I just found out what “braino” really means. And all along I just thought it was a neat sounding word that played off of my nickname “Brains”.

The cluetrain manifesto theses is a must read. A key point is: “We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.” I began using Mac computers, never having watched a Mac advertisement - a person in Flordia showed me his. My decsion to have a Treo came from a personal site on the web.

I you like computers, you’ve got to watch this demo of the mouse, hyper text, search engine, threaded forums, collaborative work, and video conferencing - from 1968! Even stuff we don’t have now.

Our extended family will be starting a little news site, using movable type. As long a we keep on posting, this should be a great way to keep in touch. I’m excited!

We celebrated christmas today, just because our Grandmother was here for a visit. I surprised my brothers with a domain name apiece. “IAmJohnboy.com” for John, and “TervurenDog.com” for Andrew. Elizabeth got a registered version of Coldstone, and is now happily building fairy tale worlds where everyone you meet asks you questions about the “Lord of the Rings”.

I printed off the faux science reports from the Twinkies Project for mom. She could not stop laughing.

I spent the evening reading snatchs of Caeser’s The Conquest of Gaul while simulatainiously running the lighting board for Dad and crew who were aiming lights in a new church building. The book is incredable, and even more increable is the thought that I, a person living two thousand years later, should be able to listen too the thoughts and ideas of one of history’s great figures.

Tonight I found all about the virus my brother came down with on the cruise. It’s hard to believe that we were on vaction only two weeks ago. It seems like only a pleasant , distant memory now .

I’m not the only one with no spam anymore. Stevef says

Mail’s junk filter does such a good job of stopping spam, that I had kind of forgotten about it. Until it all started showing up unfiltered on my HipTop.

I’ve been looking through the options PayPal provides for getting people’s money to you over the internet. My initial impression was that it was a costly, difficult thing to do, but boy was I wrong. I could start selling stuff through PalPal this evening with no setup fees and nothing on my website but a little PayPal button. They even provide a free shopping cart if you need it. Bigger sites with my own cart, or unlocking software downloads are also possible with very little pain through PayPal. I’d guess they will soon take the internet by storm.