I haven't got around to posting in quite a while. I have been fairly active on Twitter, though, so I'm going to enable daily updates from Twitter so there's something coming across the wire.

Also, I upgraded this here joint to Wordpress 2.5 today, and it looks pretty sweet. It makes management of tags a lot easier, and the automatic plugin upgrade is just rockin'. Fo'shizzle.

Comcast has come through. We are solidly online.

My home Internet connection has been dropping out every day for nearly a week. It always goes down between 10:30 and 11:00, and doesn't come back up until the evening, sometimes as late as 9:00. Since I host my websites from home, this means the sites go dark during this period as well. Frankly, you're lucky to be reading this at all.

Comcast is sending someone over to look at it today, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

I've been doing line monitoring through broadbandreports.com - they'll check every ten minutes from three different cities to see if your connection is up, and keep track of it for you. They even provide some nice graphs, which geeks love.

Here's a graph of my connection for the past two days:

See the green bits? Those are the happy places. They're like vast tropical seas of lime Jello Mountain Dew margaritas that you can swim in to your heart's content.

You'll also have noticed the blue bits. Those are evil mountains of fear and despair amongst the tranquil green seas. They're blue because they're actually giant piles of dead Smurfs.

It's very disconcerting when you have no Internet access. It feels a lot like that scene in Apollo 13 when they go around the moon and are out of radio contact for a while. There's no telling what could happen during that time - you can't get email, you can't Google anything, there's no Wikipedia, no Facebook, no Flickr, no YouTube… seriously, it's like 1996, it's fucking medieval.

I hope they fix it soon.

Lately I've been sending my wife an email every morning with links to various news items, blog posts, or other things I've found.

It occurred to me that it would be nifty to store this somewhere and make it available on the blog. So I'm going to use Google Notebook Furl to keep track of the things I'm reading, and they'll automatically show up on the 'Bits' page.

Update: I sorta stopped doing this.

What do you write when you have no readers?

I want to build a little time capsule here. Later, once this blog has actually become whatever it's going to become, I can come back and see whether it became what I thought it would become, and have myself a little chuckle about ain't-life-strange and wasn't-I-funny-back-then. And then I can rewrite this post to say what I'll think it should have said when I originally wrote it, back when I thought there were actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Congress would do anything I wanted.

See, there I go again. Everything's a political allegory. One thing I want to accomplish here is to channel my frustration with this Bush guy and his "administration," to sort of focus my anger (and, lately, glee at the disintegration of Bush Inc.) and stop ranting at the dinner table and scaring my daughter. ("You angry, da-da?") Blogging seems to be the way most people do this lately, so I'll give it a shot.

The other thing I'm aiming for is to use the other parts of my brain - the ones I don't use on a daily basis. I write code for a living, which I love - I feel like I was born to do it. I also happen to feel that writing code is a very creative, almost artistic, activity. Perhaps that's a fantasy or a conceit, but it's one that I think a lot of other developers feel as well. Certainly the pride one feels for good code, the shame for bad, and the compulsion to endlessly tinker and improve, seem artistic to me. But I've felt lately that I should pursue more "traditional" creative activities - writing, photography, music, graphic design - just in case I'm kidding myself about programming and my right hemisphere is turning to mush in my head. I'm a liberal arts guy - I have a Psychology degree, yet here I am - so I've always felt that every activity you pursue informs and enhances the others. So again, the solution is clear: start a blog.

Of course, I do already have a blog, but I've used it to post code snippets and various other IT and CompSci tweakery, so it's hardly the same thing - plus I feel it's somehow inappropriate to use the same blog for politics and random musings on life and the world. That blog is for what I do. This blog is for what I think. Most people who care about the one won't care about the other. So: new blog.

There, that about sums it up. I've got the creative juices flowing now, and I've stopped staring at a blinky cursor for minutes on end. Please ignore this post if you choose - like pancakes, the first one rarely comes out right.