I joined the downtown YMCA this weekend. One of the reasons I prefer the Y over for-profit gyms is because 1) No bullshit initiation fees, etc. 2) you get a free hour with an instructor to setup your program. So I went to make my appointment today but they're booked until the end of the month! Kind of like the public/private health care debate: I could PAY for personal training and probably get it ASAP, or I can wait forever for the free version ...

Here's something unrelated but really funny for the blogging crowd. The register has this article about how Google will soon be indexing weblogs separately to avoid "tainting" the main index with "dense and incestuous linking" that according to some "drowns out primary sources" with "idle chatter." Pretty strong words -- I guess the "real" journalists at the register get offended with writers outside the profession get a voice. Other favorite quote from this article: "Recent research ... put the number of blog readers as opposed to writers, as "statistically insignificant."

Final thought: How do you program a computer to distinguish "blog" from "non-blog" ? I don't think anyone can make a precise distinction. Obviously pages at domains like "blogspot.com" and "userland.com" will be classified by Google as blogs, but can we distinguish based purely on content? The New York Times or CNN update their websites almost hourly, and post stories on about a variety of topics but Google surely classifies these as news sources? I'm not sure that anyone can come up with a precise definition of blog.