* 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").

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS—Two of the world’s oldest telephone companies announced plans today to merge into a telecommunications giant that will better serve consumers who own stock in either company. The news broke in an at&t press release trumpeting that the BellSouth merger “Will Speed Innovation, Competition and Convergence,” easing national concerns of slow competition. At press time, consumers were too busy converging to comment.

The news is less rosy for employees of the new company as it seeks to eliminate redundancy. BellSouth will lay off 50%—or 13,500—of its Dinnertime Telemarketers division, although most have already found new work as Perfume Blasters at Bloomingdale’s.

In an unusual twist, the announcement suggested not that the merger would ultimately bring both companies down in a spectacular fireball of finger-pointing and public humiliation, but instead that “this merger is a logical next step that creates substantial value” for consumers. AT&T Chairman Edward Whitacre promised that while customer service wait times would double, consumers would now be able to wait over Internet Protocol (WOIP).

The news comes amid a massive branding campaign by at&t to reposition itself as the nation’s provider of key services via billboards and newspaper ads that herald the company’s mission as “blogging delivered” and “photos delivered” . The campaign, which wraps up next month with “babies delivered,” seeks to revitalize the brand following a 2004 study that over 86% of adult males ages 18-26 identify AT&T as “some sort of pog?” In an effort to appear more trendy, the company lowercased its namesake to dismal results. But with SBC and now BellSouth under its belt, some analysts speculate that AT&T might be pursuing the holy grail of trendiness: a palindrome.

“They’re AT&SBC&BS&T now. Just one thing missing, and damned if I’m going to tell you what it is,” said Nigel McSnackenmeyer, a former Merrill-Lynch analyst who resigned today to found a new telecommunications company called “A”.

Shares in red-tape production companies rose $2500 in afterhours trading.