First of all, thanks to all those who responded so kindly to my verse response to Oriana Fallaci. That encourages me to put some of my other work on the Web site, though I'll say most of my verse is not on political topics. I did also find an article, A is for Arabs, on Salon.com responding to Fallaci by giving an alphabetical list of things for which we can thank the Saracens. I really like that the responses to her hate-mongering are creative rather than just return fire of vitriol.

tromey: thanks for the kind words on the piece, and I do remember you from the Boulder Creek festival. Too bad it takes the diary pages of Advo for us to meet again 8-).

Code: I've been working like a madman to get 4XSLT faster and less buggy, focusing on the Docbook stylesheet. I've had some truly astonishing results. I expect 4Suite users will be happy, and I encourage others to give it a whirl. CVS version, for now, though a release is planned for Friday. I also added updated 4Suite's version of expat to 1.95.2, which means PyXML will no longer be needed just for DTD validation.

My Dell 8100 laptop has become very flaky, and Dell's tech support has quite pissed me off. I know not to tell tech support folks I run Linux, but I can believe even the most oblique mentioning of this is enough to turn off the acknowledment of vendor error. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I'm turning the laptop into an idiot savant terminal, with all my work moving to my big deasktop, on which I was dabbling with Debian. So I guess I've been converted to Debian by the rude push of fate. Red Hat has been my main OS for 6 years. Sorry tromey :-(

Life: Just to show how fatherhood changes you, I just went to see a live showing of Blues Clues with Osita, my 2 year old. I actually enjoyed it (mostly because he was enjoying it). Scary. I can't even stomach pop opera like Cats and Phantom, yet there I go watching dancing cats and bars of soap.