While I don’t pretend to be the most avid cinephile, but I do love to watch movies. While I do tend to trend along certain genres, I do like to break out of the mold every once and a while (except for films that look unbelievably boring). Despite this interest, 99% of the time, I honestly don’t care for the Oscars (or any awards show, for that matter). I’m happy when a person who really deserves to win a given award ultimately does, but in the grand scheme of my life, it doesn’t matter.

In my regular blog-reading, I followed a link from Brent Simmons’ Inessential blog to E! Online’s red carpet photos with the loose promise of “funny clothes”. Among perusing the outfits that were more “eh” or sad than funny, I came across one of Marcia Gay Harden’s back. While I recognized her name, I honestly couldn’t place her, so I checked out IMDB.

Here’s the weird thing - I’ve heard of a good portion of the movies she’s been in, but have only seen one (and that was because that was the only thing on TV at the time). I just find it kind of amusing that somehow I’ve heard of her, and yet from what it looks like, I’m not interested in 99% of the work she’s done. I mean, I usually like a broad-enough selection of movies where I’ve seen most names I’ve heard of in something… OK, it’s not funny, but I’m running off very little sleep and find it somewhat curious all the same.

Jef Raskin, father of the Macintosh, died on Saturday at the age of 61. Rest in Peace, Jef, and thanks for everything.

I think I’ve inadvertently flushed out a bug in the new version of WordPress - one that had me going bonkers for a while. When I was writing the previous post, WP insisted on inserting a trailing slash within the “img src” tag. That is, no matter how many times I tried writing, rewriting, or fixing it, the tag would always come out:

<img src=path/to/image.jpg align=right/>

The only way I managed to fix it was to go directly into the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin and manually delete the slash. I’ve already posted to the WP forums, but has anybody else run into this?

One thing that has arisen in the past few years is the fact that I bulk purchase more often now - and I’m not even referring to the occasional Costco run. It seems like I have a built-in tolerance threshold when it comes to everyday items like shoes, towels, clothing, etc. - I just never noticed it before because I would purchase whenever I came across something I liked. Having taken a large salary hit has changed that behavior (and the new influx of money coming from the second job I picked up right before Christmas, while reassuring, still hasn’t caused me to rebound to my old spending ways - which is a good thing).

All that said, it seems like the stars seem to have aligned for this month because I’ve been a shopping fiend - although it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds as I didn’t pay full retail for any of my purchases (indeed, two pairs of shoes were free due to a generous offer from an industry acquaintance). So while I’m a little concerned that my spending money budget went ballistic this month, I try to remember that I’ve been badly overdue for about half of what I got and find solace in the extra $300 I’m depositing tonight from Job No. 2.

Software ownership battle adds $10M to cost of Big Dig. While we aren’t privy to the original contracts, I would’ve thought that MA had every right to sue the software company into the ground - I’m surprised they passed…

So apparently some sleazeballs are trying to sneak their planned rape of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into the Federal Budget Bill. Please take a moment to sign the online petition to be sent to your members of Congress.

Scot’s recent post about cowbells & vibraslaps points to The Cowbell Project, where among other things you can submit songs that could be improved upon by adding some ‘bell. This got me to talking about it with some friends at work and we’re rather curious: Stairway to Heaven?

Rave 1: I love the tires on the car that I also love. Michelin Energy MXV4+. VW did a great job selecting these tires for my Passat - They grip pavement in all conditions like no tomorrow, nevermind I got 58,000 miles on the pair that came with my car and never had a problem before they were in serious need for replacement.

Rave 2: Bless Costco for carrying the same very tire - when I went into Costco (for price reasons), I was ecstatic to find out they carried them. Easiest decision in the world. Unfortunately, at some point when I was up visiting my parents last weekend, I had a sidewall blowout on one of the tires (fortunately, in my case it was actually a slow leak that eventually regressed into a tire that couldn’t hold any air) - a completely unrepairable problem. Costco to the rescue with their standard warranty - they swapped out the tire and all I had to pony up was the $1.67 disposal fee. Saved me about $140.

Interesting sidenote: Costco is now filling all their tires with nitrogen now. They make a big deal about it in all their signage, but I totally forgot to ask them about it. In doing a little research, it looks like even though it’s more expensive to fill your tires with pure nitrogen, it looks to be like a pretty intelligent thing to do.

OK, I’m not 100% happy with how well the process went (got a couple of bugs to ferret out when I get a chance), but I’m now running 1.5 and overall I’m extremely happy. Many thanks to Basil for passing along the link to the “how to upgrade your 1.2 CSS to a 1.5 theme” guide which greatly assisted in making the move very, very painless.

One thing that is really bugging me is that my link list headers have shrunk in size for seemingly no reason whatsoever and my feeble PHP abilities aren’t of any use in trying to figure out how to change them back. Any suggestions?

Incidentally, I hearby renounce any past endorsement of Cyberduck as a S/FTP client. This entire process would’ve gone a helluva lot faster if I wasn’t constantly getting the spinning beachball and dropped connections. Time to check out Interarchy and Transmit. More to follow on that front.

For all the crying last year over Sony deciding to cease Clié distribution outside Japan, they finally decided to kill it totally. Personally, due to the relative stagnation of the Palm OS, I never moved past my Palm Vx (In my consideration for a phone/email utility device, I only just recently started to consider the Treo 650, but my opinion of the OS development remains the same).

Sony did some cool things with the Palm PDA, from what I recall. But at the same time, with the anticipated arrival of the Playstation Portable and Sony/Ericsson’s focus on the Symbian OS, this decision really comes as no surprise at all.

Lexmark loses some footing on its lame abuse of the DMCA. If I had some cash to buy a new printer right now, I would pitch my Lexmark printer that requires $45 cartridges out the window with glee.

Eulogy (2004)

Want more details on IBM’s new Cell processor? Head over to Ars.

NASDAQ threatens SCO with delisting - how did I miss this until now?

I’ve never been a huge fan of USAToday, but I have to give them credit for doing a story on 3 laid-off people. Maybe, just maybe, continued coverage of this sort of thing will make people realize that things aren’t as rosey as the current administration says that it is.