Oh right ... I write a blog, don't I?

A couple of housekeeping items, before I attempt to get back to real blogging:

• No, I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth, been trapped under a large object or wandered off to Nepal to contemplate the mysteries of the universe.  Just busy, and decided to devote what little blogging bandwidth I've had lately to contemplating the nature of awareness on the other blog.  Hmm ... maybe Nepal wasn't so far off.
• A couple of logins ago, AdSense advised me that I appeared to have a "popular blog" and I should consider advertising on it.  I'm always glad to know that people are reading Field Notes, but I suspect that AdSense and I have somewhat different notions of "popular".  As much as I would like to bump my employer's revenue stream up by another 0.0000000000000001% or so, I have no plans to do that at the moment or any time soon.  I'm not against running ads per se, but I don't see the point of cluttering up the layout for what I doubt would be any significant gain.  If you ever do start seeing ads here, it will be because there has been a dramatic surge in demand for occasionally-posted web.musings, in which case why not?
• Prompted by a couple of recent comments, including a couple of completely appropriate ones,  I've settled on a definition of spam comments:  If it's completely independent of the post it's supposedly commenting on, it's spam and will be summarily removed. Mentioning your favorite business as part of a thoughtful response to a post on customer service is just fine.  Mentioning your website, commercial or otherwise, with nothing more than a generic "Hey, great blog!" comment is spam.
• Mind, I reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason or no reason (hey, it's my blog).  But as a practical matter I'd only expect to do so in cases of spam or incivility, should it occur.  As part of recusing myself from matters Google (and yet still trying to write about the web), I would also remove any speculation about what Google might be up to, be it public information or not, accurate or otherwise.  I don't expect that to be a problem, but thought I'd mention it.

And ... we're back!