Well, Gruber has released SmartyPants 1.1, and Lee's using it. I suppose I've been mulling over its use long enough. Buckle up, smart punctuation is coming to a retrophisch.com near you.

Anu of the A.W.A.D. list is now gleaning example text from books found at Questia, an online library. It is a subscription-based service, though you can search for free. It appears, from the comments, at least, to be a real boon to researchers of all levels.

Michael notes that Salon has adopted a new pay-or-click-through-multiple-ads model. Might be worth it for some, but I never thought Salon was worth much when it was free.

Lee's blogging! Welcome to the weird and wacky world of the blog, bro. :)

Ok, so now I’m worried.

A few weeks back, I noticed that Gunnery.Net had dropped off the ‘net. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, as I figured Marv might have been moving hosts, having domain issues, etc. Last week I started digging around; I noticed all of Marv’s domains (at least the 4 others I knew about) were off-line as well. All email to any address I ever had for him come back as undeliverable.

Now I haven’t spoken to Marv over the phone since before I stopped helping edit Gunnery.Net, but I decided to give him a ring. Disconnected 866 number. Disconnected long-distance business number. Hmmmm. Ok, I can understand killing the 866 number, those things cost major dough. I can even understand killing the biz number if he wasn’t using it any more.

Then today, disconnected unlisted home number (what can I say, he trusted me). Like I said, now I’m worried. Marvin Stenhammar was in the U.S. Special Forces in the 1980s; he was forced to retire due to a severe injury and a degenerative bone disease. Lucky for Marv, he married a Norse goddess of a doctor, who looked after him when she wasn’t at the hospital. Did they move? Or something worse?

I can’t head over to the SIG-L email list and poke around; the email list about SIG firearms Marv and I met on no longer exists. Or if it does, it’s on a different email server that I have been unable to google. I’ve googled Marv’s name and domains and have come up with squat, at least as far anything recent is concerned.

If you know of whom I speak, and you have information, please drop me a line at: retrophisch at retrophisch.com (sorry, anti-spam measure). I’d just like to know, you know?

Michael links to this article on MSNBC about Google, its pervasive nature, popularity, and a little history. And since MSNBC's articles tend to disappear after a while, here's an alternative link.

Thanks to code deciphering from Michael, you can now see the categories I use for my posts at the bottom of each post. If you click on the category link, you'll get a page that displays all previous posts in that category. MT rules.

Speaking of ATPM publisher, and pal, Michael Tsai, Michael started his own weblog back in September and failed to mention this to anyone on the ATPM staff. :) Like myself, Michael is using Movable Type to drive his blog, though he’s doing a much better job in getting the HTML that MT produces to validate. Now if I could just fix my MT templates to look as good in Chimera Camino/Mozilla as they do in IE.

For crying out loud, now I have to worry about spam links showing up in my blog. Spammers are now stuffing blogs' referral logs--a list that automatically updates links to sites that have linked to them--with links to sales pitches and porn sites. Yet more proof why spammers and the marketing companies that support them are the scum of the 'net. (Thanks, Lee!)

I remarked to my buddy Brian that "retrophisch" sounded like something out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, since it reminds me of "babelfish" from that series. Brian responded with a definition, based upon the one for the babelfish:

retrophisch: n. Living organism which is placed in the auditory canal of intelligent life forms. Used as a universal translator. Disadvantage: Translates to pure Anglo-Saxon English, hence the prefix "retro."

One door closes, another opens. Welcome to my weblog, or blog, retrophisch.com! Further blogging at digitalpembroke.com is now suspended. That site will be undergoing extensive redesign and reorganization, and will essentially be used for non-blogging purposes. So from now on, stop by retrophisch.com for the blogging goodness you’ve come to know and love!