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Its been one year exactly since I posted the first entry on this blog.

In celebration of this momentous event, I have changed the tag line at the top of each page to my favorite bon mot of Dorothy Parker, "What fresh hell is this?" The quote nicely sums up the theme that this blog has evolved to represent.

As my disappointed worldwide readership has no doubt noticed, I set a record low of only one post in April. Why? Many reasons: blogger's fatigue, a lot of other stuff going on, tired of being outraged, just didn't care, etc., etc.

In any case I haven't given up on posting, I just took a break.

For anyone who cares, and doesn't know about blog feeds, they are a great way to keep up with postings to blogs that you care about but don't want to check every day. You do this by subscribing to your favorite blogs using a news reader. The blog reader that I use is Bloglines which requires no additional software to set up. Once you set up a Bloglines account, you can add feeds to it and when a new post comes up on one of the blogs you have subscribed to, it will show up when you go to Bloglines. To make it even easier, I've added a Bloglines link at the upper right hand corner of this site, under the Subscribe/Feeds heading, so once you have a Bloglines account all you have to do is click on the logo on my page and this blog will automatically be subscribed to. (I've also added links for RSS and ATOM feeds, for those of you who are of those persuasions.) That way you should never miss one of my posts ... whenever it may occur.

For your further reading enjoyment here is an article about a wide range of blog reading software.

Love, me.

You may notice that the look of the site has changed a bit. I've gone from two to three columns, to better organize the information on the main page, and also to give myself a chance to learn more about the web publishing platform that this site uses, Moveable Type.

I've also added a "Commercials" section to the lower part of the new right-hand column. These ads are from Google "AdSense". The links may seem kind of strange, as the way it works is that a Google service analyzes the content of the web page being viewed and then selects the links from there. I have not explicity chosen the ad links. I will make a small amount of money on any links that someone viewing the site clicks through on, but mostly this is an experiment by the staff at Electic Times World Headquarters.

Note also that usually, anytime I link to a book, CD or DVD, those links go to amazon.com and likewise through the Amazon Affiliate program, I would get a small amount of money if a purchase was made via such links.

In other words, I've sold out!

I could have called this site "Dilletante Times" (as in 'dilletante' a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge) but I decided to cut myself some slack. I however settled on 'eclectic', because "if you can't say something nice ...". My interests and tastes have always been eclectic, though perhaps middle-brow.

In this blog I plan to post entries and links to stuff on the internet which is of interest to me and readers out there with eclectic minds. In the early days of 'on-line' computing (remember The Source, early Compuserve, The Well and (gasp!) even Prodigy) I marveled at the potential of having information truly at (to futher abuse the cliche) my fingertips. As the internet as it has evolved, and is still evolving, a large part of that potential has been realized.

This blog itself will evolve. It's style will change and become, hopefully, an attractive and useful place for others with eclectic minds to find things and ideas from many places, and of many types, that have attracted me. But, instead of twiddling the knobs until the style was just right, I feel the urge to start posting and let the presentation change over time.

... So, fellow eclectics, here we go ...