People are strange animals. It's odd that the ultimate intangible of spending time or exchanging thoughts with another person can mean so much. Strange too, how easy it is to drift away from people to whom you once were close, and sometimes (happily) to reunite. Here are some of the many people I feel lucky to know. Here are a few photographs, too.

Geography will not be ignored. Here are a few places that matter to me:

• Tennessee - The largest coherent chunk of my extended family lives here. Beautiful mountains, enough green to spare most of the year (and four real seasons), lakes and woods, good roads, fireworks, great produce, pleasant people, waterslides, fog, history. (Tennessee has some problems, too, but the glass is more than half-full.)

• Maryland - A good state to grow up, but taxes are too high. I'll still visit, though -- Maryland well deserves the motto "America in Miniature," has mountains, seashore, flatlands, estuary, cities, woods, farms. Plus, crabs (and the Old Bay is important). I admire that Maryland had the intelligence not to take back the large chunk of swampland to the south which was drained of one sort of muck and has slowly filled with another.

• New York -- The world's greatest city, so far. I miss my housemates in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn itself, which is a reasonable place to live in New York without paying the Manhattan premium. (Check out brooklyn.net and brooklyn.com.) Besides, the subway covers all 4 of the real boroughs; Large toy boats also go to Staten Island, also a nice place.

• Virginia -- The drive-thru & break-down state of childhood roadtrips. Blacksburg and Charlottesville are cute towns; bburg is home to Cliff the Ask Slashdot Guy as well as my twin-sized futon. The mountains are beautiful, except in winter, when they can be foggy and icy.

• Texas - Except to Alaskans, Texas' scale is hard to exaggerate. Things (cities, roads, buildings, belt buckles) really are large, places are sometimes overwhelmingly far. There are two cities in Texas I now have a soft spot for --Austin (where I've lived before, for school and while working at T3), and San Antonio, where I've visited a few times and enjoyed. I could also see living in the far West sections, toward El Paso, near the Big Bend ... The worst thing about Texas is not Texan arrogance toward "them other places" (exaggerated, and mostly comic), but rather cedar fever, which knocked me flat on my back in 1999.

Thoughts pile on thoughts and rarely get written down or clarified as they should. Here are a lucky few which have somehow escaped.

• Organization is tough. A few random thoughts on:
  • households

• Computers
  • my gripes about the way computers are built
  • (less gripey) impressions of the Macintosh iBook 2001 model
  • why I like Free software (and even open-source software that RMS would not consider Free:) )
  • a paeon to tabbed browsing

• Food -- here are some of my favorite foods and related thoughts.

• Taxes -- There should be laws that say if an IRS agent lives in your area, a) your local paper can notify you of it b) he or she should have to introduce herself to each local resident in person, house to house, and c) each agent should face an automatic restraining order, not to go within 300 feet of any taxpayer without advance notice. I would call this "Little Timmy's Law Against Terror."

• Books -- Here are a few books which I've gathered into a non-required reading list. Required reading lists are a good way to kill interest, though there are exceptions. (The St. John's reading list looks good to me, for instance, but in that case the participants are already interested! This isn't true for most schools / students.)