To avoid entries becoming a "wall of text" -- especially the lengthy outings -- I've long borrowed from the Philip Greenspun school of online articles and intermixed irrelevant, largely random photographs.

Generally I finish the entry, and then quickly select one, two, or three recently taken shots -- shots with zero correlation to the story in question -- and stick them in. It adds a bit of color, and I've gotten some comments that people enjoy the diversion. As a side-effect, it's a great example of subjective interpretation, because some readers build their own explanation for how each picture fits with the story (I've gotten a few emails describing these interpretations, and it is truly fascinating. A few had me convinced that I must have subconsciously thought that the picture represented X, the explanation was so compelling).

A small amount of extra bandwidth for a little extra color and diversity in the entries.

I recently got an excellent bit of feedback from a longtime friend and associate: They enjoyed the pictures, but found that they made visiting the site during work hours an almost covert activity. Pictures of my daughter playing in a stream, night falling on a drive-in, or some orangutans at the zoo, they felt, would give a passerby or suspicious boss the feeling that they were slacking away reading kidsplayinginstreams.com, or driveinenthusiast.com, or zoopics.com. Knowing how entirely unenlightened many workplaces are, I immediately appreciated exactly what they were saying.

As such, from here on in I'll avoid unrelated pictures, perhaps sticking to pictures of circuit boards and control flows.

Completely Offtopic - Several days back I was stuck driving behind a huge late-model Chevy Suburban in an industrial park. What struck me as absurd wasn't the vehicle -- some people actually need a vehicle of such size, even if most don't -- but the way they carefully swerved to avoid every single manhole cover on the street: Undulations in the road of less than a CM, which are filtered out in the shocks of even the smallest of econoboxes, had this person doing panic avoidance maneuvers.

Irony in vehicle choices.