I had been planning to get going with the blog full blast yesterday, but fate intervened.

Did my morning meeting, and started on my email when I lost my DSL: Vonage, Net access, everything. Spent several hours rebooting, tracing wires, etc.

Finally called Verizon to see if they could trace the line. After 10 transfers and 20 minutes on various types of hold and inputting my phone number every six seconds got to the right line, on hold, which played the following message: Verizon customers in Southern California and North Texas are currently unable to reach the Internet while we perform maintenance.

So I went to the range and hit golfballs for the rest of the afternoon, then spent the evening rebooting, restoring the cabling.

So let's try again, shall we?

First, as I mentioned last week, it should be obvious now why I've been incommunicado for the last couple of months -- we shipped askSam 6 last week, almost 20 years to the day after the original askSam shipped.  I apologize for the lack of blogging, returning phone calls, returning emails, actually turning my IM on, etc.  If I owe you a call/email/IM ... I'm working on it, and hope to get caught up over the next week or so.

While I've been less than communicative, I have been thinking a lot about blogging, partly for this blog, and partly for a class I'm teaching in the fall at IUPUI.  I'm starting to think about the different types and forms of blogs, and have had several long conversations on this with Dean Brown.  And that's where I'd like to start ... tomorrow: If blogging is a new part of the media ecosystem, must not there be more than one type of inhabitant?

And wouldn't Marshall McLuhan enjoy this?