The layout generator has been quietly chugging away and reached over 500,000 layouts without even a blink. That's a lot of layouts.

Let's put that into perspective by comparing it to the forum. The forum has had around 30,000 topics and nearly 130,000 comments, mostly by Hugo The home page is by far the most popular entry page followed by the layout generator which easily beats the forum and recent posts pages, the next two most popular entry pages, combined.

Sometime last decade I built a web interface to MySQL using PHP. At first it basically managed records, allowed you to add, delete and modify table data etc. Over time it has evolved into a full database management system that depending on your privileges and settings allows you to:

• Create or delete a database


• Create, drop or rename tables


• Alter table structure


• Add or drop keys and indexes


• Add, remove or change the properties of columns


• Add, modify, search or delete table records


• Manage users and privileges

Last August, I wrote of my frustration with Verizon, my ISP. At the time, I thought the issue fixed. Not so. Sit back, grab a beer, thank the gods you don't—never mind. I've heard the Baby Bell and BT tales, too.

So here's the latest adventure. As you read, note that if a single Verizon employee had simply done their job — nothing extraordinary — just their job, none of this had to happen beyond that point.

In June, 2007, a $1200+ charge showed up on the phone bill as past
due. Since we weren't in arrears, and since the charge was from

To create an account on this site you need to provide a valid e-mail address. That is quite a common requirement for many sites these days and helps use reduce the number of accounts created by bots for spam purposes. Many people are using their own forms of spam protection on email addresses such as the challenge response system where you send an email to someone and they automatically send you an email to validate the address the original mail came from. This can be a great system and works well for personal mail.

As many of you know, my longstanding site at garyblue.port5.com went dark on 1 Nov., 2007, or there abouts. I started the site, using Portland's free hosting, in order that I could simply provide a link to the various demonstrations I created for the forums and lists. There were no beautiful designs or even planned organization. It just sat there, enjoying about 2000 unique visitors each month. No Yahoo!, but it had enough folks linking to it that many of the pages had Google page ranks of 4 or 5.

August, 2003 – November, 2007 R.I.P.