I wonder if all bloggers have a hard time with their first entry. I wanted to start with something interesting, but of course when I sat down at the keyboard, every vestige of intelligence fled, and I simply sat here staring dumbly at a blank screen.

This blog is an experiment. I was encouraged to try it by someone named Moira, who lives diametrically opposite me on the continental United States, and whom I've never met.

I learned of Moira's existence by reading my Web server's logs. I do this frequently, partly to help me find bad links and learn what areas of my site get the most traffic, under the delusion that I will someday beef up the content of the more popular areas. But I also read my server logs because I enjoy seeing what's on the sites that link to my pages.

Thus, when I discovered that someone was linking to my Latin Mottoes pages, I followed the referrer logs back to her blog, where I discovered that, like me, she had been a Cloudmaker, trying to figure out who murdered Evan Chan. (No, nobody really died; it was ostensibly a Web promotion for the movie A.I., but it turned out to be so much more. And it had very little to do with the movie.)

Anyway, Moira convinced me to try my own blog. I taught myself PHP last week, and felt that this would be good practice, so I hacked together some skeleton blog code; right now, it just handles posting and reading, but those are the two essential functions. The truly maddening part is trying to ensure that everything works properly under all of the major browsers. Especially Netscape 4.76, which utterly sucks at adhering to the CSS standard.

So that is the why and how of this Weblog. Probably not a very exciting first post, but I suppose it's better than a blank screen.

At least, I hope it is.

Verbum emissum non est revocabile.
(At least until I get the remove/edit functions written.)

Fewer than six hours remain until I go see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back with my friends. One of them has said that she won't sit near her husband and me if we decide to do something geeky.

I really wish the network had chosen to show more than two episodes of "Clerks: The Animated Series". Some of the ones they didn't show were just hilarious. Movie parodies, "cameos" by characters from "Freaks", Jay and Silent Bob, Charles Barkley... what wasn't to like?

Snoochie boochies.

Wil Wheaton is a hell of a lot cooler than some people give him credit for being.

This was originally part of a longer entry, but after reading Wil's site (including his blog and archives), everything else I wrote struck me as boring and pedestrian, so I deleted it.

My brother is a cop.

I'm proud of him. And I envy him; he makes a difference in this world, whereas I take up space in an office, writing boring time-management-and-billing software that will be used nowhere except in this office. I have never been so proud of him as the day our mother sent me a newspaper clipping which showed him in action, putting his life on the line for the sake of the people in his community.

In a way, it's kind of ironic that he became a cop; for a while, he was a longhaired, hippy Deadhead -- not quite the sort of person you usually expect to become a police officer! Then there was the time he and his friends decided to trespass onto an abandoned missile base and climb down one of the silos in the middle of winter; when they decided to come back up, their fingers were so cold they couldn't climb back up the rope. It was only through sheer fortune that my brother had recently injured his shoulder, so he stayed up at the top while the others climbed down. He went and got help, and they were promptly arrested (which is still better than starving or freezing to death at the bottom of a missile silo).

But he eventually became a police officer, and I'm really proud of him. But I've never been able to tell him that, and I don't know why.

Once upon a time, when we were kids, we were really close. Sure, we had the usual sort of sibling rivalries -- I tried to put his head through a wall, he tried to put my face in a puddle of urine behind the tent at Boy Scout camp; that kind of thing -- and we often got into escalating wars of ratting on each other to our parents. But though we never discussed it, the important things remained off-limits to snitching.

For example, he never told my mother that I would frequently circumvent the worst punishment she could levy against me -- taking the cord of my Apple ][ computer to work with her so that I couldn't use it after school -- by fashioning a (hideously unsafe) replacement from a discarded extension cord. And I never told her about...

Actually, there wasn't anything really important I could have ratted him out on. My brother was the good one; he did his chores and his homework, never talked back, didn't take expensive devices apart just to see how they worked, didn't require endless parent/teacher conferences. (In school, I once heard one of the teachers refer to me as "David Lee's brother" -- and I'm the elder sibling! How's that for humiliating?)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. When we were younger, despite the rivalries, we were very close. When push came to shove, we knew we could count on each other for anything. But we grew apart as we got older; while my friends and I would geek out with computers and AD&D, he and his friends rebuilt cars and played sports. And now, when we talk on the phone, it's clear that we're both grasping to try and find something in common to talk about. We have each other's email addresses -- yet I can't remember the last time we exchanged email.

If only I could tell my brother how much I admire him.

"Singer Aaliyah and eight others died in a plane crash in the Bahamas..."

Newspapers and news programs have repeated that statement since the crash occurred on Saturday. Occasionally, there's a variation on the theme: "Aaliyah, one of nine victims in a plane crash..."

As a friend of mine observed when this phrase came over the radio for what seemed like the fifteenth time in a single hour, it really sucks to die in the vicinity of a famous person.

I just finished reading a newspaper article which quoted and named Alan Yurman, of the National Transportation Safety Board; John Frank, executive director of the Cessna Pilots Association; Lewis Key, a Bahamian pilot who has flown the same model of Cessna that crashed; and Claude Sawyer, a witness to the crash. And, of course, it named Aaliyah no fewer than four times.

But the "eight others" remain anonymous corpses, mere extras in the movie of life who don't deserve a screen credit. I've never heard their names, nor seen them printed. They are unpersons as far as the media is concerned, because A Celebrity Has Died.

Hooray, I can now edit and delete entries. I no longer have to live in fear of making a spelling mistake and being unable to correct it.

Now if only my Webhosting service would get on the ball. Two days ago, this was a fast Web site; now it sometimes takes up to 20 seconds for the server to start transmitting data once a connection is established.

Gee, this is a fascinating entry, isn't it? I'll liven it up with a joke from the 1500s:

A man that was right jealous on his wife, dreamed
on a night as he lay abed with her & slept,
that the Devil appeared unto him and said: Wouldst
thou not be glad, that I should put thee in surety
of thy wife? Yes, said he. Hold, said the Devil,
as long as thou hast this ring upon thy finger,
no man shall make thee cuckold. The man was
glad thereof, and when he awaked, he found
his finger in his wife's arse.

Breakthrough Experiment Wires Living Nerve Tissue To Silicon Chips

Damn, that's exciting. The article describes potential applications such as enabling the blind to see, or permitting paralytics to "move objects with their thoughts".

There is, of course, a more earthshaking possibility, which is that of hooking our brains directly into a computer network.

Sure, it's many decades off; even after this neuron-bonding technology is perfected, and they find a way to wire an entire brain, they'll still have to find a strategy to cope with the fact that every brain is structured differently. It won't be quite as simple as hooking up a biomech interface to an optic nerve. It will require heavy training of both the user and the implants themselves (after all, the cluster of neurons that hold the concept "sphere" will be in a different place in each brain), but think of what could be done!

Email without keyboards. Save a "photo" of what you're seeing through your own eyes. Call up a "heads-up display" listing information about the person you're talking to, so you can avoid a faux pas like calling his wife by the wrong name. Throw away the cellphone and hold your conversations silently -- hell, have business meetings in cyberspace; if you can project any virtual image you want, they don't need to know you're sitting at home in your underwear. Play computer games indistinguishable from reality. Download foreign languages or skill sets and start using them right away, à la The Matrix.

Of course, it would probably just end up being used for porn.