“I think he more closely resembles a very clever script, which writes personal emails and funny comments to its blogposts, but has as its main function to scoure the web searching for things to link to from its blog. It is an extremely clever script that grades papers and applies for jobs, and convinces undergraduate students to install and improve upon its different functions when it moves from one site to an other. I believe the Dennis G. Jerz entity is proof of how far artificial intelligence has been developed.” —Torill on Jerz’s Literacy Weblog: ‘Indecently Active’ (Thinking With My Fingers)

Now that Torill has figured it all out, she will have to be dealt with. Severely. I will link to her and link to her and keep linking to her until she stops praising my blog. That’ll teach her. ;)

Thanks to the Seton Hill University IT folks, who supply free unlimited modem dial-up (though the modem is only 24.4 kb); thanks also to UWEC computer science student Will Gayther, who initially set me up so that my home-grown blogging software would let me post remotely, and then who started over from scratch and created a MySQL-based blogging tool to my specifications. (It’s still under development, but right now it’s far better than the miserable slop of PERL script that I had created for myself — and that encourages me to use it more. Well done, Will. How’s the “comment” functionality coming along, buddy?) And knowing that Rosemary Frezza will always e-mail me to tell me about broken links and typos means that I might add one or two more posts in the time I might otherwise have spent proofreading.

Update: Will writes, “hehe…I suppose I could add ‘functionality’ to your weblog, where every time you post an entry with ‘Will Gayther’ in it, it automatically links to my site.” That won’t be necessary, Will — I’ll add the link!