Hey, my DSL is back up!  Thank you Verizon, only 24-hour turnaround (and I don't mean that sarcastically; that really is pretty good).  Fortunately my extreme dial-up band-aid kept me on the air in the meantime, although it did remind me how crappy it is to surf the web at 56K.

A thing I knew but worth noting; one of the cool things about the whole RSS mechanism is how efficient it is.  While on dial back-up I really appreciated the asynchronous nature of RSS retrieval.  And it doubly reinforced how much better it is to get “entire content” in RSS feeds as opposed to simply teaser text.

I also cursed spammers for choking my precious bandwidth with their offal.  Thanks to MailFrontier it doesn't end up in my inbox, but it does take time to retrieve, of course.

And finally, dynamic DNS rocks.  I use zoneedit, and I'm very happy with them.  The whole cut-over-to-dialup and cut-back-to-DSL thing "just worked", without me having to do anything to make it work.

P.S. I've restored the full-graphics template for pages.  What did you think of the skinny look?  If you have an opinion, please email me...  You can click here for the without-graphics template.