Friday, March 31, 2000
Yes, I decided to sneak in an update today, since this weekend is the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament.
Congratulations to Wake Forest on their win in the NIT Championship Game. It's a good win for the ACC.
Of course, N.C. State lost to Penn State in the consolation game of the NIT. (Some consolation.)
Even though I'm happy that an ACC school won the NIT, I don't want to see an ACC school win the NCAA Championship. That's because the only ACC school left is North Carolina, N.C. State's biggest rival.
So on Saturday, I'm pulling for Florida and Wisconsin. For some unknown reason, I kind of like Wisconsin. I'll still have to root for Michigan State in the championship game if they beat Wisconsin, because that's who I picked to win. Besides, they would play either Florida or North Carolina, and I'm not a big fan of Florida. I still have no trouble rooting for Florida against North Carolina. I can root for anybody who's playing North Carolina.
Well, I'll be on vacation until Monday. Enjoy the shortest weekend of the year, for those of you going to Daylight Savings Time.
Thursday, March 30, 2000
Netscape 6 to Debut April 5. I'm counting down the hours.
Jerry may be leaving Ben & Jerry's. Say it ain't so! Even if Jerry stays, it sucks that they might be bought out.
I found this Dear Sally letter from TheWebToday very interesting. Especially the last two paragraphs. (found via Eatonweb)
At this point, I think I am mainly logging for myself, and most of the links are not necessarily what I'm interested in, but what I think I can use to make a sarcastic remark. I have managed to work a few details about me into some of the links. I've only been doing this for a few days. I'm still learning. Hopefully I can avoid being a weblog "that lacks both heart and mind."
I got a mention in Now This today. Steve called Cluttered a "promising new 'og." (I had forgotten that he started using the term 'og) Thanks Steve.
I wouldn't normally have mentioned this (does anybody else really care who links to me?) except that he actually explained why he doesn't update more often. I find it amusing in a way, since my comment about him not updating was just an offhand remark.
I kind of understand his reasoning for not having more updates, and for not using Blogger. I had some of the same concerns before I started. I was afraid that "easy to use" would also mean "very inflexible." It's actually not that bad, and it's made updates really easy to make. I still need to play around with it a bit (especially with the archiving functions) but so far, it's helped out a lot.
Time for a rant. I noticed today that NBC canceled a show called "God, The Devil, And Bob." I don't know much about this show, other than the fact that it was animated. I never watched it. However, every news source I have seen today has used the headline "NBC's 'God' is Dead." It annoys me that people can't come up with an original headline.
Of course, at the first site where I saw that headline, I clicked on it to find out what they were talking about. So their stupid trick worked. At least I didn't click on an ad banners while I was there.
I have to agree with this article, In Praise of Older Software. For the most part, I've put off upgrading as long as I possibly could. (Yes, Netscape 6 is an exception to this rule.)
I'm getting ready to go out of town, so I can't guarantee any substantial updates until Monday.
Wednesday, March 29, 2000
Gillian Anderson interviews David Duchovny. (Found via IGN Sci-fi) Interesting interview. It's nice to see they do actually get along reasonably well, contrary to rumors. So people actually call David Duchovny "Scully"?
And as much as I love The X-Files, I think they should end it this year. I just have a bad feeling that if it goes another year (with or without Duchovny) the quality will be way down. Of course, I'm always open to another movie.
An IPO for Krispy Kreme. (I'll avoid making an obvious joke about dough, unlike the person who came up with the headline for this story.) I firmly believe that there will be an endless supply of hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts in heaven.
I know a lot of other weblogs are probably going to talk about this, but this Jon Katz article on Geek Profiling scares me. Over at rc3.org, Rafe has a link to that article as well as an article in WorldNetDaily.
Encouraging kids to rat on other kids is not the answer. But it's a lot easier to bribe the "good" kids to turn in the "bad" ones than to actually get parents actively involved. I don't want to see another Columbine, but is this really going to prevent it?
On a lighter note, I found another weblog that linked to me. Breaching the Web is a weblog that I had never read before. It's a pretty good weblog. After all, she linked to the cockroach birth control story too. And she called Cluttered a "fun new weblog." I'll have to add Breaching the Web (nice name, by the way) to my daily routine. Yes, flattery can get you somewhere with me.
Milky Way Shown To Be Eating Other Galaxies. Burp!
This reminds me of a story I wrote when I was in 7th grade. We had to write a tall tale, so I created this massive bad guy (whose name escapes me), and he ate whole galaxies, and a hero named Jupiter Jackson (modeled after Indiana Jones, of course) who stopped him. I got an A for that story. I think it stands out in my mind because it was one of the few things I had to write that I actually enjoyed writing.
Ah, the bizarre things that happened 14 years ago that I remember. And I still have trouble remembering things that happened this morning.
I've decided that I like Verdana. I really just changed the font on a whim, but it's grown on me. Now if I could just add some color...
Tuesday, March 28, 2000
Wake Forest 62 N.C. State 59. In overtime. Sigh. Not only does this game inexplicably affect my mood, but watching games like this will probably take five years off my life.
The New York Rangers fired coach John Muckler and general manager Neil Smith. I'm surprised they didn't wait until the end of the season, but I'm not surprised that it happened. Yes, I'm a Rangers fan, as difficult as that is to admit right now. A $61 million payroll and only 29 wins to show for it. It proves that you can't just buy team chemistry.
Here's an article about a webcam at Race Rocks, an island off the southern tip of Vancouver Island with a lighthouse and a unique ecosystem. The webcam, at racerocks.com, gives everyone a chance to see rare plants and animals without upsetting their habitat. Now that's a good use of a webcam.
Help control the roach population. Have your roaches spayed or neutered. (Apologies to Bob Barker.) If they can get it to work, I'm all for roach birth control. But what will the Pope say?
I'm allowed to make jokes about what the Pope would say. I was born and raised Catholic. Well, I haven't been going to church much lately. (OK, the last mass I went to was Christmas Eve.) But I still make sure I don't eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Go figure.
A new survey says that Americans aren't sleeping enough. I can't dispute their claims. I get six and a half hours of sleep each night during the week. The thing I don't understand is that I get up every morning at 6:30 (well...closer to 6:45). So that means that I should want to go to bed at 10:30 at night, right? I'm never tired at 10:30 unless I'm sick. By around midnight I finally start to get sleepy. Maybe I'm just in the wrong time zone.
Another day, another milestone. I got a mention in Medley. Lyn liked the fact that I grouped Medley with Now This. I guess this is what she refers to as Weblog Navel Gazing(WNG).
Today I decided to switch the font to Verdana. I also put an actual mailto link for my e-mail address at the bottom of the screen, and took out the extra x's in my address that were to trick the spammers. Yes, there's a reason I've made it easier to mail me. I'd like to know what you think.
I am enjoying this so far. Today's the first day where I was able to dig for some links, so I found some new sources for information that I didn't know about, or knew about but had never bothered to visit. And if I can't find anything interesting out there, I've still got plenty of old bookmarks I can share.
I've also made some progress on a portal. Right now, it's still not ready for prime time, but it is helping me find things to write about.
Monday, March 27, 2000
It's Cluttered Day 2. I guess doing this for a second day is a good sign, right?
Now would be a good time to mention EverQuest. I play the game way too much. If a day goes by where I don't post, it's probably because I stayed up too late playing EverQuest.
I've been into computer games/video games all my life, and an on-line multiplayer game is just fascinating. It's so much fun when you get into a group, and the group is working together, and you're killing monsters left and right.
Of course, at times, I have a love-hate relationship with the game. It's a lot of fun most of the time, but in order to advance your character at a reasonable rate, you need to put a lot of time into it each week. However, I've found that the more time you spend, the less fun it gets, and usually, I end up playing to a point where I get really frustrated because bad things start happening that are slowing me down, so I have to stop playing, which then slows my progress even more. Then I go back to playing, and it's fun again, so I play more...well, you get the picture.
And if a day goes by where I don't have any updates, and I haven't said anything in advance (like I'll be on vacation) then you can probably blame it on EQ.
I saw a very unusual error message at work today: "Catastrophe is imminent." I think it had something to do with a license that was about to expire. It was on a mainframe, so don't bother trying to find it in Windows. (I wouldn't put it past Gates & Co. though.)
I'll go ahead and put this in as more of a reminder to myself, but Jon Carroll writes some excellent columns every day, but I just don't read them often enough. I have kind of a daily routine in the sites that I visit every day, and somehow his site just hasn't worked its way in.
Wow, a major milestone today. I've made into the Eatonweb Blog Portal. Woohoo! I even got listed the same day I submitted. I just got lucky, I guess, considering Brig just made an entry about how bored she was so she caught up on all the backlogged submissions for the portal. Maybe this is a good omen.
Since I probably won't be posting again until after N.C. State plays tomorrow night, here's my obligatory link to GoPack.com, which has all the news about N.C. State sports that you'll ever need. N.C. State plays Wake Forest in the NIT Semifinals (I know, it's not The Big Dance, but I take what I can get) Tuesday night at 7, and the game will be on ESPN. In case you're wondering why I'm making a fuss about N.C. State, it's my alma mater.
Go Wolfpack!
It's kind of odd, but I know that if N.C. State wins, I'll probably have a lot more to say tomorrow night, but if they lose, I'll be pretty brief. It's amazing how the outcome of a contest between two groups of athletes who are total strangers can affect my mood. I guess growing up near New York City it's almost impossible not to become a sports fan. There is one thing good that has come from my obsession with sports. I read the newspaper on an almost daily basis. And I do actually read the rest of the paper after I finish the sports section. Okay, I have to read the comics too, but then I go to the front page. Honest.
Sunday, March 26, 2000
It's about time I tried to do a weblog, so here it is. You might want to check out the About page, where I try to explain this. But how do you explain the unexplainable?
It looks like I'm finally caving in and using IE more than Netscape Communicator. I just keep getting these nasty crashes where I get the infamous "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" dialog box, but when I click ok, I get the same dialog box again, and it just keeps looping infinitely. The only way to keep the crashes from happening is to turn off JavaScript. Well, I've finally reached a point where it's very impractical to surf without JavaScript. (Not to mention that Blogger relies heavily on JavaScript.) All I can say is, go Mozilla go!
Not only have I finally gotten into the weblog racket, I've finally joined a fantasy baseball league. It's a league run by Yahoo. I'm not crazy about the rules, and I'd really like to get into a keeper league, but this is a good way to get my feet wet.
Yes, I have been a baseball fan all my life. My team? None other than the 1999 World Series Champion New York Yankees. (I must say the welcome message from Yankee Stadium P.A. announcer Bob Sheppard is a nice touch.) Before you can say bandwagon, let me throw out a few names from the past. Joel Skinner. Ken Phillips. Paul Zuvella. Dale Murray. Steve Trout. Tim Leary. It may not seem like it, but yes, there was a time when the Yankees were bad. I stuck through it, and I've been rewarded for my loyalty.
And just for the record, I can't stand George Steinbrenner either.
I had to watch the Oscars...oh, excuse me, Oscars 2000 (How pretentious is that?)...for the Best Song Award. Okay, I had to see the performance of "Blame Canada," from South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. I got done watching it, and I thought, "This is the song that should win." Of course, my very next thought was, "It'll never win." Alas, I was right.
The song from Tarzan that won wasn't terrible, considering it's a Phil Collins song from a Disney movie. At least it wasn't that Gloria Estefan and 'N Sync song.
Let's see, I've covered technology, sports, and music. That leaves Sci-Fi. Hey, there's a reason I chose this URL. (Never mind that it will go away if and when I get my own domain name.) If you haven't been already, you need to check out IGN Sci-Fi every day. It's got all the latest science fiction news, plus reviews of sci-fi movies and TV.
Well, that's it for the first day. I hope you haven't immediately dismissed this weblog after only one day. There are a lot of weblogs out there that I probably wouldn't bother with if I only saw them for one day. Personally, I think two weeks would be a good time frame. By then, I will either have hit my stride, or just totally given this up.
It's a start, but I have a long way to go. I have to tweak the design a bit. The black and white look is a little bland. I'd like to add a list of weblogs (besides the three that inspire me) that I visit often. I'm also working on a portal, mostly for my own use, but it might not be a bad addition with a little bit of polishing.
By the way, don't expect me to cover all four of those categories every day. I'm not that anal retentive.
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