Bryan - I’ve just got to tell you how much I love your blog. Seriously, I do. I read your blog more than I read Andrew Sullivan’s blog now (which is saying something, since I do admire Andrew Sullivan). You have a great sense of mixing your polemical political posts with some really first-rate, fine writing on other technical and apolitical topics. Always interesting and always engaging (your recent post on Terry Taylor was also one of these fabulous posts - and I’m not even a Christian Rock fan). How do you find the time to keep such a consistent blog going and do all the other stuff you do? It is very impressive, all around. In all seriousness and sincerity, a heartfelt congratulations and thanks!

Thanks, Jimmy. Sometimes this feels like a colossal waste of time to be perfectly honest. Day after day, argument after argument, with no end in sight. I have to occassionally mix in something else from the other parts of my life, just to keep from going mad. Besides, all war and no play…well, you know the rest. That stuff usually feels like I’m writing to an audience of one—me. I’m glad to know otherwise.

How do I find the time? I write fast and edit on the fly. The lame typing class I took in high school seems to have stuck with me.

I appreciate this form of shoptalk.… what I do for a (sort of) living is educational graphics on a much smaller scale. But the scale isn’t all that much smaller; even using 640 × 640, a 30-second animation is half a gig in uncompressed form. This is a good example of how advances in materials and manufacturing can matter more than inventions. Only 15 years ago, this sort of animation was unthinkable for one person using one computer; nothing new has been invented since then, but disk and memory size have made all the difference.