wink     ; )

Opera

It's official. Opera really is the "Fastest Browser* in the World" (for most purposes).

* Full featured browsers that is.

#2

Oh, and by the way, if you didn't already know, we've started the process of adopting our second child. We don't expect to bring her (we've requested a girl) home until summer of 2005, so it'll be a while yet.

getupgrrl writes the following about her gestational surrogacy:

It's not that I'm depressed or anxious or sad, because I'm not. It's just that this entire pregnancy feels very surreal to me, like a dream that I can't quite remember. I'm not pregnant. My body hasn't changed at all. I've had no morning sickness, no fatigue, no food cravings. My life has gone on as before. Well, I don't go to the hospital every morning dressed in easy-access sweatpants, that's true. But I still can't quite believe that I might actually end up with a child at the end of all this.

Those surreal feelings and the difficulty in believing that "I might actually end up with a child at the end of all this" resonate with me even though we are in completely different circumstances.

Thoughts on blogging

This post by Julie about transparencly and self-censorship in blogging prompted me to finally put into words some of my feelings about blogging.

I have a hard time with this blog. Part of that is because I don't have as much time as I would like to devote to it. But another part of it is that I am not truly anonymous here. Many people who read this know me, and know me well, in person. That's great in some ways, but it causes problems in others. Particularly, I censor myself a lot.

There are all sorts of things that I want to say but don't: rants and criticisms and embarassing stories. There are really intimate and personal things that, for reasons that I don't understand, I would rather share with a world of strangers than with the people who know me best.

Because of this (and my lack of time), I post infrequently or, at times, not at all. And when I do post, the posts are usually short and insubstantial (or very occasionally, cryptic).

But my dillema goes a bit deeper than just self-censoring. I find myself being deliberately boring here. I could post all sorts of fascinating yet insubstantial stuff here and not worry about the wrong people reading the wrong things. But instead I write stuff that I know is tedious and banal. I do this not just because I'm self-censoring, but because I'm actively driving some of my readers away. I know that if my post frequency gets above a certain level, or if my posts maintain a certain level of substance, then cetain friends/family members will actually pay attention to what I'm saying here instead of only dropping in thrice a year.

For reasons that I don't really understand myself, I don't want that to happen.

So I deliberately hobble this site. Sorry to those of you who want better from me here. I don't really know what a good solution is. I could go totally anonymous: set up a completely new blog and tell no one about it. I've considered this. But I'd be losing a bit too much (of what I don't know) by doing that. And I've thought about just saying what I want to--who cares if my friends and family know. I'm still considering this one. There are other ideas out there too, but none really strike me as approriate yet. So until I figure out what to do and get the guts to do it, this site will continue to hobble along as it has been--boring and tedious.

Sorry.

Gotcha Day

We brought Spark home one year ago today! What an amazing year it has been.

Funeral

The whole family is going to California for Tree's Grandma's funeral. We won't be back till Sunday. Internet access will be intermittent at best and blogging will be low priority, so don't expect much from me here.

Not going bald anymore

Some months ago, my hair was falling out rather quickly. Just wanted to say that that has stopped. It only continued for another month or so after that post. So if any of you out there have been losing sleep over this, then rest assured that I'm fine. Please accept my apologies for being so slow to update you on the issue. And go see a counselor.

You can't persuade the public using Math

Daring Fireball is ragging on Napster-to-go. One of his main complaints is that "$15 a month is $180 per year. That’s a lot more than most people spend on music, isn’t it?" He seems to think that "doing the math" (as Napster's new slogan goes) will make people realize that it is a lot cheaper to not use Napster.

While I agree with DF on the math, I don't think that that will make any difference in the public's reaction. As Joel points out: "[Y]ou finally get the focus group to agree that your software is worth $25 a month, and then you ask them how much they would pay for a permanent license and the same people just won't go a penny over $100."

People just don't think sensibly when dealing with monthly costs. I think that Napster-to-go will fail, but not becuase of how expensive it is. I think it will fail because people like to "own" their music. People want to know that once they've paid for it, their music is theirs forever (or for as long as they can find a player that can play it). The idea that your music becomes inaccessible when you stop paying the subscription fee just kind of freaks people out. The music files are there...why can't they be listened to? DivX (the rental service, not the codex) failed for this reason, and Napster-to-go will fail too if they pursue this marketing strategy.

Comment Policy

I've never gotten around to spelling out my comment/trackback policy, so here it is:

I reserve the right to delete or modify a comment for any reason. The only reason that I've exercised this option so far has been to delete comment spam. That is likely to continue.

I have recently deleted all trackbacks due to a flood of trackback spam (it was easier to delete all of them than sort through them to find the 3 or so legitimate trackbacks which have been made on this site during its lifetime). In the future, I anticipate only needing to delete trackback spam.

In order to keep comment spam down to manageble levels, I close comments after about three weeks. So basically, if you want to comment on a post, you have about until it scrolls off the front page. I had been leaving trackbacks open indefinitely, but that has recently been getting lots of spam too, so I'm now closing them after three weeks as well.

Hacked

The server which hosts this site got hacked last week. The hacker replaced every page with this. Sorry if you came here and only saw that. Everything should be all better now.

Mourning

Tree's (other) grandmother, Grandma T died today. This was not at all unexpected, but we are still sad anyway. She seemed so happy and vibrant when we saw her over Christmas, even though her health was already pretty bad by then. I'm so glad that she got to see Spark (multiple times) before she died.

Rest in Peace Grandma T