So, would you agree to meet in person somebody you met on the internet? In a graveyard at midnight? After recently (and hopefully finally) getting rid of the last psycho girl?

I did and actually had a wonderful time. Perhaps the most interesting blind date I've been on. It beats dinner at (your favorite restaurant here) hands down for a place to just sit and talk without being bothered (well, if you can put up with the occasional ghost and the howling hounds running through).

Knowing about all the beauraucratic layers in AOL which are designed to prevent (as much as possible) minor glitches from knocking out the entire service, I'm sympathetic to the guys at the Dow this morning who installed a software upgrade and knocked out the center of capitalism for a couple of hours. The only question is if they fixed the bug or rolled it back to the prior release. I bet they rolled it.

It's interesting to watch how all these different competing players interface with Microsoft. Having installed a bunch of stuff the last few days, here's my summary....

• Microsoft - It's our operating system and we'll steal whatever we want and put it on the main screen and refuse to delete it and fuck you. We are god. Deal with it.
• Netscape - It's your operating system but we'd really really like it if you let us do your web browsing and don't steal all our cool shit, pretty please with sugar on top.
• AOL - It's your operating system but we'll pay you money and do whatever you ask of us to get on the main screen and do web browsing. By the way, we've got 30 million paying customers.
• Sun - It's our fucking network protocols and we were here in the TCP/IP world before you and we're the freaking dot and we don't give a shit about your pathetic loser operating system. Doesn't matter that everybody seems to like it, we don't and so we'll continue to be a thorn in your butt. In the meantime we'll write software which works under Windows, but we're going to overlay and do all we can to replace your entire fucking desktop and put whatever we want on it.
• Oracle - Wouldn't you like to buy a database to go with your operating system? Please, buy it from us. It's not very good but we're Oracle and our CEO owns his own jet so someday it might work.
• Cakewalk - You're our diety and we bow to you. Please let us write music sequencing software for another year before you include it in your operating system.
• Intuit - We're with Cakewalk. Please give us another year so we can cash out our stock options before you finally take over the tax preparation business.
• Computer Associates - We burn money and protect your computer from bad guys. Who's Microsoft?