I agree with Paul Ford. The web is a distraction too readily at hand. Time has been frittered away before this bright screen, flitting from shiny thing to shiny thing. There has been more trivia and less substance, and I feel the less for it.

The ability to type a few words into a carefully crafted search box and be presented with an ordered list of possibly relevant results is a blessing bestowed by Google, and a curse. Detours off into the weeds beside the information superhighway have killed many a sunny afternoon. My hope for genuine writing, photography, or web design is quickly overtaken by tangents, trivia, and shopping.

Not that I'll be shutting down my computer in the near future. But my ancien PowerBook purchase was, I think, a vague desire to recapture my college days, when all my writing was done in black and white. Printing required fishing out a LocalTalk cable and sussing out an empty port in the Mac lab. Email barely existed.

Friend Brian once dismissed weblogs as instant loquacity, yet here we still are, five years on. My own webbish ramblings are a fairly cringeworthy document in places, but a document nonetheless. It's just time to focus on adding words with substance rather than just words.