There's no one thing to write about. So I'll write about a few little things. Deal?

Amusement. My boss sent me this link. Shockwave is required. If you're like me and don't keep Shockwave installed, find someone who does and send the link, and watch them watch it. It's even more amusing than watching it yourself.

I just heard a name I didn't expect to ever hear again, because it had been almost 15 years since I last heard it. And in this case it wasn't good news.

I'm tired. I got home from work at arbout 4:45 and immediately started writing up a study for Friday night. I had about an hour before I really needed to leave... Well, at 6:15, I mostly had the study written. I'm GenX to the bone.

I seem to be hung up on posting stuff that's useful or thought-provoking... For the past TWO YEARS. So there won't be a lick of useful information in this one. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Nil.

Soon after I moved back to St. Louis, Gatermann and I came up with a weird ritual for Friday and/or Saturday nights. Come Feb. 1999, I started writing my first book, which was a full-time job on top of the full-time job I already had, so my brain was usually totally fried after a week of troubleshooting Macintoshes for 40 hours and spelunking in Windows configuration files and writing about my findings for another 35-50 hours.

As I was hurtling down Missouri 370 en route to I-70 this past weekend, I heard a commercial for some brand of booze on the radio. I don't remember which. Its advice for life was to be yourself (translation: drink lots of their product), and, among other things, to watch one sunset a week (and then, ideally, stay up all night drinking their product and take in the sunrise as well).

I'm published again! The Jan. 2001 issue of Computer Shopper UK features an article titled "Windows Cleaning," by Yours Truly. It's essentially a rewrite of chapter 2 from Optimizing Windows, with a few new insights, but due to space limitations I had to leave some stuff out too.

I looked into the cost of getting it in the States; you can order it from Amazon UK but you're looking at 2.25 pounds Sterling for the mag, then another 7 pounds sterling for shipping, so you're talking almost $14 US for a magazine. Note that Shopper UK is not the same as Computer Shopper in the US, so don't go looking for me there (I doubt those guys have ever heard of me). The article is mentioned on their Web site but the content isn't posted, as far as I can see. Sorry.

Short shrift today as I finish up the second article in the series. Funny how the Internet compresses production times. My first published article was written in March, then appeared in November. Today, articles go to press days (or even hours) after I finish them. Hopefully I'll earn some points there in the UK by slipping in a Joy Division reference.

I've just shipped it off to Jeremy Spencer, my editor over there. I find I really like working with him; he seems to have a very laissez-faire approach to editing and I have a particular hatred of overediting, so we seem to make a good team. I'm sad to see this series end with a third piece, to be published in the March issue.

And the question everyone is asking... Jeremy asked if we were ever going to get around to picking a president and offered to send me a copy of the Revocation of Independence. I told him I'd seen it, and that we elected George W. Bush, but Al Gore is showing he's not made of the same stuff that Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were. They lost close elections, and rather than contesting them again and again and selectively recounting ballots until they got results they liked, they went home for the sake of the country. Rule by their opponent, they believed, was better than chaos. (So we got Jack Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. Carter was--is--a good man but a poor president. Kennedy was a beast of a man and only slightly better president. Bush can definitely do less damage than those two.)

Al Gore doesn't care about the good of the country. He wants to tell his grandkids about the days when he was president. Many Americans consider Richard Nixon to be evil incarnate, but frankly, Gore is making Nixon look like Thomas Jefferson.

We've now seen Gore at his worst (I hope), and to me, that's plenty indication enough that he has no business in the White House.

The joy of teaching. Remember that Pentium-75 that was limping along under Windows NT's heavy yoke? She didn't complain to me about it (probably because she knew I did a lot to try to make it usable), but she did complain to some other people. One of the other IT guys did some lobbying. And when I said that a Mac would be an improvement over that thing, it got some people's attention. (I'm not exactly known as a Mac zealot at work. Some call me exactly the opposite.) So she got another machine.