1.	One of the reasons I'm so fascinated with the US political process is that I'm personally involved in a political process myself, the evolution of a cross-platform wiring protocol known as XML-RPC. However it happened, thru luck, vision, patience or effective compromising, I have become a pivotal person in the evolution of the protocol.
2.	I used to say I live for plumbing, but now I've refined that, I love the *politics* of plumbing. It's the working together that I find fascinating; having been immersed in the lack of working together in the past, that was just preparation for the day when people would work together. (I'm still a member of the Church of Murphy.)
3.	This has been a week of negotiation, there's measurable consensus forming inside Microsoft that it's now time for them to move on XML-RPC, to get our work in synch, and to develop a way to go forward with other parties involved, the Python, Java and Perl implementations, along with the new MSIE 5 implementation, released yesterday, and the Netscape and Microsoft/Mac browser implementations, released earlier today.