These days I'm probably happiest when I see my two daughters loving one another.

Every now and again your life's course can turn on one simple thing, some small decision the import of which isn't at all obvious at the time.

My life has been sadly lacking in snails. I can't clearly remember any first-hand encounters. The best thing I can come up with is second-hand, a passage in Jacques Pépin's autobiography (The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen) in which he describes prying snails from the terrace of his vacation home and cooking them up for dinner.

I'm always impressed that as we go through life most of the stuff we do doesn't matter that much, at least not ostensibly: you go to the grocery store, you work, you go to school. If any of that were omitted, most days, it wouldn't matter much.

I discovered Twitter, as I remember, and the idea of watching a global conversation go by immediately struck me as a fantastic thing. So I suppose it's not TwitterVision per se that excited me, but Twitter itself and its implications.

Research is all well and good, but I definitely enjoy writing the most. I will happily sit at my computer and work on a single paragraph for hours. And there's no better feeling than when your writing is going well.

My book review site and first blog, which I started in 2003. I started it because I was lamenting that while I read so much, I could hardly remember any of it. People would ask me what good books I'd read recently, or what I thought of a particular book, and my mind would go blank. At the same time, I'd just heard of blogging and found the idea interesting and thought I'd give it a try.