In The U.S. Needs to

In The U.S. Needs to Open Up to the World, musician Brian Eno writes: Europeans have always looked at America with a mixture of fascination and puzzlement, and now, increasingly, disbelief. How is it that a country that prides itself on its economic success could have so many very poor people? How is it that a country so insistent on the rule of law should seek to exempt itself from international agreements? And how is it that the world's beacon of democracy can have elections dominated by wealthy special interest groups? For me, the question has become: "How can a country that has produced so much cultural and economic wealth act so dumb?"

I got a new toy

I got a new toy today...ok, it's not really a toy, it's meant to be my business phone at home. It's a Cisco ATA for use with the Vonage phone-over-broadband service. For US$39.99 per month I get unlimited local usage and 1500 minutes of US/CA long distance. There's a bunch of other added features as well like voicemail. What I like about the service is this: it's not tied to our physical line. Should I luck out and set up an office somewhere, or work remotely for a week, I can plug it into any 10Mbs ethernet jack and receive phone service. The only downside is that this really pushes the need for solving our phone problems at the house since the Siemens handsets are dying.

I'm in the process of

I'm in the process of consolidating my sites into one hosting service so this is forewarning that things may break over the coming week or more. For future reference...my weblog/journal/whatever this site is can always be reached by using http://my-weblog.com/epc. My business (Artific Consulting) site is http://artific.com. I expect that home.earthlink.net/~epcostello and gothic-egg.com will be gone after this (Frisket's web site, http://frisket.org will finally get its own space).