• Alex is returning to New York.
• Yesterday's post Easter 1997 had a whopping 121 page views. On investigation though, 70+ pvs were from a single bad robot (fetching the page over and over, not even doing a modified-GET). Many of the rest were from GoogleBot, MSNBot, and Yahoo Scoop. Didn't realize I had such a following amongst the bots of the world.
• I am slowing trickling out yet another redesign here, samples are here and here. The redesign makes use of the Yahoo! UI Library for the basic skeleton.
• While I was at the etech conference, I wrote up some ideas I've had about automating authentication for robots and user agents, turns out some of this (not my article, just the general concept) was discussed at last week's SES and the idea of automating authentication for web crawlers was apparently soundly rejected. Oh well.
• The movers are coming tomorrow to take about 1/3rd of the apartment to storage so we can put it on display. This means I need to start planning the Spring road trip so that the sight of two fluffy golden retrievers doesn't terrorize potential buyers.
• I thought The care and feeding of social media’s three classes: Creators, Curators, Consumers was an interesting article. I don't have anything of value to add to it at the moment.
• I am slowly recovering from the bronchitis/sinusitis I've had since returning from San Diego. Of course, I blame San Diego for it and not the bizarro weather we've had in NYC.

The slaughter at Virginia Tech shocked and saddened me, but I wasn't surprised. Somehow as US culture has become more conservative, these incidents have become more regular. I grew up in what was allegedly the most liberal, chaotic, free-wheeling decade, the aftermath of the 1960s, and I can't recall a single incident of a student walking onto a school campus and killing students or teachers. I'm sure there probably were incidents (I'm not sure that the incident that served as inspiration for I don't like Mondays counts as such a shooting).

I'm not a sociologist, it's just an observation: the more we've clamped down and tried to enforce a certain cultural norm amongst kids, the more they rebel, and the more violent the acts. The answer isn't more strictures, more laws, more control. I don't know what the answer is, but what we've been doing for the past ten, twenty years is only making the culture sicker, not healthier.

I was going to add a link here to Tori Amos' cover of I don't like Mondays at the iTunes store, but the process to sign up to be an affiliate is a nightmare (Linkshare does not account for the case where the business name is different from the legal tax name in their signup process. Their loss, not mine). And it was probably tacky to add such a link here anyway.