Bitcoin = Fine

I have been following Bitcoin pretty much since the beginning. I actually used to mine Bitcoin as a way of paying for hormones when I first started to take them. Kind of wish I had held onto the coins a little longer, but that is another story for another day. I have observed Bitcoin through the initial mining gold rush, through the exponential price increases, through the introduction of altcoins, through the rise of ASIC mining, through the Mt. Gox bankruptcy/scandal, you name it. And now, after all of this, looking at the chart, there is one inescapable conclusion. The whole thing just looks like a bubble.

Since the early days, when people asked me how Bitcoin worked, my answer was usually something like this. I would say, Bitcoin is a type of online currency that exists because someone figured out a solution to the problem of making information scarce (by solving the Byzantine Generals Problem). And when they ask, "But why are Bitcoins valuable?", I would say, because they can function as a means of exchange. You see ultimately, money is really more of a fiction than anything. It used to be backed by gold (meaning that for every dollar printed, there was an equivalent amount of gold being held by the government), but those days have long since passed. Today we have what is known as fiat currency, which is a currency that is not backed by anything in particular, other than the power of the government that prints it.

This is probably not news to anyone familiar with modern finance, but this begs the question, how can you have a currency that's not backed by anything? Not even a government? Well... what I would have said to respond to this question, is that because Bitcoins are scarce (no more than 21 million are allowed to be mined), if anyone is willing to pay for them or accept them as a means of exchange, then that means they have at least some tangible value (albeit perhaps a small one). And if they can be proven to hold any value at all, they can function as a means of exchange. And because Bitcoins offer other advantages, such as freedom from government or traditional financial institutions, this makes them all the more desirable. But right now, I would be hard pressed to advise anyone to buy and hold Bitcoins.

So what is going on? Were all those people who said Bitcoin was a Ponzi Scheme right? Sort of, but the truth is a bit more complicated. If* Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange for anything tangible that can be assigned a monetary value, it is inherently not worthless (*keep in mind I said if). This is unlike a Ponzi Scheme, where you are essentially stealing money from investors by promising them unsustainable returns. On paper, Bitcoin seems sustainable, as it's value is determined by what it trades at on free and open markets. No obfuscation, no hidden agendas, just a new way to exchange value. Even if Bitcoin's value fluctuates, as long as someone, somewhere, accepts it in exchange for a tangible good or service, it should be worth at least something. I mean, if everyone stopped accepting it, that would of course spell disaster, but that could never happen, right?

It's now time to ask another important question. Why would I want Bitcoins? Well, there are a few reasons. You might want to buy them under the assumption that the price would go up at some point. However, the long term trend has been pretty much down since the peak at $20,000, and it currently seems unlikely Bitcoin will hit that amount (or even close to it) again any time soon, so speculation might not be your best bet. Well, what if I want to buy things? Unfortunately, unless the kinds of things you want to buy are drugs, or other things that involve skirting the law, you are almost certainly better of paying in traditional currency, as your transaction will be faster, safer, and arguably more secure. Also, no need to worry about the value of the currency you are holding plummeting overnight. Other potential uses include money laundering, tax evasion, and online gambling.

Umm... okay, but things will get better as Bitcoin becomes more legitimate, right? I would say that while there are many places in which you can spend your Bitcoins today, it's really not much faster or easier than it was two or three years ago. The network has also gotten slower, and fees are up. Meanwhile new laws and regulations continue to block Bitcoin out, or make it generally less attractive for everyday use. I remember when I used to just be able to freely buy and sell Bitcoin on Circle.com for a reasonable price, and in a reasonable amount of time. Recently I have resorted to selling Bitcoins on LocalBitcoins.com due to my inability to find a better/faster alternative. But that's good isn't it? We are keeping the greedy financial institutions out of our business. Honestly, the last person I sold Bitcoins to was kind of bearish, and unwilling (I think unable due to regulation) to hold Bitcoins as part of his business model. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

That sounds... not good. Okay, maybe Bitcoins will never hit the mainstream, but I'll still use them, so that gives them value right? Enter the altcoin. An altcoin is just a variation on Bitcoin, only instead of using the same blockchain (essentially, the public ledger for all Bitcoin transactions), they use variations on the model Bitcoin provides, implementing their own separate blockchain, and often introducing changes from Bitcoin that affect how coins are mined, how transaction are done, etc. Oh, and of course, they all introduce new coins into the cryptocurrency ecosystem beyond the 21 million allocated by Bitcoin and it's developers, but we'll get to that in a bit. When altcoins like Litecoin first hit the scene, it seemed only natural that Bitcoin should have some competitors. Otherwise who else will put pressure on the Bitcoin developers/miners to compete and improve? There are now over 100 (I counted) altcoins listed on Bitfinex.

So why all the altcoins? At least one early justification was the advent of ASIC mining. Originally Bitcoin was mined by everyday geeks on their computers, and this provided them with a stable stream of income, while maintaining the Bitcoin networks stability and security. This is of course the primary purpose of mining, and without miners actively using computers to mine Bitcoins, the Bitcoin network could be taken over in it's entirety by a single person who could essentially do whatever they wanted to any Bitcoin that had ever or would ever exist. Yeah, not the kind of thing you want happening in your ultra-secure new form of currency. Initially mining was just done on your standard computer's central processing unit (CPU), making it accessible and profitable for virtually anyone (assuming you even knew Bitcoin existed, which most of us did not). I got involved around the time when GPU mining stated to take over. GPU mining started when people figured out how to use recently developed frameworks CUDA and OpenCL to implement the hashing algorithms necessary to mine Bitcoins. It was around this time I bought an AMD graphics card to mine Bitcoins, as AMD cards were notably more efficient for mining than their contemporaries developed by NVIDIA. This incidentally, led to fairly serious supply issues for people actually interested in using AMD cards for gaming, as miners would pay a premium for these cards. For a brief time, an expensive AMD GPU was essentially a license to print money. But then came the ASICs.

In the Bitcoin would "ASICs" typically refers to the integrated circuits specifically designed and manufactured to mine Bitcoins. Even in the early days of ASICs, they were decidedly more profitable to run than a GPU. When ASICs hit the scene with their off the chart performance (at least on a per watt basis), it quickly became unprofitable to mine Bitcoin on anything that wasn't a ASIC. This is because Bitcoin mining profitability is determined by difficulty (a measure of how much hashing computation needs to be done to earn Bitcoins by mining), and the difficulty increases as the total speed of all miners increases. Difficulty limits the total amount of Bitcoin that can be mined in a given time period, which means that you are essentially competing for a limited supply of coins when you mine, and more efficient mining will gradually push less efficient miners out of the market. You will note on the chart above (chart is logarithmically scaled), while mining difficulty remained stable from mid 2011 to the beginning of 2013, starting in 2013 there was a significant difficulty increase, forcing many GPU miners out of the market.  Many insisted this was not a problem, and that it was just a natural stage in the evolution of Bitcoin. But there actually was a problem, and a fairly big one at that. Prior to this event, Bitcoin mining had been a reasonably democratic process, with mining being distributed over a fairly large amount of miners. But when ASICS took over that number got smaller, and it only continued to shrink as profitable ASIC mining became more competitive. Further consolidation of mining pools has led to a situation where there is now a single entity, Bitmain, gradually moving towards majority control of Bitcoin.

Litecoin had already been on the scene since 2011. It's major differences from Bitcoin were that it provided faster transactions than Bitcoin, and used a different mining algorithm that required large amounts of memory to mine efficiently. Since ASICs relied better hashing efficiency for their edge, algorithms that were memory dependent could not be optimized as well by ASICSs. This was an important differentiation, because that mean Litecoin mining for profit would remain accessible to people who couldn't afford their own chip fabrication for longer than Bitcoin would. This created a niche for Litecoin, and helped to keep GPU miners in the game a bit longer. During this period, increased democratization alone was justification enough for Litecoin (and other altcoins) to exist. Other reasons include, fancy features with questionable real world utility (Ethereum's smart contracts), increased anonymity (Monero), or cute memes (Dogecoin).

However, while it may be nice to have diversity in terms of offerings, it is highly debatable there is any utility in have over 100 alternatives to Bitcoin. And those are just the alternatives you can trade on Bitfinex, let alone any other alternatives people might come up with which never gain traction. And then there are the splits. Splits happen when there is disagreement in how a cryptocurrency should operate, using driven by disagreements between the people who maintain the software or the large stakeholders involved with the mining. This has led to altcoins like Bitcoin Cash, which was derived from Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin Cash ABC/Bitcoin Cash SV, which were both derived from Bitcoin Cash. And yes, when these splits occur, all of a sudden there are 21 million new coins created out of thin air. But, since anyone holding the coin being split at the time of the split would effectively be holding the exact same amount of the new coin being created, in theory no value is lost. Unless you happen to be storing your coins in a wallet controlled by a third party entity that doesn't want to give you a stake in the new currency, in which case it sucks to be you I guess?

And let's talk about the wallet situation, while it is possible to store Bitcoins in a reasonably secure way without storing the entire blockchain by using wallets such as Electrum, if you want complete unilateral control of your Bitcoins, without any third party involved, you need a copy of the entire Bitcoin blockchain, which is currently over 187 Gigabytes in size. This could take days to download on even a relatively fast Internet connection, and would take more space than many have on their entire computer. And it's only getting bigger. And you need to leave the program running to avoid additional wait times when you start your Bitcoin client before sending any coins. And then you would have to do this for every altcoin you want to use as well. Is it any wonder people just leave their coins on exchanges and other third party websites, only to lose them when the site suddenly shuts down. Oh, and good luck if you accidentally send money to the wrong person, there's no way to undo that.

Okay, okay, so the cryptocurrency situation is far from idea, but things will get better! Well, so far, that does not seem to be the case. And there is a worrying trend starting to emerge that could spell disaster for the future of cryptocurrency. Take a look at the mining difficulty chart, when presented with a linear scale.

This wouldn't be the first time the difficulty of mining Bitcoin has dropped, but the extent of the drop is actually kind of unprecedented. What this means is, a significant amount of mining was shut down, most likely due to miners being unable to make a profit by selling Bitcoin at the going market rate. But even more than that, one might infer that they also don't want to be holding Bitcoins, or else they might be willing to take a short term loss under the assumption the price of Bitcoin would rebound. This drop in mining directly coincides with the recent drop in Bitcoin price, which had been hovering above $6000 for quite some time, to below $4000. It has now rebounded back above $4000, but considering that expectations for Bitcoin have typically been bullish in the holiday season, this situation does not look promising.

But let's play out this scenario even a bit further, and ask ourselves what might happen if Bitcoin continues trending down. If mining is not profitable, even more miners will just ship, until only the most profitable ASIC miners will continue to mine Bitcoin. In this (fairly likely) scenario, a single organization would end up with full control of Bitcoin. And even if said organization had the best of intentions for the currency, even they would not continue to mine it if they couldn't make a profit, and then this would lead Bitcoin vulnerable to a hostile takeover from anyone who could amass a sufficient supply of ASICs. Bad news all around.

But it gets worse. Let's ask ourselves now, given that Bitcoin has peaked for the foreseeable future, and we may realistically never see have a sustained upward trend again, who is going to hold Bitcoins? Someone has to, because if no one is willing to hold them for even a little while, the market would completely collapse. But no one is going to want to hold an asset that just decreases in value, and given the volatility in the mining situation, it's very hard to trust Bitcoin has a future. So altcoins to the rescue? Except altcoins have not been able to demonstrate a resistance to the ASICs which led to mining consolidation either. If any given cryptocurrency is doomed to be controlled by a single entity, then why should anyone have confidence that the same thing that happened to Bitcoin would not happen again?

What makes this situation even worse, is that there is a ridiculous amount of liquidity between different cryptocurrencies, meaning you really have no incentive to hold anything that won't go up. Even if you have to exchange your altcoin for Bitcoin to actually buy something, this can be done at a moment's notice, meaning that there is no incentive to ever hold Bitcoin for any longer than it takes to complete a transaction. So if everyone is just shuffling money between altcoins, and no one wants to hold something that won't go up in value, the whole situation just turns into a ridiculous game of whack-a-mole, and anyone who doesn't want to be taken for a ride would be best advised to just hold in traditional currency. And the longer this goes on, the more altcoins will be introduced, and the more diluted the market will get. And even if an altcoin were to usurp Bitcoin's throne, it would likely just lead to a smaller bubble with the same result. And a smaller one. And a smaller one. Until the whole cryptocurrency market starts to flat-line.

One you lose people's trust in such a catastrophic way, it's almost impossible to get it back. No one will want to be the only left holding Bitcoins, and exchanges will collapse, markets will shut down, and we will be back to square one. It kind of gives you pause, when you consider the case of Satoshi Nakamura. The infamous and anonymous founder of Bitcoin, who has sat by the sidelines during this entire escapade, holding his coins tightly to his chest. He mined Bitcoins worth billions of dollars at their peak, and he never sold a single coin. It makes one wonder what his true intents were, and if he ever accomplished them.

The True Story Cordial Minuet - Part One: Game Theory

I first learned of the game Cordial Minuet from a post on the gaming blog Kotaku. It was essentially presented as a skill based gambling game, where choices affected outcome more than chance. I was intrigued. Let's be honest here, who hasn't been tempted by the prospect of free money at some point in their lives? But when it comes to gambling, unless you have an edge against the house, it's a losing proposition. And with games like Texas Hold 'em, whatever skill may be involved is significantly offset by luck, and situation memorization (understanding the odds at any given time). Despite that glamorous presentation it is often given, playing it online typically devolves into a grind by which you gradual syphon money off unskilled players by applying your knowledge of the game's fundamentals. Assuming no one is cheating. In other words, you might as well get a real job.

Cordial Minuet however, seemed to be different. To me it actually seemed to have a lot in common with fighting games, which rely on a concept called "yomi". To those not familiar with fighting game jargon, yomi is the concept of predicting an opponent's future actions, based on past actions. For example, if you were playing paper rock scissors, and you knew that the other player had a bias towards picking rock the first turn, you should always pick paper the first you play with them, because this will give you a statistical edge. And then, if/when they figure out you are always picking paper the first turn, they will start being biased towards picking scissors instead, and so on. Essentially, you recognize patterns in the opponent's behavior, and you adjust your strategy to take advantage of those patterns.

To someone who doesn't realize you are doing this, it can at times seem like magic. They will ask, "How do you always know what I am going to do?", and you might reply "I can see it before it even happens." Magic. Except really, you are just building a probabilistic model of the other player's behavior in your head, and you are using that model as a predictor of their future actions. You can even manipulate the other player by doing things which you know they have a predictable reaction to, and then countering their response. For example, if someone has a habit of always using scissors after they use paper twice in a row, you can counter that by picking rock. The more details you can hold in your head regarding the other player's patterns, the more effortlessly you can counter their actions. And when both players understand that this is what they are doing, they will strive to be less predictable, while still taking advantage of patterns in the other player's behavior.

Now let's take a step back and look at game theory as a whole. There are essentially three factors that determine success at any game. The first is luck. In this context, we are just going to define luck as the part of the game we don't have control over, such as the roll of the dice in a board game. In theory, there may be things we could do to take control of these factors, but let's assume we're not going to do that. The second is efficiency. In other words, how fast/accurately you can perform an action in a given amount of time. So say if you had a contest to see who could press the button the fastest in sixty seconds, this would be a contest of efficiency. Efficiency also applies to reflexes, which determine the minimum time it takes you to respond to something another player might do. Then finally, we have prediction (or yomi), which was discussed above. Games are all more or less designed around these three factors, and the balance of how these three factors interact with one another determine what skills will be most applicable to a game.

In a casino game like the slot machine, luck is generally considered the biggest factor. Because you are unable to predict and adapt to the behavior of the game, you are powerless to affect the outcome, and therefore the correct strategy is not to play. It may be theoretically possible to predict the game's outcome at a given time, but since it is not practical for you to do so, you are left at the mercy of the game's odds. In a game like a music game (think Guitar Hero), efficiency would be the biggest factor. How quickly you can interpret the flow of input from the screen into accurate physical reactions will determine your skill at the game, and you improve mainly by training your mental and physical response to the input you are receiving. But then, we have prediction/yomi. This is particularly interesting, because when you talk about competitive gaming, this aspect is often the one that ends up being the most significant. You see, in order to have a skill curve in a game, you need to be able to get better by learning. Luck won't do us much good here, because we have defined luck as things which cannot be predicted by the player. Efficiency can be improved by training, but this alone will not make for a very interesting game. If both players are competing only on efficiency, they will tend to reach a plateau in their skill level and then lose interest. But if we are competing on prediction, the game will turn into a constant battle to one up the other player, with a potentially diverse set of strategies.

There is another factor that should be mentioned, which is the requirement for outside knowledge. This is not the same as the other factors however, because it is basically just an advantage, that will disappear as you play the game. For example, in a trivia game, you may initially be at a disadvantage if you weren't familiar with the subject material, but eventually you would learn the answers to questions, and would be on even footing with a more knowledgeable person. The amount of time this takes of course, would be proportional to just how many possible questions there were to begin with. This could in many ways just thought of another form of experience, which states that you will be better at a game the longer that you play it, because you will learn the probability of the game's outcomes, and become better at predicting them. But this is different than predicting the other player, as it applies to only the game itself, and not the person you are playing against.

Part of the reason Cordial Minuet interested me, was that all the skill of the game seemed to be placed on prediction. Unlike games such as Texas Hold 'em, in which a lot of the strategy has to do with specific situations and the probabilities of the outcomes of those situations, Cordial Minuet was purely a game of anticipating what the other player would do. I later learned that there was a degree of luck involved, since certain board layouts you may play on could be slightly more advantageous to one player than the other, but there is always a way to win, regardless of the board. In other words, think poker, where there is essentially no such thing as a bad hand. Sounds interesting? I thought so, at the time.

 So what could go wrong? Stay tuned for Part 2: The Game...

One Year

It has been nearly one year since my life took an incredible turn that nearly changed everything. For anyone who reached this page from my old blog, please take note, I am transgender, and I have transitioned since my last post there. This is nothing new, but the process of change continues for me, and I take on different tasks when I feel the time is right. At this moment, I felt the time was right to  reshape my online presence and start talking about things that led me to where I am now, and where I plan to go from here.

To begin with, as I said, my transition is nothing new. This is a journey I have been on for some time now, which started when I first decided to take hormones at the age of 24. I am 32 years old as of last October, so you can imagine that a lot has changed since then. I changed my name, I changed my legal gender, I grew long hair (again), I trained my voice (and subsequently had voice surgery), I endured hours of painful hair removal, I came out to friends and family (to mostly positive response), I changed the way I interacted with people (I am generally a much more positive and outgoing person than I used to be). Overall my transition has been an overwhelmingly positive experience that changed my life for the better.

But my transition is not what I want to talk about today. You see in spite of the positive changes, I still wasn't in a good place. I had gotten my chronic sleep issues under control after dealing with them from a young age, but I was now having severe headaches that seemed to have things in common with migraines, but traditional migraine medications were not effective. I still lived with my parents due to general lack of motivation and social anxiety over things that happened in my pre-transition life. My parents were tolerant of my transition (eventually), but they never really embraced it or accepted that it was something that I needed to do. I had a serious mental health episode at one point that led me to be hospitalized, and I was put on anti-psychotics. The experience took a lot out of me, and it took me a long time to feel relatively normal again. I had also been watching my father slowly succumb to Alzheimer's disease for the better part of a decade. In general I was constantly stressed out about my life and my transition, and not having any real friends since high school, I had no one else except my brother to turn to (who has always been supportive of me), which ended up putting a huge amount of stress on him.

I think in a lot of ways my transition only served to increase my isolation, because I wanted to completely disconnect myself from my old life, and I really had nothing to replace it with. I did things like online gambling out of desperation. I spent all day watching YouTube on many days. Even though my social anxiety had improved, I still hardly ever got out of the house. And then it happened. In December of last year, I had a complete psychotic breakdown. I ended up trying to kill myself, I threatened my family, and when the police were called, I resisted them and threatened them as well. I ended up being put in jail (after a short mental hospitalization), and spent the better part of the next month in solitary confinement (it wasn't technically solitary, but they did keep me by myself in the medical unit because I was transgender). For the first two days I was there, I wasn't even given my medication, which led me to be by myself, in a cold jail cell, unable to sleep, for two days. Trust me, it seems much longer when you are alone and sleep deprived. At one point I threatened to kill myself just to get access to the heavy blankets they give people who are suicidal, because I was freezing cold.

I don't really have anything to say in my defense. I made the decisions that led me to get to that place, and although I may have lost perspective during my episode, the anger and hostility that led me to reach that point was very real. I guess it's easy to become mad at the world when you feel like there is no one who really cares about you, and that all you can do is hold everything inside of yourself. But I also had a negative attitude about life in general, and I lost my ability to see the beauty in life, and what it had to offer. However, this was a choice I made. You may not always be able to choose the experiences you have in life, but you always have to choice of how to interpret them, and the interpretation I had chosen was of a dark and hostile world that only wanted me to suffer. And it was this interpretation that led me to where I ended up.

In a way, jail was probably the best place for me, because while I was locked up I had time to reflect on the decisions I had made and their consequences. Once they let me into the library, I stated reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and I have to say, that while I was aware of his work, I was nevertheless quite impressed when I actually took the time to read it. It was a fairly dense book (I only got about halfway through), but it was a much needed outlet for me to rebuild my mental stamina. I also, started writing, and drawing, and actually exercising. And while this may sound a bit cliched, I also reconnected with God.

I think that it is easy to blame God when bad things happen in your life, or turn away because there are so many confusing messages about faith and morality in the world. Truth be told, I had begun to find it unconvincing myself, since everyone seems to practice faith in their own seemingly unrelated ways, that a true higher power even existed. And yet, the time I spent in jail, and the circumstances surrounding it, left me with no doubt that a higher power had intervened to save me. When I was lying in a hospital bed (before I ended up in jail), I saw something. I guess you could call it a near death experience, although it was only in the metaphysical sense, but I literally saw hell itself. And as it turns out, it was nothing at all. I mean literally nothing. As in an infinite and eternal empty void, in which nothing exists but your own disembodied consciousness.

They say sometimes you have to hit bottom before coming back up, and that was truly the lowest thing I had ever seen or experienced. It made me question almost anything and everything I had ever believed. And the bizarre experiences that surrounded my psychotic episode and subsequent time in jail only served to further convince me that what I'd seen is real. My experiences led me to realize some things about God and the nature of our existence as human beings, and I think I should set the record straight about a few things.

First, there absolutely is a God, and believe it or not he does love and care about you. If it ever doesn't seem like it, you need to keep the following point in mind. Second, God does not "cause" suffering. Suffering a state of mind that one enters, and entering it is always a choice. Some people might read that and say "But is feeling pain a choice?". I would say, pain and suffering are not the same thing. Pain is just a feeling, and suffering is a way of responding to that feeling. Third, bad things happen, because without bad things, good things would have no meaning. We are imperfect human beings, and we need an imperfect world to live in. Sometimes bad things will happen, but if you maintain a positive attitude, that just makes you appreciate the good things even more. Finally, love will always lead you back to God. Regardless of how you practice your faith, love really is universal. In this world we are often confronted with complex questions of morality, and our path is not always clear. I think in general, trying to process everything in a purely rational way, will just leave you confused. What you feel in your heart about something is more meaningful than any rational thinking could ever be, and if you are willing to trust your heart, and live your life with love, that will lead you back to God.

Among other things I can to realize, is that God is truly everywhere, and he is always with you, and considering he has put up with you until now, the least you could do is give him the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately, the specifics of how you live your life are much less important than what is in your heart, and God always knows what is in your heart. It is impossible to hide from him. No rational justification will ever be enough. If you do not in your heart believe you are doing the right thing, you will face the consequences. Eastern religions sometimes call it Karma, but whatever you call it, it's real, and you can see it working in your life every day. I had allowed my heart to be corrupted and to turn against the one who cared about me more than anything, and I did face consequences for that. That I was given a second chance, is really a testament to God's mercy.

So, what happened next you might ask? Well I spent Christmas in jail, but in January I was bailed out and went to a crisis house. I met a lot of very interesting people there, and began to share my experiences with them and talk about what I had come to understand. I did have a night where I jumped out of a second story window (yes, really), after which I was hospitalized for another month or so, and then put in another crisis house for a more extended stay. Eventually I got together with a new friend I made to rent a house together with some of his old classmates from high school. And I have generally been working to better myself and try to have a more positive influence on the world. I am still a very imperfect person, and I don't always know the right thing to do, but I'm learning that if you treat people with love and kindness, you will always see the best in them. That is my story, but I still have much more to come.

I started this blog because I wanted an outlet to talk about some of the things I have experienced, life in general, friends, family, and other projects I have been or am currently working on. I still do programming stuff, and there will of course be some of that as well. But I really want to just let this blog organically evolve and take on a life of it's own. In any case, I hope that what I have to offer will reach you and/or help you in some way.