tags visible, I'm hoping my crude HTML tagging will work here. Last time I assumed I'd got a "regular text area" and ended up with my entry run together as a single paragraph. Neither easy to read at that length, nor terribly professional-looking.

On the bright side, it seems 58 people came to look at that entry even though I told nobody I had written it. I just hope they will come back again when I have something more interesting to say. Today I've got a head-cold and other work to do... darn it.

 It may well be absurd for me to start a blog here ... but I'm doing it anyway. Not because I expect the world at large to find this site by accident (as I did tonight) or to care very much what I think about anything. In fact, if I continue this as I've begun, mainly because it's late and I'm too tired for any meaningful work, I expect it to remain in the obscurity it will have deserved. I have nothing earth-shattering to say, and few enough people would listen even if I did. Not because I think this little Mac community includes many people who care that a dinosaur like myself is still clinging to her Classic Macs instead of leaping into Leopard. I've been a Mac-addict long enough to appreciate the great technical advances. To somebody who was thrilled to discover the original versions of MacPaint and MacDraw, iMovie and the rest of the entertainment in "iLife" seems almost magical ... but the truth is, when I want entertainment, I want it *away* from the keyboard where I spend most of the hours of most of my days. My Powerbook (G3 original) is for work rather than diversion. The fewer bells and whistles divert me from clumsy phrasing, wrong headers, mis-added tables and the like, the better. I don't even want the computer downloading and playing things I'd need to attend to later. Though I still experiment often with other programs, updates, plug-ins, add-ons, utilities and whatnot (as almost all Mac users do), they're intended as tools rather than toys. If they don't enable me to do something better or faster than the tools I already have, they're gone; if they do, they languish in a "New downloads" folder waiting until I need them ... or the drive space they occupy. If the software I chose for its usefulness and reliability (e.g., my good old Eudora 3.1.3 -- no ads, no chili peppers, no nonsense) a decade ago is still working well and lets me do what I need to without giving me grief or trying to amuse me when my mind should be otherwise occupied, then the only time I'll consider an upgrade is when there's a pressing reason for it -- a reason other than a software manufacturer's natural desire to get more money from me. I skipped pretty much directly from System 7.5.3 to 9.2, and never regretted that I hadn't wasted much time wrestling with OS 8. The same goes for hardware: if it doesn't solve an existing problem or bring me new capabilities I actually need for some reason, I'll stick with the tried-and-true equipment. In fact, I've always preferred being a couple of generations behind. If I were a) rich, and b) just playing around instead of working, things like the inevitable setup glitches and learning curves and bugfix versions wouldn't bother me. But money is tight and life is short, so I'll leave the post-beta beta-testing (gamma testing?) to the "early adopters" who enjoy such things or feel the "coolness factor" outweighs the disadvantages. I'm not alone in this, by the way: a good many of my fellow-word-workers have favourite apps which bear little resemblance to what you'll find installed on a shiny new Mac. There is a whole Yahoo group devoted to Wordperfect 3.5, most of whom are running it under SheepShaver on Macs so new they don't permit the installation of a Classic partition. They're not just old fogeys or too cheap to buy Office: they simply like a pretty much non-crashing wordprocessor that allows certain efficiencies Microsoft won't permit. The contingent of Mac-based technical writers who can't switch to OS X without losing FrameMaker's special virtues for their type of work is substantial, too. Most of us swear by certain shareware and freeware programs that work as well as, or even better than, the nationally advertised brands. Some of us are steadily shifting ourselves towards open source software, which has come a long way this past decade and seriously threatens the would-be monopolists. After all that, you would think I'd find the notion of blogging unappealing for at least another five or six years. In fact, I've been looking at various blog hosts for a good year --but mostly from the usability perspective rather than a desire for immortality on the 'Net. Having found this site by accident, I was pleasantly surprised by its devotion to Macs but even more by its accessibility. I know how very few people will have waded through all this verbiage -- "What? a whole page of text and no links?" -- but I'd like to think some day a person using a screen-reader will land here and be glad that no fancy layout or Flash animations for "coolness" made this page impossible to read. To me, the real virtue of blogs (or those which have any at all) is that they allow direct, fairly informal communication to the reader. The content of a post needn't be profound or its presentation glitzy. The reader will decide whether the writer is worth reading, usually within the first paragraph and for his or her own reasons. The process costs nothing and requires no special hardware or software. And the diversion is harmless enough ... as long as writer and reader meet blog outside of working hours.