[...] Two years ago, weblogging was a new phenomenon to many, and not nearly as popular as it is today. Most of the bloggers were techbloggers or diarists. Rebecca Blood was wonderful. She responded quite kindly to my letters and was extremely helpful to a newbie. (Can't say the same for Dave Winer, but hey, that's Dave.) Warblogging didn't exist. Charles Johnson was a techblogger, although even then, he was posting about anti-Semitism and Arab terrorism. I was a regular reader of MetaFilter, Salon, and a sometime reader of Slashdot. All in all, the first year of my weblog had a much different voice—until the bloody Israeli spring of 2002. Between six straight days of terror bombings that culminated in the Passover Massacre, and the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, my feelings hardened considerably. Shortly thereafter, I found myself unable to remain in the neighborhood I'd established myself, over by Shelley Powers and Jonathon Delacour and the rest of that crew. Our thoughts were too far apart, and we kept getting into arguments. Bad ones. [...]