After many years of avoiding it, I have finally allowed myself the pleasure of learning a new software program. It’s called Dreamweaver and it is used to create and publish pages to the world wide web.

I have been involved in print media for the past 20 years and so software programs and I are not strangers. I have learned most of them. When the desktop publishing revolution began I was bi-lingual—which simply means that I used both an IBM PC (PC=personal computer) and an Apple Macintosh to do layout and design and get things to the printer.

As time went on, I became a mostly Mac kind of guy and have never looked back. Windows Vista, which is getting a lot of hype and advertising these days, is in my mind nothing but Microsoft trying to catch up to what the Mac has been about all along—fun to use. But that is another story.

Dreamweaver allows anyone who takes the time to learn it, the ability to put web pages up for everyone to see and interact with. As I learn to use it, I am once again being stretched and in the process being excited and entertained by the technology all around us.

During the ice ages, when I was a disk jockey for a college radio station in Michigan, I made the comment that top 40 radio represented only about 5 percent of the music that was being made in America.

The same can be said today about music and the internet. There is so much good music out there that we will never hear on the major radio stations or ever see advertised for sale in the local cd shops.

Many artists are actually publishing their stuff in MP3 format and uploading it to a web site where we can sample it and buy it and dowload it if we like it. You then load this stuff on an MP3 player like an Ipod. What I have found is there are hundreds, maybe thousands of music blogs that actually have reviews and samples of songs and links to the artist websites all tied into one.

As in writing blogs, music blogs can almost take over your life in the fact there are so many interesting ones. This is a technology that is getting bigger and bigger as the days go by.

In America, we don’t make shoes or steel anymore—we publish web pages and serve fast food. This has certainly been a transition from the industrial age when we made everything and sold it to everyone. From farm to factory to service economy in just a few short decades. And now I am a part of it.

I buy books and software and hardware and vitamins on the web. I do Amazon dot com and pay pal and ebay. And now I am finally learning to create the pages that are used to serve me and give me the information that I need and want.

More can be said about all of this…but I will end here and go back to bed. Instead of counting sheep, I guess I will count my blessings.