Last week I was on New Hampshire Public Radio's (NPR) "The Exchange", talking about Searching the Internet. Link is the full show, and requires either Real Audio or Windows Media Player.

That makes two appearances in two years. Hope they ask me back for more soon. I enjoy public-speaking quite a lot, and especially the improvisational aspect of it.

I admit it. I'm addicted to the Food Channel. ("Hello, my name is Nancy. I'm a Food Channel Addict." | "Hello, Nancy!") I'm particularly interested lately in 30-Minute Meals with Rachel Ray, mostly because with my schedule of book production, 30 minutes is the most anybody's going to get out of me for food preparation. If that.

Trixie (aka PandaBear) sent me these recipes today from the Food Network's website. Start with the quick chicken and noodle soup, then be sure to click on the links to the right, which include a decadent-looking mixed grill (these ain't your momma's grilled cheese sandwiches) and chocolate cafe au lait.

I think I'm going to go make the soup for tonight. My tooth still hurts from the mega-filling I had done late last week (including "cementing" a cracked tooth together).

Salon.com Technology | "0wnz0red" -- Cory Doctorow's new short story at Salon. Damned good. Cory wields a mean pen.

But now the pipes are running. Hurrah!

This represents my first attempt to write to a blog. Who knows--I may do it again sometime. But for now I have a book to edit, and it's a good one.

For the last two days, between the mid-afternoon (2-3pm ET) and about 5pm ET, I can't access anything on the Net other than local nodes in New England. When running a traceroute to, say, Texas or California, I find that the routing goes from NH to MA and thence to NY, where it completely times out on Sprintnet New York City. Maybe there's a clog in the pipe? But day after day ... ? Coincidence?

We are so very vulnerable. So few major pipes going through metropolitan areas that if just one, such as that Sprintnet pipe in NYC, goes out, the entire Northeast is frozen. We are so very, very vulnerable.

It's been almost a year since I used Blogger to post to this blog. Time for a redesign and face-lift.

I've been spending the last year journaling and blogging at LiveJournal. And though I appreciate it for its inherent community, by the very virtue of how it's designed and how it has developed, there's something personal about a blog that I've missed.

Not that I have known anyone has been reading this. I'm going to try adding a comment feature using a now-defunct .asp program that can ride on top of Blogger pages. Let's see if it works (or if I can even figure out how to run it).

New photo in this design is our new kitten: a Bengal named Dawn. She's a wild one.