You can now also buy davidchess.com merchandise if for some inexplicable reason you should want to. Isn't that amazingly silly? More importantly, you can go to cafepress.com and start up your own store with about five minutes work. Obvious in retrospect, but still somehow mind-blowing...

Added two things to WORDS: a collection of my postings to alt.hackers, and the Thrilling Tale of my first experience on eBay (with notes on bidding strategies). Both of interest primarily to me, and of course to scholars working on their biographies of me.

Added the suffix "Now" to WordURL ("HilarityNow.com").

I've also been adding random small things, new sayings on the splash page, and of course new log entries, but I don't always mention stuff like that.

Oh, and AOL seems to have fixed the "users.aol.com" hostname again, even though the reply I got back from their Webmaster when I complained was utterly clueless.

Yet another new WebLib ("Number Six"); the source of inspiration will be obvious once you read it.

A whole new toy is coming along; it can be previewed for the time being here and here; it should be on the toys page officially pretty soon. Knock wood!

New Top Story on the portal on Theogeny; we'll see how funny it is in a couple of months! Also a new hacked-together image for Theogeny's splash-page collection.

Random interesting things still show up in the Referer log for WordURL; another Japanese site, and various bookmark lists, both personal and public. It's endemic! *8)

Added a new story to Words: They.

Besides adding the pages and links for the log, added "this page last updated" tags to the bottoms of many pages, added a UUA link to the links page, and otherwise twiddled about here and there. Oh, and if you were having trouble getting to davidchess.com or theogeny.com or chessfamily.com over the last couple of days, there was apparently some problem with something upstream of onepine; but all seems normal now.

This fecundity (superfluity?) even has its own jargon: a "burb" is apparently a list of some (tiny) subset of the existing/known diaries/jounals, gathered together by some common theme or property. It's easy to find burbs listing diarists in a particular region, of a certain age-group, diarists who love cats, diarists who are obsessed with certain body-parts. Isn't nature wonderful!

What would my paragraph for today say, to avoid the eagles? That I have fingers, that I have ears, that my heart longs for vast stretches of quiet and small waves on still water? That this page feels sort of cramped? All those big fat buttons...

Some more splash pages on Theogeny, just because I can't resist. Up to eleven now, I think!

I was inspired by this to do a new set of splash screens for Theogeny; just for page-design practice really. Thanks to Media Graphics 10,000 Graphics Pack for the photos. Whaddya think? Interesting? I may or may not keep it.

So I straightened up and added yet some more new stuff on the portal, to prepare for this possible flood of visitors. Not sure how much I like the new lead story; it may need some work. Also enhanced WordURL.cgi to offer check-links to both NSI and the (NSI-maintained) multi-registrar whois service, just for completeness.

I really want to find the requisite couple of free hours to do some more exploring of the Forked Stick, but somehow they never come. It's not actually the writing that requires all that time; it's the Getting in the Mood...

WordURL sighting for today: Justin Fletcher, a feller I know from the Slige world, is apparently working hard to keep his liver away from the eagles, and he's put a link to the script in his diary for 6 Oct 1999. I saw it in the referer log, so now you can go read his diary, and he can see this page in his referer log. Just to keep the cycles going! (Today's WordURL suggestion: www.ImpenetrableSteamboat.com.)

Autumn is coming in. I love autumn. Margaret accuses me of saying I love whatever season it is, in every season, but I really do love autumn. The coolness, the thought of making pies, lighting fires, a dozen things that I'll actually do and a hundred things that I've never done and may not ever do, false nostalgia for some ideal Autumn Country of good smells and only the softest change. Have an apple.

A few more pages in the Forked Stick, including some rooms upstairs at the Cup and Hen.

WordURL sightings for today: a message-board on NetPond (gathering place of domain-name collectors), folks looking through the referer logs on Anatole.com and Lingerie.com, and an odd line in my Referer log citing http://www.geeknews.com/ (a pro-Microsoft geek-news site), although I can't find any pointer to this site on that site today. Interesting factoid: In the period when I've been keeping track (i.e. after the initial SlashDotting had calmed down), hits on WordURL from Yahoo-related links now outnumber those from Slashdot-related links, even if you don't count the individual who did a Yahoo search on "random url", and liked my script so much that he hit it 841 times. (Ouch!)

Worked a bit on the algorithmic composer over the weekend, and it now knows a little about dissonance (see link below, but please don't hit it more than once every couple of minutes!).

It has just, by the way, struck me how utterly appropriate it was that my little cgi toy was named "Grouse! Site of the Day" on Wednesday, my birthday. Thanks, Universe!

More random updates to the portal at Theogeny, just 'cause it's easy; now I see why "joke news" sites are so common...

Put up an initial (very bad) draft of an algorithmic composer, but am reluctant to mention it on the Toys page, or anywhere else! Nobody reading this tell SlashDot about it this month, OK?

Also a new "Tech Beat" story and a pointer to urgent.com on the portal at Theogeny, just for fun.

I'll have to analyze the rest of the data and see how much (if any) all this has increased traffic to the rest of the site. Man, it would be easy to fall into the trap of actually caring about this stuff!

I will try to think of something more profound to say later; in any case here is the Article of Doom itself, including a bunch of comments at about the "usual SlashDot comment" level of quality...

Hurricane Floyd gave us lots of wind and rain and a little water in the basement, but we were very lucky. I stayed home yesterday because one of the cars was in the shop and we thought the kids might have to be fetched from school early, and not only did I get more work done than I would have in the office, and avoid driving through the floods, I also finished up Web Libs. And how it's an utterly gorgeous clear cool day, smelling of autumn. My favorite!

I think everyone in the world should be forced to write a paragraph a day of thoughts, events, rants, or whatever, and to put it up on the Web for everyone to read. Of course that would imply universal literacy and computer access, but that's OK! Anyone who refused to post their daily paragraph could like have their livers eaten by eagles or something.

Added a pointer to the Dworkin-device typewriter to the Toys page. DavidChess.com is pretty much all up and running. I still want to do the Portal and the Forum page before bringing Theogeny live (although it's currently possible to sneak into the Vortex via the Dworkin Device). Also added a pointer to Dad's new page to Links.

This morning when Maymay and I went down to the dock to test the water, there was an enormous school of tiny fish (sardine fish), occupying our miniature cove at the side of the bay, between our dock and the rocks that appear, seaweed covered, at low tide. I've never seen so many fish; there were certainly a hundred thousand, and I would believe a million. From a distance, it looked like the cove bottom had become covered with sand, or like something strange and cloudy was filling the water. We watched them for a long time, schooling around like a giant single amoeba, a big three-D vector field, sending out scouting parties, shrinking away from noises. Eventually the school split in two, and the smaller half swam south down the shore toward the next dock down, and vanished.

I remarked that it should be possible to write a simulation of a mass of fish, and try to figure out what sorts of rules in each fish would cause all that group behavior. Maymay called my bluff, of course, and now we have School.pm and Fish.pm and FishEnv.pm, and she's drawn some little 20x20 icons of normal fish and brave fish and airplanes and like that, and we have a run.pl that produces a crude GIF of where the randomly-placed fish are. Lots of work remains of course, including Fish::behave(), and something better than GD-produced GIFs for output...

Maybe I'll write up the Buttoner for alt.hackers. Or even CPAN! I get grandiose late at night. The slopping and slapping of the waves on the shore down below the house is immensely soothing. What is it about sitting by an open window, by water, with a cool breeze blowing, that so directly causes the pleasure centers to fire? What is my heredity recommending, here?