Ahem, sorry. Anyway, the reason I called you here today is to let you know that Mac|Life has posted a how-to I put together many months ago, which aims to provide tips for home recording with GarageBand. You Mac owners may enjoy it — and for anyone on Windows machines, I tried to make these tips as general as possible, so many of them can be applied to any recording situation.

So I hope you enjoy them.

So head on over to Liliputing for early impressions of my brand-spankin’-new Acer Aspire One D250. And I should have a full review up sometime the week after E3.

Four hours later I’m angry, my forehead is red from all the slapping, and I’m completely disgusted. (Also, probably, hungry.) Because either this simple, obvious tool does not exist, or I — with all my intertube experience and Google-fu — cannot find it.

Here’s the latest example: I do a lot of writing for websites, right? But I’m a freelancer, not on staff, which means that most of my writing gets sent to an editor rather than inserted directly into the site’s content management system, or CMS. That means that I have to send over a document file of some type, a document file created in some sort of word-processing apparatus.

And here’s the problem: Every word-processing apparatus I’ve tried is positively horrendous at generating HTML, the code-level backbone of internet writing. Every single one, when you attempt to save a simply formatted text file as HTML, inserts all kinds of crazy formatting information that would be an absolute horror for any editor to have to remove on a regular basis.

This is bad for business.

So I started searching for a very simple tool: A word processor that allows the writer to mark up his or her document with basic formatting — bold, italic, underline, and links — and then allows the document to be saved (or God, at the very least, viewed) in HTML that includes nothing but paragraph breaks; markers for bold, ital, and underline; and links.

I want to be able to type, just as I am doing now with my blogging software’s online content management system, using the near-universal commands of Ctrl-U, Ctrl-I, Ctrl-B, and Ctrl-K — or at the very least buttons on a toolbar — and have those turn out <u>, <i>, <b>, and <a href=”"> tags, and nothing else. And when I add a new paragraph I want to see a </p><p>, dammit!

Can I enter these tags by hand? Sure. But here’s the problem: Right now I’m doing a weekly music-game column for Green Pixels that is almost entirely links. And like most sensible sites, when GP links to a page on another website, they instruct your browser to open a new window. That means that each link needs to say <a href=”http://URL” target=”_blank”>Link Text</a>. You try typing that about fifty times and see if you don’t start looking for a better way.

This is the solution I’m working with right now: I type the big lists of song releases into Microsoft Word, because I like to keep them alphabetical and Word is good at stuff like that. Then I copy the list and paste it without formatting — a key distinction! — into Google Docs. I use Google Docs to turn all those lists into links, one for each artist and one for each song, because Docs includes a simple key-mapping for that and also allows you to automatically add that “target=_blank” attribute to each one. Docs also allows you to view the file in HTML, so I do that, copy it, and paste it back into Word. Because Docs also inserts a bunch of unnecessary crap like titles and ID tags (for some unfathomable reason) on each link, and also uses double line breaks in place of paragraph breaks (for an even less fathomable reason). So I have to do a find-and-replace to remove all that extraneous gibberish that drives editors crazy, and Docs’ find-and-replace is garbage.

I know I’ve probably lost most of you already, but the point is this: My needs are simple, but I have yet to find a tool that meets them. I’ve tried word processors…I’ve tried notepads…I’ve tried desktop-based blogging software…I’ve tried online options. None of them seem to solve a problem that I have got to imagine has been bugging web writers for a decade now.

I asked folks on Twitter for recommendations, and the results were almost comically diverse. Most people seem to either be entering all the formatting tags by hand, or relying on their editors to make traditional word-processing documents web-ready. No two people used the same software.

Clearly there is a need here. But you tell me: Am I asking too much? Or am I just missing that one awesome bit of software that everybody knows about but no one’s bothered to hip me to? I’m getting desperate here, people. Please help me out with your suggestions before I’m forced to teach myself a modern programming language and write my own damn software.

1969 – The first ARPANET link is created, building the first strand in what would eventually become the Internet.

1978 - The first multi-user dungeon (MUD) is created. Little more than a customizable chatroom, the MUD is nevertheless the predecessor to today’s MMORPGs.

1985 - Quantum Computer Services launches Quantum Link, an online hub for the Commodore 64, featuring simple multiplayer board games. The service is later renamed America Online.

1991 - Neverwinter Nights, the first MMORPG with graphics, is launched on AOL. It costs $6 an hour to play. Its server capacity: 50 players.

1996 - Quake is released, shortly followed by QuakeWorld, a client for playing the game over the Internet. The era of the online FPS is born.

1997 - Ultima Online is launched. 100,000 subscribers sign up within the first six months, only to be brutally PKed and have their boats stolen.

1998 - The Dreamcast is released in Japan, becoming the first game console to launch with a built-in modem. Also, the last.

1999 - EverQuest and Asheron’s Call are launched, completing (with UO) the unholy triumvirate that has strongly influenced MMORPGs to this day.

2002 - Xbox Live is launched on the original Xbox, setting new standards for communication both in-game (with standardized voice chat) and cross-game (with a unified login and friend list). PS2 and Gamecube also debut online functionality, but neither approaches XBL in popularity.

2003 - EverQuest is ported to PS2 in the form of EverQuest Online Adventures. The gaming world notices, yawns, and goes back to hunting for new Final Fantasy XI screens.

2004 - Halo 2 is released, featuring one of the most popular online components in any console game. Within the next two years over half a billion games of Halo 2 will be played online. Also this year: World of Warcraft launches. You may have heard of it.

2006 - PS3 and Wii are launched. Xbox Live takes note of the systems’ respective online offerings, heaves a sigh of relief, and returns to lounging on its jewel-encrusted throne.

2007 - Halo 3 launches. A crippled Internet limps along under the strain of a few million players all getting online at the same time.

2008 - “Internet2″ is completed, offering researchers and universities 100 Gbps transfer speeds.

2009 - Debut of 100-Gbps streaming porn.

2010 - Most metropolitan areas now offer free Wi-Fi within city limits. All that shared bandwidth makes users nostalgic for the dial-up days.

2029 - The Internet, now self-aware, sends a T-800 back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

2050 - Humans move to an internet-only existence, uploading their brains to permanently live in the electronic world.

2112 - Attention, all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control.

Here’s the funny thing. 1981 was a long time ago, sure. Pushing 30 years ago now. But in the realm of PC technology, how different was it, really, from 1991?

Think back, now. By 1991, sure, Prodigy and CompuServe and GEnie and AOL were all running (or at least had been), but what was the average person’s exposure to things like reading news articles on a PC? Look, I was pretty much as big a computer geek as there was back then, and even I was only on the Cleveland Freenet — it had the precursors to IRC and Usenet and messageboards, sure, but it was a far cry from what we have today.

In fact, I can remember where I was the first time I ever saw NSCA Mosaic, essentially the first graphical browser: I was in my first apartment, which means it was sometime between April of 1994 and May of 1995. And it was shortly after that — I was still in college, so before June of 1996 — that I saw the first commercial with a URL in it.

So, OK, we’ve time-dated the Internet’s move to widespread popularity, at least in its current form: somewhere smack-dab in the middle of the ’90s.

Let’s digress for a moment. I was watching TV sometime around the Obama inauguration, and someone aired an interview with George W. Bush, from when he was running for president. It was the one where someone was grilling him about the names of foreign dignitaries. Remember that one? If so, do you by any chance remember what year it was?

It was 1999.

Maybe I’m weird, but that just rocked me. The guy who just left office was campaigning literally a couple of years after the term “Internet” became widely known. In an offhand way, it illustrates the fact that the Internet in its present form — which is to say essentially the world as we now know it — is barely a decade old.

That’s kind of awesome, isn’t it? In terms of technology, this quaint 1981 world of rotary phones, acoustic couplers, and monochrome screens isn’t much different than 1991. But the difference between 1991 and 2001? You might as well be living on another planet.

Maybe this happens to every generation. My parents, after all, saw similar things happening with television, my siblings with music technology. (And no matter what you iPod-slinging whippersnappers may say, the leap from LP to cassette was almost incomprehensibly more significant than cassette or CD to MP3.)

But if you ask me, it’s both inspiring and terrifying. Technology has changed so dramatically in such a short time, who knows what things might look like in another 10 years?

All I know is, I’m dying to find out.

But what I wanted you to know is that Green Pixels has put up another one of my how-tos, this one about streaming media from a PC to a Wii. Yes, it’s possible! Yes, it’s even fairly easy. But no, it’s not as intuitive as using either a 360 or PS3. And no, I won’t buy you a pony.

I’m not even sure why you’d ask that.