The truth is my day starts sometimes between 3 and 4 am and runs non-stop until 7 or 7:30 pm, with zero need to travel, and in between there are times when I have the time to blog. I wish I had more time. I wish I was better organized. I also wish I had the time to read these other important bloggers, and to respond to 100-pct of my mail like I used to.

I'm like you: I have a "wish list" and a time problem. So I do what I can do.

And when things like personal hardware or software problems (today it's software), spam/viruses or Stelco drag me down, I tend to whine. That happens to people, I think, when they can't get problems solved.

I have always fancied myself a wealth creator, which is to say I like to add value, where I can to society's benefit. My style has always been to move the hurdles out of the way so that progress can flow. In that I am a big believer in the lessons of the Chinese Masters (classical Taoism), which is a story for another day.

In the past 20 months, I feel I have gone maybe 5-pct to where blogging can go (with tools available today). Trading blogs in 2006 will grow into audio and video and text messaging and virtual private networks and all those technical applications of digital communications, I feel.

This stuff is happening fast. I'd like to speed up.

The problem, of course, in going faster is (i) you need to rely on others (i.e., in a non-commercial situation) to help, and (ii) by the time you arrive at your destination, you have already set new goals and objectives, so there is no end point.

This means that you have to enjoy the process (i.e., the journey, the dance, etc). And when you don't, it becomes obvious to readers.

With all the tools, blogging is easy to do, but it is inherently difficult because it is a personal expression. You lay yourself bare to whomever " with the knowledge that the world has some pretty ugly faces to it.

The one thing that allows me to drive forward is that I have no axe to grind. I simply have opinions " right or wrong " that I think might help others who do not have as much experience or expertise as I.

And maybe I do have an intuitive sense of markets. I'm not sure, but one thing I do know is that I understand markets enough to see that if you do not approach them -- like writing this blog -- with an open mind, you'll get eaten up.

Capital markets are about life, and trading and trading blogs should mirror it.

That's why I don't care to be known as a perma-bear or perma-bull, when I'm neither, or to be an adherent of any one approach to analysis and decision-making, when I know that balanced judgment is critical.

Today, I'd like to take the time to personally contact my fellow bloggers who made the Forbes Best of the Web list, and their favorites as well, but, you see, I'm stuck trying to disable a vertical scrolling feature in the new MS Windows XP (that the old one didn't have).

The new XP flips my pages over a few lines at a time, like a wave that is totally distracting because of the constant delays. Since I cannot work like this, I have spent a couple hours at trouble-shooting, without success. You cannot imagine how many (expletives deleted) I have hurled at Bill Gates.

I figure Gates has made his billions by issuing lousy software to people like me who are almost " but not quite " capable of using it the way they say it works. Of course when things on my desktop are going right, I am a happy and productive guy.