Harry Slaughter's blog

Why bother blogging?

What's the point? Who cares? If someone happens across your site by some mis-quided search engine, why would you try to scare him off with details about what you saw on TV or how your page is still under construction or how your feuding with some other blogger who stole the name of your blog and why your's is the original?

I've kept a journal since I was 15. I have pages of old homework with ideas scribbled on the backs. I have those flashy multi colored Mead notebooks from the late 80s filled with scribble. I've got napkins from bars in Mexico stained with ink that was ideas I thought were brilliant (when I was drunk in Mexico). I've got a dozen diskettes from one of those Panasonic word processors before PCs became common (finally got my data off there one day when I realized they were simply in DOS-like format). I've got Mac, DOS and UFS disks filled with many hours of writing. In one 3 year period, I wrote as many words as are in Moby Dick (though mine weren't quite as coherent and aren't really considered "classic").

But I never considered subjecting anyone to any of this. Until the Web.

Now I'm in this awkward position of having a blog but not really wanting to post anything to it because I don't know who'll be reading it. You don't really see any honesty in many of these blogs. The best blogs out there are usually humorous but not serious. If a blog is serious, then it's likely not very good.

But I find a lot of this stuff, even some of the bad stuff, very interesting and often entertaining. Check out weblogs.com. It is a list of recently updated blogs and the place I go when I feel like reading blogs. Why I feel compelled to read only the freshest blog entries I do not know.

A good blog should also have links to interesting stories, so check out this breakthrough in quantum computing.

Hey I moved

I've been down in San Diego about two months now. Came down here to take a 4 month contract job with the navy. I'm working on a tool that will help ship system admins keep their network's hosts up to date. And since I've rented out my house. I'm hoping that they'll offer me more work when my contract is expired.

Hey, neighboor!

My favorite site

I use Google dozens of times a day. While it certainly hasn't indexed the entire web, I can almost always find the page I need here. This is probably the single most useful site on the Internet today. Google groups is my top resource for debugging software and gaining from the experience of folks who've already done whatever I'm currently trying to do. There's Google Answers if you're so desparate for info that you're willing to pay for it. And the Google toolbar, Windows IE only :(, is a simple and powerful tool for gleaning factoids.

Mozilla 1.0

I was a big fan of Netscape in the early days of the browser wars.
But even I have to admit that MS (the evil bastards) eventually
created a product far superior to the buggy Netscape (pretty
much any version prior to 6.*).

But finally, Mozilla has taken the code that hatched Netscape many, many
net-years ago and released what seems to be a very stable and
fast Mozilla 1.0.

It's got some great features (like the ability to prevent pop-up ads
and browser window resizing), and after having used it for about
a week, I haven't seen it crash once. Also, it's faster than any
Linux browser I've used and at least as fast as MSIE.

Go to their site and check it out:

mozilla.org

Or just go here
go here
and download it.

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