skippy_

I bought some really geeky t-shirts today. Some wonderful bits of cotton involving Latin, progressive rock, computers - gotta let your freak flag fly.

Looking at my new picture, I can't help but feel embarrassed. I mean, look at the bags under my eyes. It was taken in the morning hours so what do you expect? Hope I don't get in trouble for putting it up.

Tomorrow will be a busy day. Gotta find out Mel's new room #. More resumes to send. And I've gotta figure out what to do with countless leftover brats. Tonight I'll make some tomato/cucumber salad so the marriage of the flavors can be consummated overnight. And I borrowed a 5-gallon bucket so I can make sauerkraut.

I see that the Isthmus published my letter to the editor. Of course it was truncated thereby removing all of my sarcasm. It was a short letter yet they saw fit to include only a couple sentences whereas everyone else was given many more words. Go figure. One of the few times I actually engage in brevity and I'm reduced even further. My editor emailed me last week and asked if it was me that was quoted in Allan Moore's new book. I had no idea so I asked her for the quote and she sent it. Sure enough it had the words of your humble narrator. I now exist in the print world as a footnote! Allan Moore is a professor of music in some capacity at some university in the UK. He has written a slim volume about Jethro Tull's Aqualung album and he quoted from my essay on Tull. I think I can lay claim to the title of Madison's Authority on Jethro Tull. Not a particularly glamorous title, I grant you, but, hey, I'll take what I can get.

Returning to things geeky, the new version of Firefox is, as Darth Vader might say, impressive. I haven't had a chance to give its RSS capabilities a spin but must say that it handles plug-ins like a fucking charm. And the find feature is handy as well. Inversely, Windows Media Player 10 is a mixed bag. While minimizing to its own toolbar hasn't (yet) caused a fault in explorer.exe like 9 did, it is blatantly annoying to have a normal playlists and a Now Playing playlist. Intuitively you'd add files to a normal playlist and let 'er rip. But they don't appear in the Now Playing list so you've really gotta fuck around to sort the track order and whatnot. So I've reverted back to Winamp. I'm tempted to upgrade to 5 but have this sneaking suspicion that its footprint is gonna be huge and that there will be all sorts of built-in features that I don't want doing things I don't want them to. And I don't know if my Shorten, Ape, and Flac plug-ins will work. Lastly, I snagged a program to check out my bookmarks and find dead links. I was able to purge about 100 bookmarks that were no longer good. And I downloaded a thingy which simulates the sidebar hoolie in Longhorn. In theory, it could be really handy but I just don't have any great use for it, at the moment.

I'm debating whether or not to give a graphic description of my weekend's adventures with the new toys. I shall listen to a Doctor Who audio drama and mull it over...