An explanation of the historical posts

When I first moved to London in 1998, I wrote messages to a large group of family and friends back in the states. I recently found the diary entries, tucked away in a corner of the hard disk, and thought I better put them into form that's less easy to lose. So I'm reposting them here, with comments on how things have changed. Some of them are embarrassingly wrong or naive, but it is fun to look back.