Most of my blog has been just pass through of the popular links du jour. Here for your reading pleasure (or getting-to-sleep material) is an update on my summer.

I’ve been pretty quiet here lately. It’s not business. I’m no more busy now than I ever am. I think it is in large part the fact that I am saturated. I have been spending a lot of time reading a great many news sites, blogs, and the in-between sites. Most of what I read that interests me has already been blogged to death and I see no need to be another also-ran site so I am reducing what I link to to things that either make such an impact on me that I don’t care how much they’ve been repeated or is original content. And original content takes time so I expect the lower traffic to continue until I change my mind, which I of course reserve the right to do.

The last few weeks have been very interesting. I greatly enjoyed watching the Democratic National Convention and thought that Kerry and Edwards both delivered very good speeches. So far the Republican response has been underwhelming. The fact that they resorted to a terror alert to capture the next news cycle indicates to me that they are getting desperate. And, yes, I believe strongly that these terror alerts are more political than safety. Nothing the Bush Administration has done has given me any reason to actually believe them about anything.

In other news, I discovered Seed Magazine recently and read the issue I got cover to cover. There were fantastic articles in it about how environmental issues are shaping this election, how research into mercury in children’s vaccines is turning up some frightening things, Percival Lowell and canals on Mars and how he inspired so many even despite that major gaffe, and more. It’s the first science magazine that I have gotten into in years. The others are either too much work to read (either too technical or too dry) or too popular (the articles are overly simplistic).

I’m also slowly working my way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (very close to the end) and The Confusion is on deck. At the rate I’m going, the third book will be out by the time I finish the second. The story is very interesting but I still dread the ultimate ending in the third book. To date, I have not liked any of Stephenson’s endings. I always feel like he has amazing ideas but realizes 1 page before the end of the book that he has only 1 page left to wrap everything up. So, with 3 books to work with, maybe we’ll get a good ending this time.

At the same time, I’m also slowly working through Bone by Jeff Smith. I stopped collecting comics after Neil Gaiman’s Sandman ended some years back and my friend Jim recommended this. It’s fantastic. I’m buying 1 book every two weeks so as to stretch this out. I get book #3 in a week.

Jack has been taking swimming lessons (he has graduated from starfish to seahorse), attending afternoon day camp (today is his last day) and other fun activities. On the downside, his best friend in the universe is moving away and though we’ve explained it to him, he doesn’t really seem to understand it so I expect the day he wants to play with her and she’s already gone will be the day he gets it. We’re doing everything we can to keep his days filled with activities and making new friends. We just need to get him to early September when school starts again for him.

Finally, I am stuck on the final screen of Neverwinter Nights. It’s the first game I’ve gotten into obsessively in something like 10 years. For the last decade all I ever really played was Solitaire games (cards, mah-jong, etc.) I decided some months back that I needed a change of pace and here I am. Once I manage to finish this level I can download community built adventures, get the expansion packs, or replay this one with a different character class just to see how I do with something different. We’ll see…

Meanwhile, work goes well and I’m back to being very busy again, which I prefer. So, that’s good.