Wow. Just when I thought there wasn’t anything funny left on that Interweb thing, I found this.

I found it in a roundabout sort of way; I was on someone’s random weblog, and they linked to Neil Gaiman’s journal. He had a link at the very bottom (at least, that’s where it was when I was there about 10 minutes ago) to the Morbid Tendencies site, specifically to their “Bunny of the Month” club.

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Having just finished Octopussy and the Living Daylights, I think I can safely say that the Bond books (those 14 masterworks of espionage fiction by Ian Fleming) are far and away better than the movies.

Now, this isn’t to say that the Bond movies aren’t good; they do an adequate job of presenting the Commander’s stories. It’s just that there’s a certain something when it comes to books; in my mind, there’s more possibility for description and character development when you aren’t hampered by a 2-hour running time and the necessary reliance on verbal communication and expression.

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A few months ago, I had resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never get my system to do accelerated 3D graphics while still having both monitors on.

All that has changed thanks to Google. And a bunch of mailing lists and FAQs, and other linux hackers who have the same video card.

For reference, I have a Radeon 7000 (or Radeon VE) dual-head AGP video card. And Unreal Tournament works great. I’m still having some problems getting Half-Life to run in Wine, but that’s mainly half-life’s fault: I can’t get it to run in 24-bit or 32-bit color.

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Well, not me, per se, but the site. I mean, Ian Main is a masterful coder (see my previous post), but the blue & white just isn’t me. I thought for a while that I might just desaturate the images, and convert to an all-grey profile that looked sort-of like “Human Condition”, but I decided in the end that doing so would just be a half-measure.

What I really need is a completely new design. I like the minimalism that humancondition provides, but there are some things (mostly things I can’t adequately describe) that I don’t think capture what I want to present. Since I’m not much of an artist, and I definitely don’t want to do something cheesy like have a giant fanart of some anime or manga, I think I’ll stick with simple geometrics (like the current slashed lines and gradients). I’m sure I can hack the current stylesheet enough to make it do what I want (especially with the web developer extension to firefox), it’s really just a matter of figuring out what I want to do (have I said that already?) . . . .

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I added a whole bunch of new categories for posts earlier. Most of them are still invisible, because I haven’t made any posts with them yet. But there’s all the fun ones, like “Classical Music” and “TMBG”, and I sub-categorized the “Technical” category.

The trouble is, a lot of my old posts use these new categories, but the categories didn’t exist when I wrote the posts originally. So I am faced with a decision: Do I go through the archives and edit each post (I’m up to over 120 at this point, I think) so they reflect the new categories? Or do I just not care, and use the new categories for new posts and let the old ones bask in their “retro styling”?

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I know it’s a silly topic to rant about, but I’m bored and it’s been bugging me for a week or so.

Jack in the Box has introduced a new product called “Natural Cut Fries.” To go along with the new fries they’ve got a TV and radio spot running; the spot is a faux interview between “Jack” and some guy with a silly fake French accent, with the “interviewer” purporting that Jack must have some problem with the French because he named the product “Natural Cut”, not “French”.

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I was only vaguely aware of the production of a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. But lo and behold, there’s a trailer available. Oh, how I love the wonders that are the Internet.

Incidentally, if you haven’t read the amazingly expanded, inaccurately-named “Hitchhiker’s Trilogy,” here is a handy link for you. I thoroughly endorse the idea of your buying all five of them. A funnier series of books hasn’t been written, in my oh-so-humble opinion. I’m really looking forward to the movie.

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So it turns out that it’s really expensive to make enough cutting boards to cover all of my kitchen counters. I found some nice plans for butcher block cutting boards on Lowe’s web site (via a Google search, of course). So I figure, I’m never comfortable cutting anything on my counters, since they’re too low. Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame) has custom-made counters in his house, but I don’t have the luxury of being able to remodel my kitchen. So I whipped out the ol’ tape measure to see what I can find.

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A friend of mine recently said something to the effect of " Foucault’s Pendulum is The DaVinci Code, only more complicated." Now, I read The DaVinci Code several months ago, and I vaguely remember reading Foucault’s Pendulum back in high school. The only problem is, I can’t remember much of anything about it (the latter). So, since we were at Half-Price Books when he made that comment, I grabbed a copy and have been slowly but surely reading it. I’m up to chapter 20 (I think), and so far it does appear to have some of the same plot elements: a main character researches a secret organization, and stumbles onto a “plan” concerning the Holy Grail. I’m less than 1/5th through the book right now, but I’ll certainly write something when I finish it.

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The Wikipedia just hit 300,000 (English-language) articles ( slashdot noticed it before I did). Congratulations, and here’s hoping for at least 300,000 more.

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