I’ve pledged money for both WampumBlog and Paper Bent for Blogathon 2003. Why? I don’t know. There are plenty of worthy blogathoners out there, and if they’re willing to sit there and blog for twenty-four hours straight, they’re welcome to do so. A

Skimble has a neat little summary of the heist of a lifetime. If there is a spot o’ truth to this “river of light” story, it needs to be investigated and revealed post haste.

Calpundit’s entry about medical malpractice—and how people testifying about it can change their stories rather drastically once they’re made accountable for them—is required reading.

John Scalzi has a nice little essay/rant on what being a professional writer means in regard to criticism—to paraphrase using the words of a recent episode of “Monk,” Suck it up. And he’s right. If you think this is hard, you ain’t seen nothing yet. (My professional writer experience consists solely at this point of being a tech writer at Apple, and it was as true there.)

If you want to be loved, have a blog. Oh wait.

(I’ve read Natalia’s followup, and she makes a good point: this is her journal; she was writing about her feelings. Fair enough. But I’ve been in enough writing classes/workshops/seminars to know how the vast majority of people react to criticism, and it’s not with the detachment they’re going to need to whether writing professionally. I know how I deal with getting criticized on my writing, and I have a much stronger sense of self-esteem than most when it comes to my writing. So John’s reaction is not at all from left field.)

A couple of people have now written to ask why my right-hand column (which contains my list o’links, among other things) doesn’t show up in Mozilla. I don’t know why; it shows up in Safari and IE. The first time I got this question, I thought it was because blogrolling.com was down, but now I suspect it’s a Mozilla problem. Any clues?

I mentioned on my mailing list that one of the reasons I haven’t been updating here is that I’m still using dial-up to get the Web, which is a pain in the tuchis and most of the time I’d rather not bother until we get DSL.

Well.

Ex-cuuuuuuuuuuuuse me.

A number of people wrote me to ask what my problem was, since dial-up is clearly just as good as DSL.

And all I have to say to that is: go get DSL, use it for 6 or 7 years (which is at least as long as Darin and I have had it), and then get back to me about how great dial-up is.

Dial-up is slow. Dial-up leads to pages taking molasses years to load. Dial-up leads me having the time to take Simon upstairs, change his diaper, tickle him a little, take him back downstairs, check in with Sophia, and get back to the computer before some pages have loaded. (Don’t even try to the California DMV site on dial-up. Completely not worth the time.)

Dial-up uses your damn phone line.

With DSL I am on the Internet. With dial-up, I have to wait for the modem to dial-up, connect, and stay connected.

Yes, it’s great to have dial-up available. But a comparable substitute for DSL? No way.

So, like: why didn’t “Live From The Blogosphere” provide a Trackback link so everyone who wrote live entries could list their entries?