My Own Little World by George Ziemann -- February 22, 2009 About a week ago, my site got transferred to a new host, and suddenly I have new features available which were a premium at the old host. Like SQL and PHP. Of course, I have no idea what the new pricing structure is, either, and I suddenly have 150 GB of space available, so I'm thinking I might want to look into what the details are. If I can use PHP, that opens up several opportunities, like forums and other methods of helping us connect better with the people who visit the site all the time. I can do podcasting now, too. There are a list of skills that I bothered to learn because someone in every band needed to know these things and most of the time no one does, leaving you at the mercy of hired hands and outside services. Sometimes I think it would be helpful to have a twin so that we could get this stuff done faster. Of course, one of the twins always turns evil and has to be shot, but as long as it gets a few things done first, it'd be worth the effort. Lacking said twin, I'm still slogging through the tedious part of mixing a pile of songs. There is also a stack of photos to be dealt with and, for some reason I cannot fathom, I need to cut the grass -- in February. Even worse, now Web 2.0 capable, I can clearly see that many of these things that I didn't think I really had time for have generally proven themselves to be things I don't have time for. StumbleUpon is like crack. It was probably through StumbleUpon or reddit that I came across a couple of odd stories recently that I seriously doubt the accuracy of, but are not beyond the realm of possibility. The first one is a video clip that shows some guy opening up one of the new digital converter boxes, only to find a video camera and a microphone. There's no way to know whether the guy making the video put the stuff in there in the first place, then videoed himself "finding" it. I would think that if this were true, people would be screaming about it by now. Also in the classification of rumor is a story wherein all childrens books printed before 1982 (or something like that) were being removed from bookstores and libraries, and can no longer be sold or lended. It has to do with the presence of lead in the covers. I'm sure that many people will be saddened to hear this. Some may see it as an insidious form of censorship. What it makes me think of is what a miracle it was that any of us survived the 60s and 70s. Lead paint, asbestos insulation, lead toys. They used to let us play with mercury in school. Never owned a bicycle helmet. We played football in the street. Come to think of it, though, we didn't all even live through high school.