Friday, February 01, 2002

This is eerie.  Well, Cooper is always eerie, but the Radio 8 My Pictures tool installed itself and worked first time out in a matter of seconds.  This really is Web publishing for English majors. Sorry I didn't optimize or shrink the file size as I will for any future images.  (What is this, 46K?  As the vet said, "He's got a little chunk on him.") 8:44:08 PM    commentplace ()

E-commerce E-lite: You all know that online shopping surprised everyone by not totally folding or imploding over the holidays.  Now BizRate.com has singled out 24 Web stores as "Circle of Excellence" winners, voted by real Nov./Dec. '01 customers (minimum 2,000 per store) as tops in Product Selection & Availability, Ease of Ordering, On-Time Delivery, Customer Support, Overall Satisfaction, and Loyalty & Repurchase Intent.  Give it up for QVC.com, PC Connection, REI.com, Plow & Hearth, Carrot's Ink Cartridges, Powells.com Antiquarian Books, Christianbook.com, The San Francisco Music Box Company, eBags, Circuit City, and more!  Amazon.com, which just reported its first-ever profit, missed the cut. 6:16:15 PM    commentplace ()

Wow!  My third e-mail is a compliment from Weblog ace Rogi, whom I added to my rare & elite referral list after he posted back-to-back brilliant remarks on Googlewhacking as "so last week" and the definitive quote from Lennox Lewis re Mike Tyson ... if your humble Weblog gets many more words of encouragement I may have to think of a different tagline than "Single-digit page views"; maybe "Trees falling in forests almost daily." I must confess I liked Rogi's washday-white January look better than his dark and somber February design (and UserLand has inadvertently caused a real linking/browsing muddle with all these blogstars opening Radio sites with different URLs alongside their existing sites), but I honor him for passing along this link to a real and valuable resource.  I'm nowhere near suicide today and have only walked along the outer edges of it once, but I cease all witty repartee and become unpleasantly earnest when the topic of depression comes up — it is real, it is an illness, it is red in tooth and claw, it is not something sufferers can "snap out of" any more than, say, leukemia is (I think the analogy's from Andrew Sullivan, The Noonday Demon), it deserves priority treatment as a major cause of death and of billions in lost business productivity instead of stigma as a personal weakness.  I'll stop before getting too earnest but someday I'll track down and treat you to killer quotes on the disease from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Charlotte Bronte's Villette.  Gotta love the Brontes; my wife has learned to get nervous when she catches me rereading Jane Eyre. 6:03:46 PM    commentplace ()