Just a reminder: if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, please come to the Weblogger Interest Group on Tuesday, January 22, 2002. http://webloggerinterestgroup.manilasites.com has more details. We'll have fun, get together for coffee, and then beer at the local brew house, and also show off the latest weblogging tools.

Lava kills up to 40 in Congo. Flow creates a five-foot-high wall of cooling stone, leaves a half-million people homeless. Nation [USA Today : Front Page]

Scoble's comment: Wow, puts all my minor little problems in perspective. Half a million people are suffering and are not in their homes today. Ouch. And how much coverage does that get here? Yes, we value overseas lives much less than lives in America.

3000 people die here and it's front page news for months. Half a million get displaced in Africa and it's front page news for how long? Anyone want to make a bet?

Why is an American life worth less than a life somewhere else?

If I believed in a God I'd ask him or her if he or she was an American.

OK, I guess it's working again. That was weird. One disadvantage of editing in the browser is that if something goes nuts you lose what you were typing in the browser window. I've gotten used to copying what I wrote to the clipboard "just in case."

I'm going to try a longer post to see if the server times out after a while.

I was talking to a friend last night about Microsoft's new .NET platform. I was telling him that I think they made it too complex for average programmers to pick up on. Visual Basic has gotten more power (it now is object oriented, has multi-threading, and has other "power" features) but at the cost of being more complex.

Windows programming back to 1990. Only the Jeff Prosise's and Dan Appleman's can figure it out. We need a programming language for the rest of us. Something newbies can figure out.

Hey, Apple, why don't you bring back Hypercard? Make it fast and make it look like it's an OS X thing.

OK, let's see if this post gets posted and if my bugs get fixed.

Test #1

Weird, I was having posting problems with Radio UserLand 8.0.1 this morning. I wonder what I did? I just reset all my templates and themes to see if that helps. I'll be posting rapid-fire tests for the next few minutes to see if the problem is fixed.

Life on my own continued: hey, the house is a mess and no one is yelling at me or Patrick about it. That's so strange! We're playing a new game: "leave our crap on the floor and see if anyone yells about it." We're having a lot of fun.

Speaking of fun, Chris and Gretchen Pirillo sold me an extra DVD player. Works great. It's my first DVD player. Boy are things sharper. Now all I need is a Tivo and maybe an xBox.

Yeah, I don't have a DSL line yet. I am waffling on spending the $600 it costs to set it up. So, I leave my computer dialed into sonic.net all night long. It's so weird to be back on low-bandwidth. Why don't they just put 802.11b in here? I'm working on it. I hear my neighbors have DSL.

This is a marketing weekend. Gotta make sure everyone knows about Radio UserLand 8.0.1. Oh, but I gotta do laundry too. Ahh, the fun of single life.