fine whine

Check this out: last year 700 people wrote 50,000 word novels. Nothing remarkable about that, per se, other than the fact that they did it all, start to finish, in the month of November. You see, it was 'National Novel Writing Month', and as members of the Na No Wri Mo challenge, they ultimately emerged exhausted but victorious. I found the link surfing through old college acquaintances (read one's novel at his site), and I have decided to do it this year. Of course, now I just have to put off thinking about novel writing until around October.

... that John Malkovich has never seen Con Air? He says he's not among his greatest fans. Not to say he's averse to seeing his own work, but he much prefers to be doing it, not watching it.

I'd agree with him, except that I seem to enjoy reading what I've read here on this site, and especially old school papers I wrote. They're hilarious.

Oddly enough, I had two experiences today that made me happy. First, I got to be a major part of rejecting a production run of a badly-made garment at work. You see, until my ship comes in and I have a computer engineering job, I'm working for a large multinational fashion and beauty empire, doing various menial jobs. Lately, in between days cutting boxes open, I've been working in somewhat of an inspector role. And the jean I was looking at today had a lot of issues. It was stitched badly, looked ugly, and (my own turn of phrase) the belt loops were throwing up. That is to say the inside belt loop was longer than the outside. Which is like putting a Large Fries container inside one from a Happy Meal (thankfully, I've never worked for the big M). In other words, it's crap.

The other thing that made me smile was an interview on NPR. Not the content of the interview, but the fact that I could still recognize what both sides were saying between the lines. Being able to decode that meant that despite my recent NPR-listening, I have yet to become a mindless liberal radio devotee. Or whatever NPR's sinister plot for hapless listeners could be. And not to say that NPR's evil—it's not. I had just begun to suspect that my brain was turning to mush.

These suspicions started long before I got the PS2. Really.

So much for the great website re-do. Today on my wife's whim (hers, not mine!) I picked up a Playstation 2. I'm gambling on the price going down after that big electronics show (E3) and I'll be able to hit up Circuit City or Citibank for the difference. Timing is everything, really.

Timing mattered more for my choice of games. I wanted Madden and Dynasty Warriors, but satisfied with older, familiar versions, I got (and will heartily enjoy) DW3 and Madden 2001, not the recently released DW4 or Madden 2003. I also picked up DW3: Xtreme Legends for twenty bucks, but I want to get my feet wet again with some classic Xiahou Dun and friends before I learn any new wrinkles.

Anyway, I've got to go play. The little red light beckons me closer...

So I'm restyling my website (not the blogs but the main site itself), and I'm trying to do it in pure CSS. CSS, for the uninitiated, is a standard for laying out web pages. The concept and specifications have been around for years but the major browsers are only now really supporting it well. My IE5's no good at it, but it renders okay under mozilla derivatives. For windows, I heartily suggest using k-meleon. It's fast, free and rather quite standards-compliant.

A bone of contention many people have with me is that I am rather unwilling to declare favorites. I have no favorite ice cream, movie, color, or sports team. Ranking never was a strong point for my opinions. However, today I was struck with the realization that I do indeed have one favorite: My favorite pair of jeans is my beat-up Levi's 579s. So there, I picked one.

Oh and I'm restyling my main site. Seeing as I haven't really changed it in the last two years.