I grabbed the camera and took this picture right as the sun went down.

I started this blog in 1996. Long before the term "blog" or "blogging" or "web log" had even been coined. I threw it away several times, and started over, most of the time due to either disk crashes, server moves, or incompatible CMS upgrades. Eventually I gave up. I didn't take it seriously. Then Facebook came along, and I put pithy, mostly idiotic, observations on there, hidden behind my wall of "friends".

Apparently, Facebook is now big enough to play in the big leagues and the consequences are becoming more and more apparent every day. There's been a lot of fallout since Edward Snowden came forward with new revelations about the NSA, which includes Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and others, handing over data. Unfortunately, we've seen a number of web sites and services disappear as a result.

I have to thank Michael Froomkin for archiving my original blog entries over on Discourse.net. I have republished them here and back dated them to their original publication date.

I was having a very surreal experience trying to move phone service from Verizon to Comcast. All I wanted to do is (1) keep my same telephone number (this is the much-vaunted “number portability” that we are supposed to be able to enjoy; and (2) have working reliable phone service. It's not that easy. Here are my reports from the front:

Day 4