Indeed I do remember Rob. I remember thinking to myself, "He seems to know more than David does about half the things David's interested in, and he's a much more reasonable person."

Oh, great. Someone I've mentally flagged as being interesting, intelligent and articulate, and now I see he's prolific as well. I'm never going to be able to get offline.

:P

And since he doesn't have a Comments section, can we just talk to him here, like we use Greg's for Jon's stuff?

Thanks for the reference, Dave. :) I find your praise slightly embarassing, however, as I could say the same back to you; half of the things i'm interested in you understand better than I do. (Which I guess suggests we have very similar interests. :)) Certainly there are a bunch of questions about nineteenth-century imperialism, which have been provoked both by the overall debate on Iraq and by this book i'm reading on late nineteenth-century Germany, that I have been meaning to ask you. (I'm holding off, though, as there is email you've sent me that figure I should answer first. :))

Rachel -- thank you for your kind words. :) It's entirely possible that when I get a free moment i'll switch to movable type, which will allow comments; but that will be a while. In the meantime, i'm happy to talk to people here, or at electrolite, or at kuro5hin, as long as our hosts don't get annoyed at us. :)

Greg --- sadly, my strongest memory of that dinner is of feeling out-of-place and remembering how socially inadept I had felt in high school and college; I felt more shy that night than I had in years. I'm glad to hear that I didn't leave a horrible impression. :)

Well, thanks to the miracle that is blogdom, next time you sit down at a table like that you, too, will know half the people there already, by name at least if not by face. :)

Crap, I'm sorry you felt that way, Rob. David's right. Corresponding with people for months before actually meeting them is a great ice breaker.

Greg, no worries; it was entirely my own fault. I have a reflexive "lots of people I don't know who all seem to know each other scary" response that I need to train myself out of. *And* most of you were, in some sense, working, which meant you were on a different plane anyway. :)

Lots of people you don’t know who all seem to know each other are scary. I gave up on trying to “train” myself out of that after grad school; it just wasn’t worth the effort.

Rob, just out of curiousity: where does the name Aphrael come from? Don't recognize it, and I'm honestly curious.

And, if you don't feel like switching to MT, you can always breakdown and use QuickTopic like I did.

a delayed response, Jon: it was the name I was using in an RPG in 1992 when I first got a UNIX shell account, so it was the name I attached to that, and it's the name i've used as my online moniker ever since.

As for MT --- the big thing for me is time; until after our field test (next week *cross fingers*) and finals (week after that), i've got about as much free time as i can snatch between builds. *grin*