I changed it and got it working, then it reverted back. Back to the drawing board. austen.com and all our servers are in the process of moving, including firth, to our own name servers. We can use our name servers to point to any server we want, as long as it has an ip address. ns1.spring.net is our primary name server now and ns2.datapipe.com is our slave, secondary name server. Keep an eye on our websites and let me know if you have any connection problems, I'd like to know sooner rather than later!

According the clock, we're somewhere in Europe again. ;-D

I'll take another run at this.

An editorial worth reading. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,248-2001320966,00.html A sample from that editorial: "We know � do we not? � that with every year that passes, every thousandth link-up to the Internet, every millionth new mobile phone, it becomes less necessary for conspirators to meet physically in one place in order to conspire. The day is coming, perhaps has already come, when terrorists will not need to gather in camps. There will be no HQs to bomb, no cells to track down, no tents to ransack. The concept of host country as geographical location for a terrorist group may already be too weak to bear weight, certainly too weak to justify revenge-bombing of the uninvolved. All we will be able to allege will be the �hospitality� or �ambiguity� shown by some governments to shadowy figures who flit in and out of their territories.

More David Kline, the onetime war correspondent in Afghanistan. I was there when the first Taliban units were seen in Afghanistan circa 1986. They were all composed of Saudi and other foreign volunteers, and few took them very seriously since they did little actual fighting against the Russians. But they quickly allied with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbi Islami group -- i.e., the fundamentalist wing of the Afghan resistance -- which was receiving the bulk of US arms and aid via Pakistani intelligence (SIS). Then, amidst the confusion and infighting within the resistance following the Soviet withdrawal, the Pak's chose to channel almost all their material support to the Taliban, who used it to gain power over a divided resistance movement and a peoiple utterly exhausted by war. I'd wager that if a free & fair referendum were conducted in Afghanistan today, the Taliban would receive fewer than 5% of the votes. Their army is largely conscript, their most fervent supporters are unsophisticated teenagers insulated in Taliban religious schools. Nothing they say or do has any relationship to historic Afghan customs & attitudes.

we're back. I just cannot post on Drool. I have no idea why...