It's been just over a year since I publicly laid my considerable powers of persuasion behind HD-DVD, only to see the format die a horrifying death just over two months later.

Quite an embarrassment. It was so bad I had to exile myself from blogging.

Even worse than the online embarrassment was the awkward discomfort and shame that owning an HD-DVD unit brought. When the HD-A3 eagerly popped up its now foolish looking HD-DVD logo as a guest happened in the room, the outcome was generally one of two shades of humiliating: Half the time they'd feel a little sorry for it, and by extension me. The other half was even worse, as they'd eagerly ask "Gosh, what's that? Is that the new high definition format?", forcing me to divert the conversation to whatever conflict was going on in the Middle East at the time (always one to fall back on). I quickly deported the player to the basement, if only to be free of the logo.

Seriously, though, having three young children is quite a lot of work. A former boss once remarked, on learning that I had my first child (my beautiful daughter Elizabeth), that I was a "hobbyist". I laughed at the time, thinking that he was just being elitist, what with his 8 kids or whatever it was. Turns out he was somewhat right, and I now look back at the relaxed life of free time I had with just one child. Even two seems relatively tame in comparison. Three, with them now edging towards the ages of two, four and six, introduces a lot of difficulties, as providing them all with age appropriate activities and challenges is a non-trivial task. The time available to post insightful blog entries has suffered.

But there is hope, faithful fans! I've devised a new technique that I'm going to try over the coming weeks. It's a sort of hybrid of "microblogging", but privately accumulating until it's a worthwhile post. I consider such writings cathartic and often self-elucidating, so I want to do it if only for personal satisfaction.

There's also the matter that with the recent addition of a "recent posts" panel on the right, that ungainly HD-DVD entry still falls in the list...so I've got to push out some content to scroll it off the list....just one more entry and it's outta there.

Oh and I also added the feed bag — again it was to try out a new technology and it proved a useful prototype — of links that I think are worthwhile, for anyone who might be interested.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Dennis