First a new article, now a new edition of the monthly (no giggles, please!) site newsletter? No, I have not been kidnapped by space aliens. Just reminded that the whole purpose of this site is to keep in touch with my favorite people, my readers. Thanks for visiting, and please come back soon.

Update: There's a bit of a delay in sending out the email version of the newsletter, due to some server issues. The online version linked above is fine, however.

It's Friday, and St. Patrick's Day. How could I resist live action Frogger? Robot vacuum meets Austin city traffic.

I'm sure many of the writers who visit here also visit Paperback Writer. If you don't, this would be an excellent time to start. She has a series of posts answering reader questions about the publishing business. Lots of candor, lots of detail, lots of excellent links.

One of the wonderful and frustrating things about the web is that anyone with an idea can publish it to the world. And so you have thirty different online calendars, probably hundreds of note and reminder applications, and so on.

There are sites that try to keep up with all of it. This is not one of those sites. But every now and then I'll see things that look interesting.

Copernic Summarizer reads web pages, PDF files, or just about any text document for you, creating a summary so that you can decide whether to read the whole thing. Integrates with standard software tools, and has a standalone window to input filenames and URLs manually. Free 30-day trial.

HyperClipper XL is a smarter clipboard, handling up to 200 items at a time. (Including big items, like images, if desired.) Office XP has a function like this, but it only works in Office applications. Free 15-day trial.

Blinkx Pico finds other documents similar to the one you're reading. Collects news, web pages, Wikipedia pages and so forth. Integrates with standard software tools, but does not have a standalone window. Free.

I'm just experimenting with these at this point. If they turn out to be useful, you can find them on the OrganizingTools page in the Wiki.

How does a new ocean form? It looks like scientists are getting a chance to find out. The Horn of Africa appears to be splitting apart, making room for the Red Sea to flow in.

Plenty of people, including such luminaries as Bill Gates, have opined that "X performance should be enough for anyone." All of them have been wrong. It's pretty clear that the more accessible computing power is, the more clever ways software engineers will find to make use of it.

Still, it's also true that email, web surfing, and word processing won't see much benefit from Intel's new Core architecture. No one's going to turn down the extra performance, but I don't see the average user being willing to pay extra for it, either. Or does that mean that I just committed the Bill Gates fallacy myself?