Yes, that’s blue sky, and yes, the hand is mine, and yes, that’s sunlight on it; and no, it wasn’t taken in Edinburgh. But as it turns out, I could have stayed here to see it after all; after three months the rain has finally stopped. So we didn’t have to go all the way to Canada for a week, except to introduce William to his great-aunts, great-uncles, and great-grandma. (He was surprisingly well-behaved on the flight over, and asleep for most of the flight back, which was a relief; there may even be hope for his eventual trip to Australia.)

We didn’t come back with many photos this time, except baby photos, but then this was basically a visit with relatives: home cooking, suburban and highway driving, department stores. The sights of Alberta are all a long drive from each other, which is less appealing when there’s a bored baby on board. We’ll wait until he’s old enough to sing “A Thousand Green Bottles”.

We did go to West Edmonton Mall. The first time (last time), its hugeness was intriguing. This time it was just a mall. Good for half-price Levis and Henckels, but that’s about it. The shops out in the country were fun, though; Lammle’s Western Wear & Tack were having a Back to School sale:

So we had a good time. I read half a book (coincidentally set in northern Alberta), and William learnt how to sit up without falling over. Apart from paternity leave and a day either side of that Naples conference, it was my first holiday since last year.

The price was jetlag on the way back: flying west to east is a killer. It’s taken the best part of a week to readjust, not helped by a baby who doesn’t understand the meaning of “11 p.m.” I’ve been oversleeping every morning, trapped by vivid dreams. In one I was staring at an old 1930s road atlas in a bookstore, wondering why it was called The Tasmanian Tetipeskary. After waking up I googled the word, just in case it actually was a synonym for “gazetteer” and not one invented by my sleep-deprived brain. (It wasn’t, and was, but now I get to keep it. I hereby claim this word for the People’s Republic of Tasmania: may her tetipeskaries always guide true.)

On our return, all of the stresses of imminent teaching and unresolved house-purchasing awaited us. I repainted our study the weekend before we left, because we’d left instructions with our solicitor to put in another offer while we were away, and wanted to be able to sell ours quickly if we won. As it turned out, we came second—again—so it’s back to Sunday and Thursday viewings, and now the flat is full of boxes of stuff from the study. Two months in, and we’re effectively back where we started, but with less time: semester starts next week, and William starts crawling sometime after that.

What that means is that this site faces even worse neglect than before. So it’s time to do what I’ve been planning to for a while, and put the snail into hibernation; I can’t see there being much opportunity for blogging between now and the end of the year. On the plus side, this is the first price rise, um, official hiatus since March 2005, which isn’t too bad.

See you in 2008.

I’ve watched a lot of movies on DVD this year, but the one that stood out the most was The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (if you’re planning to watch it, ignore any suggestion that it’s a comedy). Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima were also impressive when watched back-to-back. Not much of the Hollywood fare was as fun as the Hitchcock and Jacques Tati movies I’ve been rewatching.

At the cinema, where I’m averaging only a movie a month in 2007, the most impressive were The Lives of Others, Zodiac, and The Home Song Stories, probably because they were all so evocative of their times and places: 1980s East Germany, 1970s San Francisco, 1970s Melbourne. Tony Ayres’s new film (which I caught at the Edinburgh Film Festival) is one of the best screen evocations of early-’70s Australia since the 1970s themselves, and worth watching for that reason alone, although his story and characters are also beautifully done.

And when movies just didn’t do it, there was always Boston Legal, House M.D., Life on Mars, Planet Earth, more Adam Curtis docos, and Simon Schama’s brilliant Power of Art. I had plans to write a parody mash-up of the first three for an entry here, to be called “Boston House on Mars”:

Hugh LAURIE: So, what seems to be the problem?

William SHATNER: What’s my name?

Hugh LAURIE: Foreman? Cameron? What came back from his MRI?

Omar EPPS: Well, it’s not vasculitis...

William SHATNER: Denny Crane.

Jennifer MORRISON: So it must be his brain.

William SHATNER: The mad cow!

...

Hugh LAURIE: And how about you?

John SIMM: Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?

Hugh LAURIE: Okay. I’m guessing not the last one, because that would be way too spooky, and not the second, because you’re talking to me.

Philip GLENISTER: Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!

William SHATNER: If you nancies had your way, nobody would ever shoot anybody.

...which probably wouldn’t have ended up much longer than that.

He’s sitting up. He’s bashing his hand up and down, often into my face. He’s practicing his gargles. He’s inconsolable at bedtime. He lies in bed going “oiyoiyoiyoiyoi” and “berberberber”. He’s overjoyed when we hold him up to stand on things. He’s teething. He’s trying mashed potato and baby rice. His hair is thinning out and getting lighter. He’s a happy little guy. I love being his Dad.

Amazing demo of content-aware image resizing (full paper, cache) with some disturbing implications for the photographer’s art and the historical record, but still. (Via Mefi.)

Iceland photos.

Garden macros.

Type the sky.

Unfortunately placed ads.

Building a Bender. I’d be happy just with the remote.

More on iTunes playlists: save a smart playlist as static; sync albums to your iPod, not just tracks (and an app that does it for you); and how to rescue music from your iPod.

Charlie Brooker on Scrabulous. I’ve been sucked into that vortex too, but the time between turns soon gets frustrating.

Inverted world.

Not the end of the world.

Holding a program in one’s head—or an essay, or a story, or a long blog post.

The entry I’ve been meaning to write, yet so much better!

Everything changed in Scotland on May the third—and nothing changed. The squeaking home of the SNP into minority government was supposed to mark a tectonic shift in British politics, but when Alex Salmond last week unveiled his plan for a referendum on Scottish independence the polls were still showing a yes vote twenty percent behind a no—contrary to the impression given by the nationalistic reader comments on the site of The Scotsman. It’s a relief, I suppose, because the election results had made me wonder what the future held for my relationship with Scotland and Britain, mere weeks after finally getting a UK passport. Would I have to choose between the two? This has been my home for six years, but how could I justify casting my lot with five million over fifty-five when the whole point of taking on a second citizenship was to go beyond narrow nationalism?

The fact that the UK is more than its parts was what made me comfortable with acquiring British citizenship, after all; when you consider how different the Scots, Welsh, English and Northern Irish all are from each other, not to mention the different regions, being Australian doesn’t feel that different from the elusive middle than any of the rest. This year in Scottish politics has brought all of that into focus. If the union broke up, where would that leave the descendents of the Empire?—an Empire the Scots played a major role in building, as all those “Scottish not British” slogans chalked around Edinburgh’s Old Town would have us forget.

As someone born in a peripheral part of that former Empire, peripheral even within its own country, I’m well aware of the feelings of neglect and injustice that drive separatism. Politicians in my island home regularly used to beat the drum of states’ rights and even secession when I was growing up, without much thought for how secession would actually work. But although I was shaped by the place, I’ve never wanted to be Tasmanian instead of being Australian; being both has been a blessing, not a curse. Similarly, my son is now blessed to be Scottish and British—reducing him to one over the other would take away half his birthright.

(I sometimes idly wonder how many Scots have been driven to thoughts of independence by being called English by one too many tourists. They should try being mistaken for a Warner Brothers cartoon character who spins around fast...)

The claim that the EU makes the UK irrelevant, and therefore that independence wouldn’t leave Scotland isolated, is also baffling if the argument is that Scotland has been ignored within the union. If it’s ignored as ten percent of Britain, how would it fare as one percent of Europe? The European Parliament is so much more sensitive to local concerns than Westminster, isn’t it.

Sure, there’s cause for grievance in Scottish history, as there is anywhere, but any examination of that history reveals complications and caveats that suggest not only why the kingdoms were united but why they’ve stayed that way. Nothing in history makes change impossible, but all this talk of historical inevitability sounds pretty wishful to someone who voted for an Australian republic.

For a place so focussed on history and its implications, there’s a lot of it being demolished right now, at least in Edinburgh. In only a few short weeks this spring, the McEwans brewery dominating the Fountainbridge area was demolished, along with Fat Sam’s nightclub (the old meat market) nearby; a nondescript 1960s block near the Grassmarket went;

They began adding a lopsided glass box to the symmetrical Victorian curves of Usher Hall; the 1960s office block on George IV bridge came down;

And across the road from where I work, just behind the Royal Mile, a huge area was cleared for the proposed Caltongate development.

The next stage of Caltongate promises to be far more obnoxious: the developers proposed knocking down the listed Canongate Venture, just off the Royal Mile, and some of the terraces on the Mile itself—Edinburgh’s main tourist street, in the heart of its World Heritage area. A campaign to Save Our Old Town sprang up, and I did my bit by lodging objections to the plans, which now sit somewhere on the council website. It wasn’t hard to put together a few heartfelt words about “odious proposals” showing “a serious lack of sympathy for the historical value of the area”—“it should be perfectly possible to develop a mixed retail and residential space on the former bus depot land without destroying the character of the Royal Mile and surrounds ... visitors from around the world expect to see historic buildings in a World Heritage area, not shopping malls”—but they might not do much when the spirit of the age wants glass frontage everywhere, even at the expense of World Heritage.

Two months ago, I was wondering if we would still be here to see the results of all this redevelopment. While I was in Italy touting our MSc, I was also wondering what would happen when my contract ended a few weeks later. It’s one of the joys of the modern academic life, the short-term contract. It’s all I’ve ever known, but familiarity hasn’t bred contentment; although I was more confident this time than last that things would get sorted out, it was still nerve-racking. With a growing baby in a small two-bedroom flat, we had been planning to move, but without a secure contract we weren’t sure if that would be to somewhere in Edinburgh or... well, anywhere.

The administrative cogs eventually turned in my favour, though, and the contract got sorted, which fired the starting pistol on the next race: finding a new place while they’re still remotely affordable. The price of everything has doubled since we moved here, which will be great when we sell our current flat, but isn’t so great when we’re buying; that extra bedroom for one small boy will take us right back to where we started with our mortgage, and then some. (It isn’t only because of him; we never planned to live in this flat for as long as we have.)

Then there’s the Scottish system of “offers over” and closed bids. You’re supposed to somehow magically intuit what a place is worth, in the order of 20 to 30 percent above the advertised price, and make an offer while hoping that nobody else offers a hundred pounds more. It’s like an eBay auction, but without the reassurance that you’ll only ever pay one bid above the next highest offer. We’ve heard of people who paid twenty percent more than the next highest offer, which is scary when you’re dealing with Edinburgh prices.

Last time around we dodged the issue by buying a fixed-price property. That isn’t really an option this time; there are far fewer 3-bedroom places in central Edinburgh than 2-bedroom, and hardly any end up as fixed-price. So our Thursdays and Sundays since mid-July have been a succession of terrace flats and the like, all costing x + y where x = the kind of money J.K. Rowling makes and y = a mysterious figure known only to the Sorting Hat. A depressing number of them are ex-student-rentals with the kind of grimy patina you would hope not to be getting for more money than you’ve ever paid for anything in your life, while others have been redecorated and priced at a premium by developers who bought them three months ago and are looking to make a quick £50K profit.

In our first few days of trying, there was little we could actually see ourselves living in, but a week in we saw one place that got us thinking. It was across town from where we live, off a busy main road and next to a building that’s about to be demolished and redeveloped. The thought of living next to a construction site was offputting, but the place itself was intriguing: an A-listed Georgian mansion with a flat on each floor. The chance of living in a place like that seemed worth putting up with jackhammers for a year, especially as its value would only increase once work was done, so when the closing date arrived a few days later we put in an offer, which was accepted.

That evening, we thought we’d found ourselves a really special place—something with character, part of that history that attracts people to Edinburgh in the first place, unlike the twenty-year-old flat we’ve been in. Our offer was subject to survey, though, and unfortunately the survey came back with problems, starting in the roof and leaking down from there. Any structural repairs to an A-listed building could end up with a lot of noughts in the bill, so we had little choice but to withdraw.

One of the secrets nobody tells you when you start this caper is that you can find out a UK property’s previous selling prices since 2000 online for free. I discovered it the day after we’d pulled out, which was a bit annoying, as we could see that we’d offered £30K more than the current owner had paid for it three months before. Still, it was irrelevant by then, and the site has been useful since.

In the weeks since then we’ve made one more offer, coming fourth out of seven and £9K short of the winner, which was dispiriting when we’d offered about as much as we could. There are a couple more possibilities looming, and if those don’t work out something will. But I hope one of these ones does—all of these viewings are wearing us down, and we’re only six weeks in. A friend of mine did this for a year before finding a place. If we’re still in our flat next summer it’ll be so cramped we’ll have to buy a treadmill for William to learn to walk on.

Buying a place is only the half of it, though. Then we’ve got to sell this one. And move. And, if we get the one we hope, renovate it. I wouldn’t expect too many more posts here for a while.

(One of the other secrets you learn when your partner texts you to buy the Scotsman for its property section is that the predictive text for “Scotsman” is “Pantsman”.)

With all of that going on, this has been the first August in Edinburgh we haven’t been knee-deep in the Fringe. Having William around makes it tricky, too—Jane and I have only seen one show together, Tony Law’s sequel to last year’s. I’ve seen a few more here and there—Terry Saunders (telling a feel-good tale that builds nicely), Binari (Korean drumming, impressively loud) and the Wooster Group’s La Didone (at the Festival proper, and properly strange)—but apart from the crowds on the Mile it hasn’t really felt like a Fringe.

It’s the year I made my Fringe debut, though. A friend was doing some recitals at an open poetry reading near where I work, and I tagged along, first to watch him and then, last Friday, to have a go myself, reading Lights and A Road Map of NSW to a decent reception from the two dozen present (which could have been even better if I’d recited them from memory). They were a spur-of-the-moment selection from four possibilities I’d printed out, but given everything that’s been on my mind these past few months I suppose it wasn’t surprising I chose the ones with a strong sense of place.

(Photos all taken on my camera phone, amazingly enough. That’s the Warhol exhibition at the Scottish Academy, yet another thing I haven’t had time to see.)

Sad news for lovers of extremely short podcasts: there are no more elephants for the time being. For a limited time, though, you can download the entire collection in one zip file if you’d like to listen to all twelve minutes in one hit. It’s fauna-tastic!

Two Hundred Bad Comics (via MeFi).

Peanuts by Charles Bukowski (via MeFi).

SF writer Charlie Stross explains the present and the future.

Rotation of Earth plunges entire North American continent into darkness.

Zotero, a Firefox extension to help collect, manage and cite research sources (via MeFi).

After 18 months with an iPod I’m finally getting around to using smart playlists: Brilliant Playlists; Creating Smart Playlists in iTunes; Greg Restall’s guide; tips from 43folders; Smart Playlists.com.

The place I was most sorry to miss, though, was Pompeii, which had lingered in my imagination since I’d read the Reader’s Digest book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts at the age of nine. Something about those plaster casts of the victims stuck in my impressionable mind, and Pompeii became my idea of the ultimate archaeological site. Sure, the pyramids were big and pointy, but Vesuvius was too, until its top blew off and spewed boiling lava over the hapless Romans, aiiiieeeee! The story of Vesuvius only grew in stature as I learned about Krakatoa and Thera, visited Hawaii’s Big Island, and followed the eruption of Mount St Helens on the news in the early ’80s. Volcanoes don’t muck around, and being part of the greatest empire of the ancient world was no protection.

So once I knew I was definitely going to Naples for a conference this June, it was no surprise what was uppermost in my mind: would there be enough time to see Pompeii? I booked a flight back on Sunday to be sure of having at least one day free. Then I saw the schedule and found I was presenting on the Saturday morning, my supposedly free day. Maybe I could get the gist in a few hours...

Flying in late on a Tuesday, I didn’t expect to see Vesuvius, but there it was, looming out of the dusk over what was once the third city of Europe (circa 1800). The airport is only a few miles from the centre, so Naples was spread out below us, looking much as it might to an ejected lump of pumice.

Getting in to the hotel late meant waking up late, which ate into what I now knew was my best chance to see Pompeii; conference registration was open until 7pm, so I’d have time to go out to Pompeii and back before the Welcome Cocktail. Weaving across the madness of Piazza Garibaldi (a giant square cluttered with concrete barriers and criss-crossing roads), I headed to the central station and worked out which train to catch. The clue was in the name: the Circumvesuviano.

I’d forgotten to put my passport in the hotel safe, so was obsessively checking my bag; it felt paranoid, but I’d read too many dire warnings of pickpockets in the guidebook to shrug them off. The warnings later seemed well-founded, as I heard of conference attendees’ bags being snatched and felt some suspicious bumps myself. Losing my camera would have been the worst, but as long as you keep your bag away from the street you reduce the risk of that; the main threat is from scooters whizzing past in the tourist streets of the old town.

The train took only half an hour to reach Pompeii, and by late morning there I was, walking around those once-ash-filled streets. The difference between what I was now seeing and the other Roman ruins I’d visited was huge: those were floorplans, whereas Pompeii was three-dimensional, with walls and sometimes even ceilings rising up two or more storeys. The site went on and on; it would take days to see all of it, even with only a third open to the public.

I wandered around in the sunshine, photographing walls, mosaics, paintings, sculptures, water-troughs, rutted streets and plumbed toilets, but was having a hard time finding what would make the experience complete: the casts of the victims. In the same way that photos of Stonehenge leave you expecting something thirty feet high on a desolate plain, instead of half that height standing next to an A-road, photos of the plaster casts leave you expecting Pompeii to be full of them, lying around on the streets, propped against walls, like so many Anthony Gormleys. Until you see some, the place doesn’t feel quite right—morbid though that sounds.

My guidebook said that the “Garden of the Fugitives” had several, but its map didn’t show the location, and the office at the entrance had run out of official maps by the time I’d arrived. But I caught a glimpse of one over the shoulder of a retired American who was holding it at arm’s length, and headed towards the right area... where I got lost in a tangle of streets that all looked the same.

Eventually I gave up and tried another location, the Stabian baths, where there were a few casts in glass cases in a crowded room. It was hard to give them the moment of silence their frozen forms deserved, though, when surrounded by tour guides talking to their groups in four languages. It was the same at the nearby Forum, where I discovered what I would have earlier if I’d turned left instead of right when entering the site: a large storage area full of amphorae, sculpture, and a few more casts. This time, it took a young American trying to impress his girlfriend to kill the mood:

“You know, if you think about it, that’s how we’ll all end up one day.”

Presumably they live near Kilauea.

Time was getting on, and I almost gave up on seeing the Garden of Fugitives; but while exploring the northern side of the town, I spotted another guidebook in the souvenir shop which had a better map. Sneaking a look, I realised I’d missed it before by only a block or two. So back across town I went, down the main street of Via dell’Abbondanza, then that block or two further towards the edge of the site. Behind some high walls I had seen from a distance a couple of hours before lay a vineyard with a glass enclosure on its downhill end. Inside were a dozen or so casts of men, women, children—even babies—in contorted poses, lying where they fell two millennia before. With nobody else around, it was quiet enough to properly imagine the scene: the eruption; the panic; the enveloping cloud of superheated gas, rock and ash.

Until you see the casts, Pompeii feels like an amazing archaeological site, it’s true, but only on a bigger scale than others you may have seen. But the casts make it feel like a town: like a place where people lived and died only a few short years ago. There they are, right in front of you.

That evening I discovered that the conference venue was about as far from my hotel as possible, in the Città della Scienza near Campi Flegrei, a converted industrial site with a skeletal factory ruin next to it. With over an hour’s commute either way and a 9-to-6 conference day, I didn’t see much of Naples itself over the next few days, beyond Piazza Garibaldi and the metro system. One evening I left the train halfway back to the hotel and explored the streets of the wealthier area of Chiaia, looking for a trattoria recommended by the guidebook which turned out to be closed. Instead I ate some pasta and fish at a nearby osteria where I was waited on attentively because I was the only customer. The locals still hadn’t come out to eat when I headed back to the metro at 9.30; it was like being in Spain.

There was plenty of good eating in Naples, even though most of mine consisted of conference catering and hotel breakfasts. I’ve mentioned the pizza, but not the gelati (the classic Neapolitan combination turns out to be strawberry and lemon, not strawberry, vanilla and chocolate), the sweets (my favourites were a box of Morositas Berry Morbide—death berries, as I thought of them—made of licorice), the Fonzies (which are almost identical in packaging but inferior in taste to Australia’s Twisties), and the many pastries and cakes. How can you resist something called a sfogliatelle?

Like so much of Naples, though, I didn’t have enough time to explore the food fully. Nor did I get to the royal heart of the city, with its castles and promenades by the bay. But on Saturday I skipped the last keynote of the conference to leave enough time to see the first of Naples’ two greatest museums, the Capodimonte. Housed in a palace on a hill, this gallery is full of old masters, including many I’d never encountered before: Beuckelaer and Giordano caught my attention, but the best find for me was Parmigianino, whose Antea graces the cover of their catalogue, and whose Sacra Famiglia was as beautiful as a Botticelli. Add a swag of knockout Titians, El Grecos, Breughels and Goyas, all restored to luminous colours, and you have one of the better galleries of Europe.

After looking around it twice, I watched a procession of dented Fiats and Renaults drive past while I waited for a bus back downhill to the edge of Centro Storico, the old town of the “new town” of Neapolis, as the Romans knew it; the street plan is apparently still theirs. I’d never seen a historic centre this full of Baroque splendour that was so thoroughly neglected: full of crumbling stone and paintwork and covered in graffiti, with piles of uncollected rubbish obstructing the streets, apart from the small tourist zone with its souvenir bags of multicoloured pasta; and everywhere scooters zipping by within bag-snatching distance. Piazza Garibaldi’s traffic seemed sedate after a walk through the Centro, but it was worth it for Da Michele’s pizza.

The next morning I had only a few hours to see the biggest attraction of all: the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the one with the stuff they hauled out of Pompeii and Herculaneum. If you only have half a day in Naples, spend it there, because the treasures are incredible: intricate mosaics of all shapes and sizes; kitchenware, glassware and pottery in immaculate condition; life-sized bronzes with inlaid eyes; coins and jewels that look as if they were made yesterday. The sheer quantity of it all brought home how truly rich the Roman Empire was, and how advanced, with all of this coming out of two or three provincial towns.

Then there was perhaps the greatest revelation of all: the Secret Cabinet, closed for much of the twentieth century, full of erotica from the Vesuvian digs. I’d already seen the brothel district of Pompeii, but this really showed how matter-of-factly the Romans treated the subject of romance. Paintings of nude men and women in dozens of positions shared the room with bronzes of erect Roman gentlemen pointing proudly below their waists, a marble of Pan in an intimate moment with a goat, oil-lamps embossed with hairy phalluses, and bronze flying penises (with penis legs) that would make one hell of a screensaver. Possibly the most incredible in terms of its distance from 21st-century mores was a large painting of cherubs at play, chasing each other around, holding each other down using more than their arms, and being eaten by hippopotami.

As if the Vesuvian treasures weren’t enough, the museum also contains a bunch of large Roman sculptures acquired by a member of the Farnese family while he was Pope, along with his extensive collection of jewels—all in the name of ecclesiatic research, no doubt.

Seeing Capidimonte and the Archaeological Museum could only ever be a partial excavation of Naples. It’s a big, sprawling, grimy city, with all the fascination that implies, and there was far too much that I missed: the interiors of all the churches, the castles, the funicolari and the views from the top of them. Despite the city’s reputation for crime—not just the pickpockets and bag-snatchers, but the mafia-like Camorra—the Neapolitans I met were invariably friendly, and appreciated my attempts to struggle by in their language. Maybe I warmed to them more because they all looked like they were from Melbourne, as well as like their Renaissance portraits and the frescoes in Pompeii; uncanny genetic staying power.

I’ll have to go back one day to see it all, along with Sorrento, Capri, and the Amalfi coast. In the meantime, these reminders will have to do...

Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, on The Lives of Others and Germany’s secrets.

Air cars, electric cars, and plug-in hybrids. Why aren’t these everywhere?

Photosynth combines Flickr images into zoomable VR models.

Possibly only interesting to those who have Crossed Over, but these humiliating moments in parenting will take some beating. (That isn’t a dare, son.)

It’s been a couple of weeks, but the closure of Fopp is still depressing, as is the claim that it’s because of mp3s and the “death of the CD”. The chain was apparently profitable, and had diversified into DVDs and books anyway (as any former customer knows)—it was more a case of expanding too rapidly, by the sounds of it.

By the way, here’s Ian Anderson on the “death” of the CD (non-perma link, so read it now): “Per capita CD sales in the UK are the same as they were five years ago ... but online mail order buying has really taken over.... While the weekly trot into a High Street shop to buy a single that was on Top Of The Pops has gone, reducing impulse buys of mainstream, major label albums, hardcore music buyers now increasingly let their keyboards do the shopping and can find far more of what they want and more easily online.” I’ve certainly bought a lot more than 2.7 CDs this year, and it’s only half over.

Terminator kill-bots to be run by a system called “Skynet”. Possibly unwise.

Troubled Diva on blogging and book deals.

Never say never again: Dave Gorman’s blog.

And if you’re a blogger, never take a day off. Or, if you’re me, take two weeks off for no particular reason and never look at your stats.

Something more substantial on its way soon. [...as I write it.]