journal for 2003-10-06
entertainment
We saw School of Rock this weekend. It was a little schmoltzy, but we enjoyed it. Jack Black is a funny guy, and it was a basically fun movie. It had very little meat to it, but that’s fine for a Sunday afternoon. The soundtrack was pretty great.
West Wing and Smallville premiered in the last two weeks. Both premiers were fine, although not amazing. I’m hoping that Smallville gets back on track this week.
I read the new Lemony Snicket book. It was the longest of all of them, just under 350 pages. The problem with such short books is that I can read them in a day and then I have to wait a year for the next one. Oh well! I’d rather wait for the next good book than be overwhelmed with crap. My theories on the details of the books’ mysteries are growing more concrete. I’m eager to see how it all works out.
I also picked up the Postal Service album that I really liked; the copy I’d been given was messed up. Anyway, I wanted to support an excellent band. I wish I could check a box when paying that said, “Screw you, RIAA!” I also got the new Elvis Costello, which is quite good. I think it’ll take me a while to really listen to it properly, though.
weight
I’ve been eating too much lately; I had pizza at Trevor’s on Thursday night (we played a few games of Starcraft), I ate lunch out on Friday, and then Katie and Jerome came over and brought pizza on Saturday night. I also skipped the gym yesterday, distracted by lousy programming. I tried to make up for it by walking in to work and riding my bike back. I figured that would mean I could bike home today, but I had forgotten that I had the backup tapes, and can’t bike with them. (Their case is too big.)
I’ve been hovering just above 190 for about two weeks, and if I didn’t keep screwing around, I would be below 190 by now! Steve (my brother) and I are racing each other; I’m shooting for 180, he’s shooting for 190. I must not let him win!
ipod
My iPod has hung a few times since I got it. It stops playing music and displays an Apple logo. Generally a simple reset fixes this, but it’s a minor annoyance. When I got home with my bike, yesterday, I plugged the iPod into knave and it started to fsck. The disconcerting part was that every few seconds it would reset and start to fsck again. After a few minutes of this, though, it started to make progress in the little progress bar and didn’t reset. It seemed to take at least twenty minutes, but finally it was done with no errors, so that was good.
It’s a little annoying that I don’t have a good way to determine, before syncing, whether I’ve selected more music than will fit on the iPod. Instead, I have to wait for a few minutes while it prepares the sync; then it tells me it won’t fit. I need to start making my sync playlists more sophisticated than “all my music except for a bunch of stuff that won’t fit.”
dnd
I continue to work on a D&D campaign setting. I need to get the general things done so I can start on the specifics and maybe get a game underway at some point. I’m tempted to pick up some more books, but I’ve found that most of the published books totally fail to interest me, except maybe for the books-o-monsters. Of course, making up monsters is pretty easy. I might just make them all up from scratch to prevent players from going, “Oh, a rakasha! I bless a quarrel!”
Anyway, the campaign setting is going alright, so far. I keep getting ahead of myself, though, imagining what will be cool after fifty game sessions, rather than thinking of the first few.
programming
I’m finally (mostly) done with the first revision of a gift registry. It doesn’t have good authentication stuff; it relies on HTTP authentication, but that’s good enough for a first draft. We’ll be using it for wish lists this year. I’ve been saying I’d write something like this for years, so I’m glad to have finally done it.
I’ve replaced the page for my wishlist with a front-end to that database, which is also convenient. I think I’ll go through and add more junk today.