welcome to *3, my online electronic diary.

first off, congratulations on finding this page.

navigation
----------

if you are navigating via the front end, then clicking the links at the
top and bottom of each page should take you to the appropriate diary
entry.  additionally, if you are using frames, there is a sidebar with
diary links on the left.

if you are navigating this without the front end, note that all the diary
entries are in text format in the entries directory.  each entry in that
directory is of the form ent.yyyy.mm.dd.tttth.txt, where yyyy denotes the
year, mm the month, dd the day, and tttt the time at which the entry was
posted.

*3
--

the name of this diary was chosen due to the fact that this is my third
web page.  however, please note that i do not actually wish to name my
diary "*3".  in actuality, it is the concept of the number 3 that i wish
to name my diary with.

in most cases, a name is a string, i.e., a list of characters, such as
letters, numbers, and ideographs.  the string refers to the person, but is
not the person itself.  hence, a different string used to refer to the
same person may not be the person's name.

however, since the name of my diary is the concept of the number 3, then i
can write the name in any number of ways.  in notation used in the c
programming language, the '*' character is used to denote that the
reference of an object is being referred to, and not the object itself.
hence, "*3" is my way of stating that it is not the character '3' that i
wish to refer to, but the concept of the number 3 itself.

as such, there are many other ways to write the name of my diary.  
"*three" is a simple example, as is "*iii".   those of you who have
studied ml will recognize the '!' symbol as having a similar function as
the '*' symbol in c, and as a result, "!iii" is also a valid option.

those of you who are symbolic systems majors will probably recognize the
meaning vs. reference concept.  the diary's chosen name was a nod to this
idea.  additionally, i simply wanted to try something weird and see if it
actually followed through.  the occurrence of the '*' character in the
name of this diary wrecked havoc on my code and file system whenever i
wasn't too careful as i was programming the web site generation system.

for those of you who program in c, you probably know that "*3" makes no
sense in c at all.  unfortunately, i know of no convenient symbolism in
the english language that will allow me to express what the symbol '*'
does in c, so please allow me this abuse of syntax.  additionally, '*'
does have other uses in c, but this is beside the point.

diary vs. blog
--------------

some of you may consider this a blog, or some other similar sounding term.
myself, i would much rather prefer the term online electronic diary, as
since the term "blog" is, i believe, too general and overused.  by stating
that this is my online electronic diary, instead of my blog, i would like
to emphasize a few points.

   1.  similar to an offline hardcopy diary, i do not depend on links for
       content.  note that you may find links here if you use the front
       end provided at frontend.htm.  however, these links are purely for
       navigational purposes, and point only to other pages here.

   2.  i have no intention of regurgitating common thoughts on the latest
       cool web pages, or linking to all my friends' web pages like crazy.
       there are already too many web pages out there that follow this
       pattern, and many of them are pretty devoid of truly original
       content due to this behaviour.  although, from a social analysis
       standpoint, the tangle of linkage present in such pages may be
       original content that may be interesting to analyze.

   3.  i don't plan on putting the cookie cutter elements of a blog into
       this web page.  an emotional meter won't be prevalent in each
       entry.  a forum will not be set up.  a webcam won't be placed on
       the front page, with the option, if you desire, of having a popup
       javascript window containing my visage follow you around while you
       surf.

so, in short, i want to keep this diary simple.  i figure that since i
don't have much time to keep a diary at all, i would rather focus on
content than attempt to maintain a blog.  as such, i would rather not call
this diary a blog and have people expect it to have all the properties of
a common blog.

as a result, some people may consider this page a little dry.  i apologize
in advance.  also, i will not be hurt if you leave, so feel free to leave
whenever you wish.  there is a bundle of content out on the web, and i
have no intention of keeping you here longer than you would like to stay.

accented letters and whatnot
----------------------------

to attempt to maximize compatibility, i will try to not use accented
letters or any other characters that are often encoded differently in
various incompatible standards.  whenever possible, i will try to use a
standard replacement.

however, my knowledge of romanization is far from perfect, so i may err.

errors
------

being human, i make errors.  if you find any errors on these pages, please
let me know.  i welcome error notifications.  i don't mind being called on
a trivial spelling error, and would much rather know about it than not.

for the most part, any typographical errors will be corrected in the entry
in question, and any errors in my recollections will be noted in a future
diary entry.  i believe that in this way, i can keep the content of the
entries as authentic as possible, while removing any errors that may
distract the reader from processing the content.

contact
-------

if you wish to contact me, i trust that you are intelligent enough to
determine my e-mail address from the url of this page.  questions,
comments, suggestions, and flames are welcome.  spam is not, hence the
omission of my e-mail address here.