to my site, ahead of everyone else but me, has the user agent "Scooter/3.2", and seems to be boatloads of hits from av.com, also known as AltaVista.
In the last day, Google has indexed my site, perhaps, once. Scooter has hit repeatedly, many times more often than Google has.
And yet... Google shows my home page as the #1 hit for "seebs", and finds this blog, and AltaVista has a hard time figuring out what I might be talking about.
I'm not sure what Scooter is doing, but it's not resulting in any visibility, but it's resulting in a fair bit of traffic directly from AltaVista.
Some readers may be aware that I have a regular column over at IBM developerWorks. What you may not know is that IBM's exceptionally author-friendly policies mean I'm allowed to maintain local copies of articles, once they've been up for a month! So, for instance, I now have the first TWENTY SEVEN columns up. That's right! TWENTY SEVEN of them. #28 is formatted, but they have exclusive rights for another week or so. #29 has been edited, and should be showing up around June 1st on the IBM site.
I had the first 16 articles up a while back, but I hadn't gotten around to updating them, because I was doing it by hand. Now, I've spent a while writing a script to read the IBM articles and turn them into something I don't mind putting up on my site, so I did the next 11 articles in just over an hour. (It would have gone faster, but I can be amazingly sloppy when I'm in a hurry.)
Oh... You actually want a URL? Here you go:
These articles are the material on which I have pitched a book, which, if I can get it written reasonably close to the deadline, will probably be published sometime next year. More news on that as it becomes available.
And, one last thing: The point of the Juke-Ola piece is not to say that Kevin is a bad programmer; it's to point out just how hard testing can be, and that even a small user community can have astonishingly diverse needs.
So, when we were coming home from lunch, the car that pulled off the freeway in front of us was emitting smoke from the tailpipe, and stalled, and put on his hazard lights. So, we stopped to help out - lent him a cell phone, helped push his car over.
The next car to come by stopped too.
Out of two cars that passed this man in need, two stopped and offered to help. He got a ride to where he was going (not from me, my car only holds two people), he got his car moved half a block to a parking spot...
There is hope.
This StarTribune story is the first coverage I've seen on my own personal contribution to trying to get rid of junk faxes.
I have received something over 700 junk faxes in the last couple of years. My first fax machine broke - having processed perhaps twenty faxes for me, and perhaps 350 for fax blasters.
There oughta be a law.
There is a law. It's called the TCPA, and one of the things it prohibits is unsolicited fax advertisements. The law says you need prior express permission. "Express" is a great word. It means "not implicit". There's no implicit permission. You found my number? That's not permission. My number is posted somewhere? That's not permission. We do business? That's not permission.
The law depends on a private right of action for most enforcement. That means the fax blasting scum can get away with it as long as they want, until either they finally attract the notice of the FTC, or someone sues them.
Today, that someone is me. Our dishonest friends are trying to spin this as some kind of sneaky attempt to "win the lottery at someone else's expense". Hah! They were sued for sending junk faxes last March; they knew, as of then, that there was a federal law on the issue. I got faxes from them later than March. In September, the company they were using got shut down (in principle, anyway) by a preliminary injunction. I got faxes from the same cell phone people later than that, too - meaning that either their fax blasting friends violated that injunction, or they went out and found someone else, after their first supplier had been shut down for violating a law.
Either way, as one of the few people who actually keeps old junk faxes around, I'm in a position to make it clear that this is not something they should keep doing, and maybe get a bit more case law on the books.
Thanks to Julie Forster for her excellent reporting. As of this writing, there's one error in the article, which may be my fault for explaining things poorly. I never got any faxes over about five pages - certainly not 116. The 116 pages is about 60 different faxes from one company, and the 50 pages is 50 separate faxes from someone else - and yes, I expect to go after them, too.
So, for those of you whose fax machines are perpetually out of paper, if you're in the US, there's something you can do about it. Go check out junkfaxes.org today and start your research.
I'm no good at names (just ask any of the players in my D&D games). So, I don't know what to call my blog... So you guys can name it for me. Post comments. If I like a name proposal, I'll change the site's name to that.
It doesn't matter how often you change the name of a blog, really - as long as the URL survives, it's the same place.
A friend of mine got a new kitten.
But... The kitten had been abandoned. Abandoned? Well, that happens.
But where was it abandoned, you ask?
It was stuffed in the tailpipe of a car.
"abandoned kitten that somebody had stuffed into the tailpipe of a car". I only wish this were an example of a grammatical noun phrase with no semantic value.
What the FUCK was that about? I mean, who does this? How could anyone look at a kitten, and think "the best thing I could do with this small, innocent, and needy creature is stuff it in the tailpipe of a car".
One of the reasons I'm Christian is that I accept the basic idea that, on the whole, humanity does need some kind of salvation. We're just sick sometimes.
If you're out there, and you're the guy who stuffed that kitten in that tailpipe, I've got bad news for you: It found a loving home ANYWAY. Suck on that, asshole.
So, I decided to try movabletype. I mostly like it, except for the way it specifies sizes that don't work with the huge fonts I love to use. See, I'm a sucker for high resolution displays - and thus, for huge fonts. So, most of the time, when I'm browsing the web, I don't see ANY fonts under 18 points - I set that as a minimum font size in Mozilla. Unfortunately, MovableType seems to have specified a few things in pixels, so I'll have to go fix those eventually. Eventually. For now, I'm just happy, not just to have a blog, but to have gotten my first comment! :)
Now, back to hopeless geek stuff. Today's project: Learn to configure spamassassin as a sendmail delivery filter, because I'm getting over 500 spams a day, and many of my users are into the 30-100 range. Thank you, thank you, kind folks at the DMA: Without your heroic lobbying efforts, spam might well have been reduced to a trickle, and I wouldn't be able to get this lucrative consulting gig installing spamassassin on a client's system. Thanks a WHOLE lot. Yup. Very sincere, here; the dripping sarcasm is purely an illusion.
These are oldies, but I liked them a lot. Both are in the fantasy art section of the store.
Northern Barbarian is just an awesome picture; just black and blue ink on paper, but it's a nice picture. The scan isn't as good as I'd like, because the paper is a bit colored with age, but it's a good picture. The other new pic is a picture of a wizard named Dylan. A character in one of our D&D games got attacked by some robbers, and he whupped them soundly, then offered them the option of retiring and doing something else. Dylan took him up on it, and eventually got trained as a wizard. This picture is from fairly late in his adventuring career; that's the staff of "wall of fire" he used so much. :)
I've wanted these pictures scanned in for a long time; years, probably. I don't even remember what year these pictures were done in, but these are the pictures my wife did for our Christmas cards one year.
The first is a fairly generic angel. Well, generic in that I don't think it's one of the named archangels; I've never seen anything like it before.
The second is an Annunciation picture. I love it. I don't know exactly why I love it; mostly, I think, because the angel in it is comforting, and soft, but... not human, and that makes it possible to imagine why it would have to say "Fear Not" almost immediately.
Of course, these are available through the online store, but the main point is, they're scanned in.
The secondary point is that 1.75GB of memory is *STILL* not enough, because the Mac still had to do a lot of paging while trying to stitch together the two parts of the angel picture at 1200 dpi. I'm glad I waited until I had the additional memory, but I'm stunned; how did people do ANYTHING with digital art when machines couldn't have 2GB of memory?
One of the wonders of being a freelance writer and consultant is that there's almost never any reason to get up in the morning. I am one of those people who, allowed to drift freely, gets up around noon most days. Today, I had to get up a whole two hours early to begin the interminable wait for a delivery truck - which may or may not come in before noon anyway.
Today's new toy is a gigabyte of additional memory for my poor overloaded Mac. 768MB is a lot for a machine that runs bookkeeping software and a few video games. It's a very small amount of memory for a machine that's scanning images at 2400 dpi, let alone a machine that's trying to stitch images together. This, of course, feeds into the online store project - a couple of the pictures we want to use for posters and such are too large for the scanner's bed, so we need to scan them in in parts.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to find out what sort of discounts the Zaurus developer program offers. The Zaurus is the coolest toy ever, and I want one.
Yeah, an entire blog entry about all the toys I want. I'm shallow. :)
Traditionally, one always starts a blog by pointing to another blog. (If this isn't a tradition already, it should be.)
Here's my favorite: Real Live Preacher. This guy is awesome; his stories are consistently interesting. You can tell the guy could make a living telling people what he thinks, at least mostly.
So, here we have it. Another blog. You may find yourself wondering why I'm doing this. Me too. I think it sort of started with the idea that I needed some way of generating more traffic for my site, because I have a naive hope that I can become ludicrously wealthy by selling bumper stickers through CafePress. But, on the other hand, I do a lot of writing these days, and it's strangely soothing, after putting in a few hours struggling to find the words I'm looking for, to sit down and struggle to find some words. It doesn't *sound* like it makes any sense, but it works that way, at least for me.
What's this blog "about", you wonder? I don't know yet. I tend to rant about all sorts of things. Religion. Web design. Spam. What I'm doing today, and why I've interrupted it to write a blog entry that no one will ever read. :)
Well, I'm a writer these days, so I do a lot of typing, and a lot of muttering under my breath, and I thought this would be a great way to combine them!
