* This blog has remained mostly dormant because Joe and I have had our heads down ramping up the startup. We’ll be talking about our plans in the weeks ahead, so thanks for bearing with us.

* I’m participating in a program for charity called Get in their Shoes which auctions off the shoes of famous people, such as David Copperfield and Guy Kawasaki, as well as the people who fetch their coffee, such as me. I submitted the shoes I wore from the first day of high school through the first day of this month, when the program’s founders told me they absolutely needed them, at which point I shipped them and ran barefoot from FedEx to Payless to buy a new pair. Along with my crappy old shoes (size 10.5), you also get a 30-minute mentorship with me. But let’s face it: the shoes are the main draw.

* My girlfriend Vanessa (who attends the University of Miami) is looking for a job here in the Bay Area this summer in music, such as at a record label or a publication. So far we’ve only found two kinds of companies here: tech companies, and Thai restaurants. Any suggestions?

* If you’re thinking of investing in Opera, please don’t be mislead into believing my post that Opera is buying itself, which Google Finance is currently running on its Opera investment page. Opera is not—I repeat, NOT—purchasing itself. (Digg/Sun, anyone?)

* My partner in crime, Joe Hewitt, has released the successor to his beloved DOM Inspector: FireBug. The Firefox extension offers Web developers an integrated suite of debugging tools to analyze everything from XMLHTTPRequests to DOM events to individual page elements (a la DOM Inspector). I have to admit, though, that I’m a little disappointed to give up debug alerts. They’re often the most creative and spontaneous part of programming, because rather than something logical like alert("reached"), my fingers always dish out random scraps of subconscious like alert("fried eggs").