Well, it seems that I'm not alone. Science has determined that Americans' social contacts are slipping. Of course the article blames the internet and longer work hours, but somehow I suspect the root cause is a bit more complex than that.

I've given up, it might as well be deprecated and NNTP servers everywhere turned off. There are still a few moderated newsgroups I'll follow, but I doubt I'll contribute much anymore. As much as I hate web-forums, it seems they've managed to figure out how not to completely suck. I've been an active USENET participant since long before I had an Internet account, so it's a bit sad to come to this realization, but there's no point to following it anymore.

After seeing how Nintendo is playing with the concept of Game Play itself with some of the mini games and WarioWare, I'm looking forward more than ever to see what their next console will be like.

Ah well, I'm thinking of starting Weight Watchers again, and I guess it's a good enough time as any to start, since I think I ate a total of five points worth of food this weekend.

I used to find I'd create a lot of hidden columns in my Excel spreadsheets to count up various totals because the built-in "=COUNTIF()" never seemed quite flexible enough. Well, I just discovered something that's turning out to be my new favorite toy: "array formulas".

You can look at the linked page for me details. I'm wondering how I never noticed this particular feature in Excel for so long.

Sadly, this won't do anything to help overall accidents. Whatever the number two item on that list will become number one, and we'll have to ban the next item on the list, or we can skip ahead a few steps and just ban bad drivers, but no one wants to admit that the drivers could be at fault here.

Oh, and I suppose it doesn't help that the number of fatal car crashes year to year has actually decreased since 1980 by over 15%, or that the number has basically stayed the same for the past five years or so. It seems pretty clear to me that cell phones are only the cause of accidents for poor drivers, not this evil scourge causing otherwise good drivers to drive poorly.

I was pleasantly surprised when our ancient DirecTV/TiVo unit actually got an update. Of course, the only thing I've noticed changed so far is a slight tweak to the menu layout. The un-official list of what's changed claims that the search speed should improve. Hopefully it will end up improving things; the slow menus can be really trying at times.

At the very least it should tide us over till TiVo finally releases the "Series 3" models and we can finally enjoy TiVo in HDTV.

I think it's one of the most fitting things that could have been done with the wreckage from the Twin Towers.

Well, I thought it was cute, so I signed us up. You can now see our Xbox blog about its daily life, which is mostly our Xbox complaining that we don't give it enough attention.

To the developers out there: The days of MAX_PATH being a sure-fire bet for filenames are long over. It really never was with network drives, but now users can quickly exhaust the limitation with some descriptive folder names. And, don't assume a registry value, the big culprit in my installation mess, is limited to MAX_PATH characters. Use the Windows' APIs like they're designed, and ask them how long the value is.

What is the Dissenting Pebble?