...is the time elapsed since the previous post. Am I allowed to claim I've kept up this blog in various forms for over a decade, or do I have to subtract that time? This post serves as recognition that there's been a gap.

Credit for my return goes to Google+, for first renewing my interest in longer-than-facebook style posts and then suspending my account because my calling myself "Murph." there somehow violated their policy that you must, "use the name that commonly known by to my friends, family, and co-workers."

Anyways, back here and blowing off some of the dust.

So, you've probably already noticed that you have to create an account and log in in order to leave comments. That's so the site doesn't get totally jammed with spam.

Then you've probably noticed that your first comments don't show up right away. That's because spambots can create accounts too, so I screen comments for spam - once I know an account is a non-spammer, I click my "known human" box to let you comment unscreenedly.

If you've already gone through all that, you shouldn't notice any difference in the mechanism, but I've added a captcha - new user creation and comments by users not-yet-known-human now require answering a simple math problem. That's so that I don't have to delete 20 pending comments from the spam account of the day every day.