A reminder from Holly Lisle on the First Rule of Writing: write something. Do it consistently and you'll find that when your back was turned you actually made a lot of progress.

I've been slacking a bit since my last update, but still wrote 4300 words in the last week, 171,520 since January 1. And I'm upping my daily goal from 1000 to 1500 words, effective immediately. That should give me a better balance between the fiction and non-fiction sides.

I'm trained as a scientist, and I like to think I have a healthy respect for facts. Which is why the current administration's apparent willingness to ignore evidence that contradicts their agenda is so infuriating. The intelligence community, for instance, appears to have ignored some of the best nuclear physicists in the world in attempting to make the case for Iraq's alleged nuclear program. On other issues, Congressman Henry Waxman offers a detailed analysis of mismatches between research results and policy pronouncements.

The latest flareup in the weblog world seems to be between those who think there is a separate and unique weblog world at all and those who think weblog software is just a tool to facilitate other human activities. I fall squarely into the second group. I think it's important that anyone can be a web publisher, and I think the people who make that possible deserve as much credit as the authors of VisiCalc or MS-DOS.

But, guys? It's just software. It's just a tool, just like a carpenter's hammer or a chef's stove. I'm far more interested in what all those web publishers have to say than in which tool they use to say it. Can we all move on, please?

The latest Internet worm, MSBlast, has hit two systems in my family in the last 24 hours. It might be a good idea to make sure your system has all its security patches. If it's too late, ABC News posted step by step instructions for the cleanup.

(Yes, I can hear you Unix users giggling. As with most such episodes, this worm exploits a vulnerability in Windows. Non-Windows systems are immune.)

Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper has a good series of articles about the decline of Korean manufacturing. Companies are hiring immigrant workers and moving plants to other countries in order to fight rising labor costs, while facing serious shortages of skilled workers at home. Sound familiar to anyone?

The site doesn't give a convenient index to the whole series. The articles are:
-- Manufacturers Closing Factories
-- Scaring off Foreign Capital
-- Rigid Labor System
-- Nobody Wants the 3D Jobs
-- Examples to Follow; Comments

Hynix claims it has developed the world's first 1 GB DDR2 chip, using 110 nm device technology. Mass production is planned for next year, to coincide with Intel's introduction of DDR2-capable chipsets.