wow. i just got an e-mail from someone who saw this site referenced on page 274 in a book called "html by example." that's pretty neat. i'm going to have go go buy the book now.

so i went and bought the book. there are two pages about how to embed flash in a web page, and my code (and a screen shot of the flashy thing that used to be my home page) are used as an example. yay!

it's so sad when good web sites go down. adcritic.com has provided me with much amusement over the past couple of years, and i will miss it terribly. i do hope they come back. where else am i going to see the pets.com ads they've archived? where will i go to laugh at political commercials? will i ever see the tda advertising commercial again? the one where the guy solomnly promises that tda will never charge clients for their prostitutes? it's just sad, through and through.

i was doing the prep work for putting dinner in the microwave, and i had a thought: "implacable dervish," i thought to myself. it's sure to be a googlewhack. this is getting to be maddness. yesterday, i came up with "plimsol britches" and something else that i can't remember right now. but i didn't feel like i was trying hard. so i figured "implacable dervish" would be perfect, but no. 203 hits for that. how very unsettling! now i have to come up with something that is a googlewhack, or i shan't be able to enjoy my evening.

okay, i found one: "freebasers hinges." phew!

yesterday, i organized a paper airplane contest at work. half of our floor has not been rented out yet, so we held it over there. i came in second for the distance of flight category and, if memory serves, third in the length of flight. prizes (a mini basketball hoop and a yo yo) were awarded only to first place in each category.

oh, look: peter pan has found his tinkerbell. okay, so they're weird, but i can't help thinking it's sweet that they've found each other.

a little advice for the men of the world: if you are on the bus and you ask a girl out for coffee and she says no, leave it at that. if she gives you a reason for turning you down, she is not issuing a challenge, she is just trying to let you down easy. of course, she should know better than to give a reason (oops), but still... if you miss your stop and follow her off the bus, you have moved yourself from "that nice guy who asked me out" to "creepy potential stalker man who probably has some serious issues". no matter how nice you are, you should never follow a strange woman home at night, particularly if your goal is to get her to go out with you.

news flash: idiots everywhere are making a stand against harry potter. is somebody collecting these stories somewhere? there needs to be an archive of the most stupid anti-potter quotes because they're just funny. like this one, coming from a cop who refuses to direct traffic for a YMCA triathlon because the Y reads harry potter books to kids:

"I don't feel right taking our children's minds and teaching them (witchcraft). As long as we don't stand up, it won't stop. It's unfortunate that this is the way it has to be."

(article available at sfgate.com)

i'm laughing at myself right now. i just read what i wrote yesterday (see below)... does anybody else think it's lame that i quoted from "the outsiders" in a semi-melodramatic fashion? i do. but i also think it's funny in its lameness, so it stays.

this morning, a hero appeared to me in the form of the #17, a splendid bus if ever there was one. the weather is cold, the wait was long, but the bus was nice and warm. but then it got really crowded, so it was super hot and stuffy, and a girl got on and she was bitching about how late the bus was, and why do they even bother having schedules? blah blah blah, and then it dumped me off in front of work when i really just wanted to go home and sleep. i stood there, a dazed lump on the sidewalk, and realized that "nothing gold can stay."

my book of stephen crane poems is great for bibliomancy. here's what i came up with tonight:

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its harment.

i called and started my mortgage application yesterday. i have not found a house yet, but i want to know that i have money to offer (and how much) while i'm looking. although i'm sure you all think of me as the picture of cool, calm sophistication, i was nervous and even shaking a little while i was on the phone trying to borrow all that money.

the main up-side of buying a house is that i won't have to listen to my neighbor snore for much longer. the bastard kept me up again last night. i spent the better part of the hour from midnight to 1:AM marvelling at how fast he breathes. it is astonishing that he can breathe in enough air that quickly, and then exhale it with such force. honestly, his breathing is small-animal fast. a few times, i became alarmed as the snoring stopped, and i thought maybe he had inhaled his pillow, but then he made an even louder snorting sound and continued to snore regularly. around 1:30, it occurred to me that he might snore a hole through his bed, and then the floor and end up crashing through my cieling.

i slept on the couch last night because my upstairs neighbor was snoring again. this has to stop. i'm getting very, very cranky.

have you ever dipped chips ahoy cookies in coffee? i just tried it, and boy is it yummy. they get soggy pretty quickly, though.

i went house hunting with my realtor today. what a strange thing house hunting is. people do some weird things to their houses. i must confess that i'm not a big fan of wood paneling.

hey, this is weird: one of the characters in my novel was obsessed with trying to create a black hole so that he could travel forward through time. i never thought it would actually be possible create a black hole in a laboratory. yikes! (found the link on kottke.org.)

in eighth grade, my friend alice liu memorized the entire tweetle beetle poem by dr. seuss and wrote it in my yearbook. i have no idea why this occurred to me today, but the poem popped in my head and won't get out. if memory serves, that's also the year that shreve laframenta (sp?) signed my yearbook with a serenade of whistles, like this: "whaa-whoooo-wheeee". what a funny thing to remember -- i've no idea what became of either of them...

i'm afraid i have some terrible news. the 24-hour church of elvis is reportedly closing up shop as of saturday. *sob* say it isn't so!!

elvis woes aside, here's something i want to know: if i wanted to create a magazine and print about 100 copies, how would i go about doing that? i did a search for "small press" on google, but didn't come up with anything good. have any of you done this? got any ideas for me? let me know.

urgh. my web hosters were having major difficulties this morning. i have no idea when the problems started, but, if you sent me e-mail and got a message saying that i don't exist, try again. they are damn liars.

today was the first day i volunteered to read with elementary school kids. they're so cute. i'm tall for my age, so walking around an elementary school made me feel like alice in wonderland. everything's so small. i wanted to shout, "i am a giant!" as i went hulking through the hallways. i had fun reading with the kids, though, which is the whole point, so i'd call the experience a success.

i keep forgetting to tell you about all the things i liked in 2001. i won't bore you with my resolutions, but i thought it would be fun to go over a few of my favorite things. the only thing i can think of off the top of my head is my favorite book, though. but as soon as i wrote the previous sentence, i realized there's no way i can pick just one, so here are some of the books i read last year that really stand out:

• ex libris (anne fadiman)
• haroun and the sea of stories (salmon rushdie)
• me talk pretty one day (david sedaris)
• a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (dave eggers)
• towing jehovah (james morrow)

i also re-read two books, snow crash (neal stephenson) and despair (vladimir nabokov), so i'd have to say i really dig those ones, too. for mini-reviews/impressions, you can always refer to the books page.

i've decided that if i ever, for some reason, had to give up web development and get a job doing something where i wasn't working in an office environment, i'd want to work at jiffy lube. they always seem to have so much fun there, and they get to play with tools and drive other peoples' cars and stuff.

i have an enya song stuck in my head. i can't decide if it's soothing or irritating. maybe it's irritatingly soothing. that sounds about right. at least it's not the chicken song.

go see amelie. i have a feeling it will be the best movie i see all year, and i saw it on january 1. it's that good. there are those who will tell you it's not that good, that the story is schmaltzy and that paris isn't that idyllic. that's okay with me, i still enjoyed the film immensely.

on the home page of the new york times, there is a cute picture of two kids having a snowball fight. underneath is a caption that talks about all the snow that fell. there is nothing to suggest anything was amiss with the snow, until you roll over the picture and the alt tag pops up to tell you: "storm in south kills eight". that's such a crappy little piece of information with no readily apparent explanation! i mean, was it the two kids throwing snowballs that died? they looked so happy just a second ago, and now the photo strikes me as sinister and creepy and sad. now, to my keen eye, it looks like they've actually frozen to death. the grimace of the boy in the blue coat is not due to him flinching away from an inbound snowball. rather, it's his death mask, a stifled scream as his body reached freezing temperature, and was slowly overcome. how horrible it all is!