Today is the fifth anniversary of the launch of this weblog. Its value to me has been immeasurable, and I can't imagine being without it.

Thanks to everyone who inspired me to start HBWT, thanks to everyone who reads and participates in HBWT for keeping things so interesting and worthwhile for me, and thanks to my family for not minding all the time I have spent keeping this web site up and running.

And a special thanks to Seth Dillingham of Macrobyte Resources for providing excellent hosting services for over four years! I'm so hooked on Conversant. Weblogging just wouldn't be the same without the special features it offers me and the people who make this place special, especially the e-mail and NNTP interfaces.

This site started as a manually edited web site using Dreamweaver 4 on classic Mac OS. I was a Frontier guy at the time, and had even written CMS software for Frontier, so I could have done something much fancier, but I wanted to keep it simple to focus on the content instead of the technology. Eventually I migrated to Manila, but that only lasted 6 months or so, when I migrated once again to Conversant.

Wow, I just noticed there are nearly 7000 messages in this site's discussion group!

Once I start school in September, it's going to be increasingly hard to keep this site up as-is because our budget doesn't have room for hosting costs.

I'm looking at my options, such as putting ads on the site, hopefully they could cover the expenses so that things don't have to change. If you have any ideas in this regard, please let me know! Google AdSense is out of the question, as I'm opposed to their speech-limiting policies. And I suppose now that I've said that, I've disqualified myself from even using their service, so it's a moot point!

I've had a great weekend so far, spent lots of time with my family, and upgraded my work computer to Panther (finally, Jaguar was becoming so painful). Cheryl and I went golfing together today for the first time since the fall of 2001 or maybe early 2002. I've golfed maybe half a dozen times since then, but Cheryl hadn't. She played very well, and I got my first birdie since one of the first rounds I ever played (which was beginners luck).

I was so close to a hole in one today, on a 105 yard hole. It stopped about 2 feet from the hole, I'm not sure how close it got because the green was elevated from the tees. Oh, and the birdie wasn't on that hole, it was on another hole where I had to put from about 6 feet out. I two-putted (and cursed!) the 2 footer. :-(

Hopefully we'll get to play more often this summer, the fresh air and exercise is good for us.