Specialization is for Insects

I recently had an interesting discussion with my brother Andy about email and spam. I think there would definitely be a market for a spam free replacement for email. Andy indicated that he thinks we are stuck with the current email system and that the answer is spam filtering.

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If you’ve visited this blog recently, you’ve probably noticed a lot of changes as I play around with WordPress. I used this excellent tutorial to create a custom theme for this blog. Liz says it’s kind of “plain jane”. I like it though; black & white, easy to read. I haven’t tested it on Internet Explorer yet. I hope it looks okay.

(Update 3/31/07 22:35 – I made some adjustments and it seems to look okay on all four browsers I have access to.)

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Hi! I’ve decided to start a blog again. (Yay peer pressure!)

This is my first attempt at using WordPress, so please bear with me as I learn a new toy.

I guess this first post might be important. I should talk about what I hope to achieve. (Ooo, how lofty and pretentious!).

Actually, it’s pretty simple. I want to write about stuff that entertains me, and I hope that what I write will be interesting to at least 10 people in the world.

Several years ago I had two blogs, one for my sundry political opinions, and one for fire calls I went on as a paid-on-call firefighter.

When I wrote about politics I would spend a lot of time and effort crafting arguments and posting them. Readers would either

1. misunderstand what I was trying to say and get mad at me
2. understand what I was trying to say and get mad at me, or
3. be bored and not read it.

In short, it was a lot of effort, and tended to make other people mad. Seems like reading my own poetry would be more polite.

My firefighter call log had a few fans, but it got kind of boring for me. How many times can I say “went on 2 ambulance calls”? How interesting can that be to read? The truth is I can’t be too detailed about ems calls or I run the risk of inadvertently identifying my patients. That sort of thing is frowned upon in the ems community.

I may occasionally write about political issues. I may occasionally write about interesting calls. But mostly I’ll try to answer the question “What’s Up?”