flights of fancy

It's probably cold when you can legitimately confuse your car's gear indicator with the temperature display immediately below it. In this particular case, when I left the office, the temperature was only a couple of degrees higher than the number of gears in my car. I shudder to think what the temperature will drop to in a couple more hours. Or maybe I'm just cold.

I wanted to see how difficult it would be to update using my Wii, and while challenging, the auto-match makes it easier than I would have thought possible. Coolness.

ETA: space to my title. Also, Gmail is manageable on the Wii, but you really have to play with it to get it to work properly. Still, the Wii got the job done.

I think Silversun Pickups is my new flavor of the month (last month it was Feist). I'd been hearing about them on various blogs I read, and after the umpteenth Wil Wheaton name-drop, regarding how Lazy Eye should be on the Rock Band set list, I decided to check them out. Thanks to YouTube, I heard the song while watching the video, and thought, "eh. A bit Smashing Pumpkins. Not bad. Let's check out the rest of their stuff, see if it's better." And it was. My favorite song: Little Lover's So Polite, followed closely by Waste It On, All the Go Inbetweens, Booksmart Devil, and Creation Lake.

Speaking of Wheaton, his latest book is pretty good. Too short. But like they say, always leave them wanting more.

Oh, Intarwebs! I didn't mean to abandon you! I owe you Puerto Rico pictures! And Thanksgiving pictures! See, I've just been playing with your cousin over at rpg.hackwater.com, doing some theme hacking. In fact, this week has been my best programming week so far, solving problems and applying fixes left and right. After finishing a medium project at work that had me doing some cool Drupal hacking, I turned to various small issues in my queue that had been getting no play thanks to my focus on the larger project.

I impulse-bought this a couple of months ago:

But wait! There's more . . .

In theory, this should drop a bookcase view of some of the books on my shelf:

ETA: It doesn't really work. I'd have to debug the Shelfari table CSS, which, lame. Instead, I'll use the text Shelfari widget, which also has the cool paging feature. At this point, though, I've got 215 books listed, so paging may take a while.

But wait! There's more . . .

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I haven't written word one. Looks like another failed attempt this year.

I am covered with shame! I dare not even appear at one of the local WriMo events!

Well, we'll see.

The Red Sox just swept the Rockies to win the World Series! Former Marlins Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell were a huge part of this, as were the rookies: Papelbon, Pedroia, Ellsbury, Matsuzaka, Okajima. Even J.D. Drew pitched in!

I can't believe sportscasters are still talking about a curse. There was no curse. Get over it.

Woo!

I carved my first pumpkin today. I liked pretending that I was a mad neurosurgeon bent on lobotomizing by scooping out the brains. Pumpkin guts are gross. Anyway, with most of the cool patterns already spoken for (I wanted to observe others before diving into my first pumpkin carve), I looked around and quickly settled on Tux, the Linux mascot. This makes me happy.

Click on the pictures below for larger versions; the third picture, while dramatic, does not have a large version.

I've been thinking about Steampunk lately. I was always vaguely uneasy with the term, since I rarely if ever saw any punk elements in Steampunk. It seemed like a lazy adaptation of Cyberpunk, which in my mind does convey the punk within the genre. Maybe I missed it, but although I think it's probably a safe categorization to classify Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a Steampunk comic, I can't think of any real punk elements in it.

But wait! There's more . . .