The blessing of the Internet is its ability to ignore distance.Sometimes this is its curse too.

I didn't know Gregory Blake in the way that the normal world respects.We lived far apart and never met in person, never spoke on the phone.I have only a vague idea of what he looked like, mostly from a postagestamp sized picture or two.

But the best measure of 'distance' on the Internet is not miles orkilometers, but six degrees of Kevin Bacon; how many connections

There is a world of difference between ' "string" in txt ' and just' "string" '. It doesn't even really jump out as visually wrong to meif it's in a large if condition, which probably means the conditionis big enough that it should be reorganized so that errors are moreobvious, or at least harder to make.

(Repetitive code is especially prone to this sort of slip-up for me.Unfortunately, one of my bad coding habits is quietly growing into

Most people are ordinary, which means that most people are going toproduce lame and boring results. Not through any fault of their own, butbecause they will be ordinary results, and we're simply just not veryinterested in the ordinary because there's so much of it. By and largewe're driven to the exceptional, the rare; to what stands out.

Thus, the inevitable but often overlooked result of people being social on the Internet is a lot of ordinary, boring blogs,home

This week, we:

• got 11,560 messages from 225 different IP addresses.
• handled 16,969 sessions from 1005 different IP addresses.
• received 135,139 connections from at least 46,180 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 12 connections being checked at once.

Apart from slightly higher numbers of IP addresses talking to us thisweek, this is a clone of last week 's numbers.Since the per