I've set up my own blog. Hopefully this will help keep my content current, and avoid the million-years gaps between updates that appears to currently be the case. I might be able to write here, and then turn the longer rants into articles. This is a pretty pathetic first blog, hopefully they'll improve.

I said it two years ago, and I'll say it again: look out for polymer displays! They've actually built some now, and they're really pretty -- sharper, brighter, thinner, cheaper and less power-hungry than LCDs. Also, with the market set to grow from $3 million in 1999 to $2.7 billion by 2005, it looks like now is the time to buy stock! The companies involved in the technology (rather than devices which will use them) are Kodak, eMagine, and Cambridge Display Technologies. The first and last look like the really big players.

Goodness, I'm all blog-happy! Hopefully I'll write some longer ones soon. But I just had to include a link to the SkyCar -- "the next step in man's evolution towards independence from gravity" according to the manufacturer. It looks *very* cool, but since it requires 70m-diameter circle to take off and touch down, you can't exactly park it in the driveway yet. It looks kind of like the Mach 5.

There's a brilliant article on AlterNet about America's attitude to school shootings: namely, that it is white America's problem, and white America is ignoring it. A good excerpt: According to the Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services, it is your children, and not those of the urban ghetto, who are most likely to use drugs. That's right: white high school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; ten times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin. In fact, there are more white high school students who have used crystal methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on the streets) than there are black students who smoke cigarettes. I think that's the single most amusing paragraph I've read this month, and I read the Onion regularly.

There's just no excuse for not using The Bat as your e-mail client if you use Windows. No Outlook bugs, superior performance, and a truckload of better features. One of the few software products actually worth paying for. Assuming you pay for your software, of course. Not everybody does.

Well, after two weeks of unemployment (I'm on vacation, and need money to avoid going into the red) I've finally got a job: data bloody entry, unfortunately, but it's better than starving on the street I guess. In case you haven't heard, MSIE is a lousy browser, with the kind of bugs that suggest Windows users should simply post their important information to the web. Unfortunately, Netscape is also a piece of shit -- Mozilla has promise, but it's way too slow the last time I checked. Also, Wired Magazine is good as usual, if somewhat self-involved. Update on that MSIE bug (2001-04-03): MS released a patch, and it doesn't work either! Apparently because Outlook uses MSIE to view HTML files, you can get arbitrary code executed on your machine simply by opening an HTML-formatted e-mail. Fantastic. I'm nostalgic for the days when an "e-mail virus" was a hoax.