Much has happened in the intervening time. It's not that I didn't have thought during this time, just that many of them were bleak. But the bleakness is lifting and good thoughts are flowing and the bad thoughts don't seem too bleak to mention and mentioning them doesn't raise the bleakness level.

Bleakness first. You are not reading this note right now because my web page isn't online. I'm assuming that you are reading this several weeks later at the very least.

The reason is that my ISP merged with another ISP. And the new people suck. They've forgotten (or never knew) what the 'S' in ISP means. Everything that I want to do (and did at my last ISP) makes me, in their eyes, a 'business' level customer who should be paying 10 times what my last ISP charged. $300 per month because I want to receive my own email as opposed to using their address?

I'm leaving them just as quickly as I can. (And you won't be reading this until I get the change made.)

The good news is that I get to go back to the mostly unrestricted life of using the University as my ISP. They hook you up and get out of the way. Oh, they have acceptable use policies, but they don't impose blanket restrictions to enforce those policies. They seem to understand that there are acceptable uses for running personal servers on an Internet connection. Like receiving email directly, or running a simple Web server to provide personal thoughts, family pix, yada, yada.

And how does this miracle of geniality on the part of the University come about? They don't let just anyone sign up, you know.

It comes about because I got a job.

2 years and 10 months. Who could have predicted the tech bubble would pop? Or that the crater left in the bubbling mud of industry would be quite so deep?

Oh, yeah. I also wrote a program based on gquiz to do flash cards on Linux. I call it gquizleit, because it is obviously inspired by gquiz, even though it shares no code from the original, just the idea. And it is totally Leitner based flash cards. And, like gquiz, it uses external programs to present both tests and reviews. And I thought it was mildly amusing to call it a "lite" version when it actually does more than the original.

Gquizleit is slightly more than marginally interesting and has more than served the original purpose for which I created it. I'm debating whether to clean up the code, add a GUI interface and release it to the unsuspecting world. (After talking to the author of gquiz to see if s/he'd object to a similar named project.)