Leia, the black dog, and I are camped out here at the moment mentally preparing ourselves for the annual trip to the veterinarian for shots. Everyone loves Leia as she is one sweet hound. Leia does not love the car however as she is the carsick queen. So we each have some excitement to look forward to.
In mildly more nerdy matters, the Tales from the Mousepad column that appears here created a bit of a stir around town. (It appeared in the local newspaper first.) Methinks that someone is making a lot of money off this ONE dial-up number. Sure it's easy to pick on Earthlink, but I'm not sure the terrible access is completely their fault. It seems fishy. Oh and thanks to a reader I found another ISP using the number...so we're up to 10. Sheesh.
Business-wise, I've been reading a lot of the post-mortem press about the demise of the dot-com industry. Just so there's no confusion, even though our business (obviously) involves computing and the Web, I think that the shake out is a good thing. As one who is exposed to a lot of computer press, no one was happier than I to see all that hype go away.
The way I see it, the playing field is now levelling out. Basically, most businesses now know they need a website, just like they need a brochure or business cards. The stupidity and hype (and moronic investing) surrounding the Internet have gone away at last. What a relief!
The industry shake out also means that the firms creating garbage Web sites will die, as they deserve to. Every industry has to go through this type of consolidation once the initial excitement wanes. The same thing happened with desktop publishing in the early 90s. After the initial "gee whiz" of not having to spend thousands on typesetters wore off, the industry moved to a more realistic place. And all those people who created HIDEOUS designs with 7,000 fonts went away too. And so (I predict) it shall be with Web site "designers" who create incomprehensible, slow, typo-laden sites. No one will miss them, least of all me.
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