NEW THINGS

I've been out in the wild wooly web discovering new things. First, my friend Paul invites me to this crazy web contraption called Orkut. You can't join Orkut without an invitation. It's sort of a friend database, kind of a message board concentrator. But I've yet to see the insane breadth of topics covered in the Orkut communities. Makes me feel like the old days, when I logged onto AOL in 1994 and discovered CHAT ROOMS. But since it's not real-time, Orkut doesn't feel as dangerous. Anyway, email me if you want an invitation.

The next things is that through Orkut I got in touch with an old college friend named Nils. He has a slick MT blog that deals with personal stuff, some Christian topics, and a lot of cultural commentary. He is an extremely accomplished musician. Check it now. Nils, we need to somehow get together. Call me before you come to Austin next! That MP3 of you playing on Ash Wednesday, I plan to make the soundtrack to my new web site's splash page. Someday.

Finally, through Blogger I finally got into the Google GMail thing. Incredible storage limits and a strange new interface that tries to help organize your stored messages automagically. I've not yet decided whether it's wise to make that new address my main one. Lots of privacy concerns have been raised, and come to think of it I did get burned once by storing my credit card number on a couple of big-time and supposedly secure e-commerce sites. Perhaps Google has created a false sense of trust by working so hard to serve the Internet, and finding ways to get rich relatively unobtrusively. But man, to be able to Google my entire pile of old email. How much is that worth to you? I would pay cash money, friend, and yet Google is giving it away.

Finally I discovered that if you do a Google search for "lamech" that my blog pops up in the first 12 results. So all those folks looking for Lamech sites should be crashing down my door any day now. Sweet. Oh and guess what site is on top when you run this search?