I've been writing on blogs, forums, websites, newsgroups, and every other form of Internet community that I can think of for years, and no matter where I post, I am still mostly accountable for whatever I write. Now for the most part, I like to own up to my own words, because I figure if I'm going to say it, then I should be able to back up what I'm saying, and people should have a right to know who said it. But there are times when you would like to express yourself anonymously, whether to give praise, criticism, or just speak your mind.

It's interesting how reliant we are on the technologies that make our lives easier. For instance, many of us couldn't imagine existing without our cellular telephones, but a little more than twenty-five years ago, we would've done all of our communicating from home, from work, or from tiny confined little boxes known as phone booths. But today, we take for granted the innovative communication devices that comfort us, and make things just a little bit more convenient.

If you use Google as your homepage, and why not, it's a convenient starting point if you intend to do a lot of web searches, but you're a little sad and disappointed that the main search page is a plain (boring) white background, you can always spruce it up by personalizing the page with some more interesting images from http://www.groovle.com.

I've had a number of printers during my lifetime. And I remember that with each generation of printers came a way to save money on printing. With my first ribbon printer, a giant 70 lb behemoth from Radio Shack, we would buy bottles of ink and soak the used ribbon cartridges until they were moist. The end result was usually a messy print on the tractor-fed paper sheets, but we didn't care, because it was just printing text, and you could almost always see the results, even if they tended to smudge.

When my printer's type began to grow faint, I called a local repair shop where a friendly man informed me that, probably, the printer only needed to be cleaned. Because the store charged $50 for such cleanings, he told me, I might be better off reading the printer's manual and trying the job myself.

Pleasantly surprised by his candor, I asked, "Does your boss know that you discourage business?"

"Actually it's my boss's idea," the employee replied sheepishly. "We usually make more money on repairs if we let people try to fix things themselves first."