And we arrive once again at the winter solstice and the shortest day of the year. Don't know precisely if it's today or tomorrow, but I won't be writing tomorrow. My education is finished. Christmas break begins. What I don't know about music retail at this point will have to be learned the hard way. That's OK. I know a lot now, considering it's been a little over a month since this process started. Wanna' buy a flute? Open or closed? B or C? That's OK, I can tell you the difference and make recommendations.

I'm tired of hearing the partisan sniping over the economic recovery package. Actually, I'm just plain tired. Brain is fading... must.... sleep....

Haven't yet checked out the gruesome details, but it seems that Windows XP is the easiest OS to plant a virus in yet. If you've got XP and connect to the internet - even briefly; you're toast. There are three solutions. 1) look at McSoft's website daily and download the latest patches (also daily). 2) Open source the operating system (yeah right...) so the holes can be found and plugged quickly instead of over several years; or 3) toss the damn thing in the trash. You'd almost think that McSoft was intentionally making it so easy to hack their software. That can't be true... can it?

After ranting recently about Ma Bell stealing the cable internet business from @Home, they pulled a slick one by selling the whole cable empire to Comcast. CEO Michael Armstrong is going to leave Ma Bell to lead the venture. Quite a strategic move. So I take my words back. Ma Bell is no longer the daemon I proclaimed just weeks ago. In fact there's nothing left of Ma Bell now but an overpriced long distance company. The queen is dead! Long live the queen (now Comcast, with Armstrong in charge)! It's all about managing huge amounts of debt - the same reason Ma Bell always raised prices when everybody else was slashing them (interest payments). The asset sale leaves Ma Bell with less debt to fight the phone wars. @Home's demise leaves their debt in the courts, while handing the continuing revenue to their major shareholder (Ma Bell and now Comcast). Very shrewd and calculated. Watch closely... OK, now under what shell is the debt hiding? Nope, not under that one. Nope, not that one either. Where did it go?

I find it slightly amusing that over twenty years or so in roughly the same location, served by the same cable infrastructure - we'll now be writing checks out to yet another name - about the tenth entity that has gained control of those wires.