At the present time I have five blog entries I am yet to publish because I keep revising them. It really is an amazing phenomenon. This whole blogging thing has made me a much better writer.

When I started this thing back in 2002 I would sit down at my computer, rattle off a few sentences about this or that and publish the article to my blog. Writing an entry might have taken me fifteen minutes, at the most. Now, however, I pay very close attention to my writing. In fact, most of my entries take more than a hour to write. It might ruin the spontaneity of writing on a blog, but I find the entries are far better when I have spent a good deal of time contemplating them.

Looking back at older entries, I almost feel embarrassed at how awful the writing is, because my writing has improved so much in three years. I doubt my blog can take all the credit for making me a better writer, but it certainly contributed. When I look back at this entry six months from now I will probably have to fight the urge to edit or delete it because the writing will be so abysmal compared to what I write then.

I really doubt a majority of the people my age writing in their lamentable LiveJournals or monotonous myspace.com musings. Regardless, I think this is an example of just another way technology can enrich and enhance the lives of people everywhere.

When I woke up this morning I popped open my laptop to check the weather and the latest news before having my breakfast. The top story was the supposedly successful launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. The one thing I thought was notably different this time around was the lack of a huge buildup of media-fueled hype up to two weeks before the launch.

So, here is my new theory as to why the little sensor broke on the Space Shuttle Discovery a week or two ago when they tried, unsuccessfully to launch it. The insane amount of media-fueled hype (the three minute MSNBC commercial comes to mind) probably scared the engineers stiff and took some key people off of doing actual work to go and do live interviews with Paula Zahn and Brit Hume.

I could be wrong, but it makes sense to some degree. I have never actually worked on a project which was covered quite as much as the Space Shuttle launch. However, whenever I am working or doing things under pressure, more mistakes seem to happen than when I am left alone.

Though, regardless of whether the media did or did not mess up the shuttle launch for NASA, it really does show what the American media thinks of people. Rather than covering stories that have potential to affect us, they are off covering the thing they think will give them the highest ratings. Then, they spend hour after hour covering the story. I guess that is why I watch the BBC.

Podcasts are fantastic. In fact, they are so great I am planning on making one myself. Eventually. At any rate, ever since Apple released iTunes 4.9 Podcasting has started going mainstream. A medium once restricted to people who were willing to pay for software and hunt down RSS feeds has now been integrated into iTunes with one-click supscibing.

Early Podcasts tended to be poorly produced independent ventures. Some of these were quite good, others were atrocious. Then, at about the time Apple announced they would be adding Podcasting to the next point version of iTunes, a number of larger media organizations started making their own Podcasts to try riding the iPod wave. Organizations like ABC were early adopters, creating Podcasts such as the ABC News Shuffle, which was probably some pathetic attempt at trying to make their very bad news summary Podcast sound hip and interesting.

Since ABC's well produced, but altogether awful bits (though I cannot speak for the Spanish news Podcast; that just went over my head) a number of other media heavyweights have tossed in their entries to the Podcasting ring. Most have been big improvements over ABC's attempt. I subscribe to a number of excellent Podcasts of BBC radio programmes.

However, I realized Podcasting had really gone mainstream when I heard Tim Russert inform viewers about the Meet the Press Podcast, available at msnbc.com. I subscribe to that one too, along with the NBC Nightly News Podcast. I am waiting for ABC to post their evening news program as a Podcast.

When I read an article in The New York Times on Thursday I was skeptical as to whether people actually needed to see speech pathologists to have their voices changed. Surely, nobody's voice could be that bad. Of course, I made this assumption before I had stood in a line to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in IMAX.

One of the first things I notice about a person when I see them for the first time is the quality of their voice. It tells me a lot about the person. So, as I was standing in the queue, which would ultimately lead me into a room with eighty foot tall images of Johnny Depp's ghostly white face, I learned a lot about the other people in line, just by listening to the way they spoke.

Some of the voices I heard were so unpleasant I turned up my music so I did not have to listen to them. Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp) also had a very odd voice indeed, though I suppose this was intentional. At any rate, I can now understand why some people would want their voices replaced. No offense to those people, but their voices are just unpleasant.

Also of note, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on a huge screen is somewhat scary. You can see every little pore on every actor's face.

Buried deep inside the minds of far too many Americans is something I am going to call, "clean table syndrome." Symptoms of this disease include a fear of anything non-decorative on top of tables or a fear of anything at all on the surface of a table.

It may seem far fetched, but it is far too true. What is up with America's obsession with clear surfaces ? Why bother having a table if you are not even going to put anything on it ?

Just consider the idea. Every home design magazine that shows a kitchen shows off the kitchen with absolutely nothing on top of the counters, except for a tastefully placed pot or jar of flour. It makes me wonder how the people cook. Do they put down plastic over the surfaces, cook, and then incinerate the plastic ? There is no point in bothering to have fifty feet of counter space if it will not be used.

Maybe, though, this is all a plot by some secret consortium of cabinet makers. There is probably a direct relationship between the amount of things on a counter and the amount of storage space needed to store the items which might have occupied the counter.

In short, people everywhere need to put things on their tables. What other point is there of having one ?

In my seemingly endless quest to learn to drive, one tendency has really stuck out at me. Everyone who has instructed me thus far has been obsessed with speed. Granted, it does makes sense not to go ten miles an hour on the freeway, or conversely go sixty miles an hour on a residential street. However, people seem to care far more about going as fast as legally possible, rather than at what might be considered a reasonable speed.

A fantastic example : during my woefully unproductive Driver's Education course, the driving instructor kept a close watch on my speedometer. Had I gone one or two miles an hour under the set speed limit, the instructor would chastise me saying it was, "unsafe to be going at that speed." But if I was going one or two miles over the speed limit they would not think twice.

So why is America obsessed with going as fast as legally possible ? It may save time, but the amount of time saved is quite negligible. Say there was a fifteen mile trip to be taken. Then, suppose the average speed limit on the trip was thirty miles an hour. Going at the speed limit for the entire trip it would take about thirty minutes to get there, supposing things were mostly clear.

If the same trip was driven two miles under or over the speed limit, twenty eight and thirty two miles an hour, respectively, you would stand to gain or lose a whopping two and a half minutes. That is a negligible eight per cent difference from the baseline thirty minutes.

It is things like this, coupled with blatantly bad drivers, who make the roadways more dangerous for everyone, killing about forty thousand people every year. I really do not see why two and a half minutes is worth risking someone's life.

On a slightly more cheerful note, the latest installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is darker, but nonetheless excellent. There are a good deal of plot twists and very unexpected events. Of course my favorite part of the Harry Potter books are the quirky, imaginative words and names dreamed up by Joanne Rowling, the author of the series. I would name some of my favorites from this latest installment, but that might give things away.

One would think a sleeper terrorist cell who sets off several bombs, killing many people, in a major metropolitan area might get more attention than something - while important - somewhat insignificant. I am talking, of course, about the London bombs and the return to flight of the US Space Shuttle.

Man did the space shuttle get a lot of attention ! By my rudimentary news-importance tracking method (the number of articles on Google News) the Space Shuttle story is 82% as important as the London bombs. To compare, the, "Is Karl Rove involved in the leak?" story is only about 29% as popular.

At any rate, I was forced to watch a whole lot of "Return to Flight" news. CNN even interrupted the one hour of CNN I can tolerate to watch (that is, the one hour of every day they show CNN International) to cover the shuttle, even though it was not set to lift off until several hours later.

However, I did get something out of watching the space shuttle, perched on its launch pad, framed by an uncertain Florida sky. I realized how much of a parallel there is between the space shuttle and most US-based airlines.

Consider it, if I described something as, "...an underfunded body with an aging fleet of vehicles, who has also suffered major setbacks due to improper safety procedures," it would be pretty hard to distinguish between NASA and a US-based airline.

Another thing I came to think of was the weird inverse state of transportation and population age in Europe and the US. While Europe has a very old population, they also have one of the most modern transport systems in the world. The US on the other hand, is younger, but has an archaic transportation system.

I still wish I had gotten some slightly more substantive news out of the hour I watched, but realizing these two very unimportant things made it at least somewhat productive.