On one of the Web sites I maintain, I get a lot of 404 errors from people who mistype the URLs. As a service to viewers, the 404 page provides links to the most popular pages on the site, as well as to the site's main index. When people arrive at the 404 page after attempting to get to one of the pages on the list, do they click on the link to get the page they were after?

No, they do not. Some of them try putting the file name in ALL CAPS. Others change "html" to "htm" or "asp". Others just try the same exact URL again, sometimes multiple times.

I'm not sure what accounts for this phenomenon. Perhaps they just see the big bold "Not Found" and stop reading? Perhaps they don't trust the list of links to be accurate, and think they have a better chance of finding it on their own? I honestly don't know.

Went to see Monsters, Inc. tonight with Karen. Excellent movie: great animation, excellent voice performances, wonderful script. Like the animated classics, it had humor on a number of levels, from slapstick comedy to cerebral allusions (for example, a restaurant named "Harryhausen's"). Definitely one to get on DVD, if only for the chance to pause the action and zoom in on the fleeting details.

Every aspect of it was well done: modelling, lighting, texturing, animation... the exceptionally photorealistic backgrounds were superb.

I was prepared for the noisy crowds of children, so I could tune them out. What I couldn't tune out was the annoying woman sitting next to me making exaggerated laughter and "oh no!" and "awwwww!" noises, apparently so that her sprog would know how to react. And, of course, reading every word on the screen out loud.

Happy birthday, Moira!

Not to be outdone by the dog's strange eating habits, my cat has decided that she loves peas.

Just came back from the doctor's. Time for a major "lifestyle change". No fried foods. No spicy foods. No mints. No caffeine. (So I suppose the caffeinated mints are right out.) My entire diet gone in a flash, made anathema by the stroke of a doctor's pen. There is no joy in Jeffville.

I do, however, owe a huge debt of gratitude to Moira, who clued me in about the seriousness of GERD, hence my visit to the doctor. Giving up the foods I love is a no-brainer compared to giving up my ability to sing.

But how on earth can I make soy patties palatable without habañero sauce?

It's been a long time since I've laughed as hard and as continuously as I did last night between 8:30 and 9:00. Patrick Warburton was funny as David Puddy on Seinfeld, but man oh man, he was the perfect choice to play The Tick.

I loved the first episode. The pacing was spot-on, the costume and set designs were great, and the acting was superb. The show was so side-splittingly funny that I didn't even mind the fact the metamorphosis of Die Fledermaus and American Maid into different characters. If the rest of the show lives up to the pilot, then I know what I'll be doing on Thursday nights from now on.

My single complaint: the actor playing Jimmy Carter constantly hiding his face. If they couldn't find a lookalike, how about a silicone prosthetic mask?

Went to an SCA event yesterday. Karen and I brought Slim, as there was to be sight-hound coursing. I actually got to see it for the first time (circumstances have always prevented me from seeing it before this). Slim is amazingly fast. And strong! When they tested the lure, even though I was prepared for him to try and go after it, he nearly yanked my arm out of its socket. He was very tired after the coursing, which meant that he slept in the back seat on the way home, instead of trying to come up into the front seat every thirty seconds.

As I missed most of opening Court, I was unable to swear fealty with the rest of my Order, so I had to do it later, in front of the Order. Unlike many Crowns, Odo & Elena didn't make me repeat an oath, but told me to swear fealty in my own words. Which of course I wasn't prepared for. My mind went blank, and then I said something, but I have no recollection of what it was that I said. (It must not have been too bad, as an out-of-kingdom Laurel said "Well sworn" as I came back to my seat.)

But it threw into sharp relief the idiocy of the SCA's utter inauthenticity regarding the matter of religion. Religious observance was one of the chief characteristics of the Middle Ages, yet religion is practically anathema in the SCA, which purports to re-create the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Oaths of fealty were administered with a hand on the Bible, not upon a Sword of State. Period oaths also mentioned GOD a lot, but due to the SCA's official mandate against religious observances, having done so (for the sake of authenticity), without previously announcing my intention to include words of a religious nature (and then providing an opportunity for anyone who might be offended to leave the room), would have landed me in trouble.

Even more ironically, there is much debate in the SCA on whether people with Jewish personas should be required to swear fealty, as it's against the Jewish religion to swear oaths -- despite the fact that it is every bit as much against the teachings of Christianity so to do: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. (Matt. 5:33)

Which makes the courtroom tradition of swearing upon the Bible really interesting: if someone is a Christian, and swears upon the Bible, then he's violating the teachings of his religion, which logically calls the veracity of his testimony into question -- for if he is willing to violate his own belief system, how can he be trusted to tell the truth?

Cool site: The Ormulum Project. I normally don't like sites that require you to download and install fonts in order to view them properly (my own fonts have been thus abused, to my dismay), but I'll make an exception for this one.

Well, I'd been planning on buying American Gods, because I enjoy Neil Gaiman's writing, but now I'm sure.

(And yes, it does.)

I am doing the happy dance. The Textbridge OCR software that came with my scanner is actually capable of learning how to read 16th-century blackletter text -- half-r, long-s and all! Color me impressed!

Once again, I cannot simply buy a computer part and have it work.

I have been fighting a running battle against Theseus, my computer, trying to get it to (a) successfully burn a CD-R, and (b) output video to my digital videocam. Of great importance is (a), because I really need to back up my data. I haven't made a successful backup since I was running OS/2 Warp.

I recently discovered that the problems I'm having are frequently caused by running an AMD processor on a VIA chipset motherboard. So Friday, after carefully budgeting myself for the next month, I went and bought a Pentium 4 and an Intel chipset motherboard. I pulled out the guts of my computer, installed the new motherboard, put everything back together, hit the switch, and...

Nothing.

Well, the power-supply and CPU fans turned on, but that was it. No video. No keyboard lights. The hard drive didn't even spin up.

I'd had a similar problem with my previous motherboard: the memory I'd been sold wasn't compatible with the motherboard. So I went to CompUSA (the only computer store that was open) and bought some more memory, with assurances from the salesdroid that it would work in a Biostar M7TDB motherboard.

Nothing.

So I had to wait until this morning, and called the tech support staff at the store where I'd bought the motherboard. It turns out that I need a power supply specifically designed for Pentium 4 motherboards. Oh, and a new video card, since the AGP slot only works with AGP-4x cards, and mine is an AGP-2x.

Of course.

After what seems like years, I have finally added a new page to my site: a reasonably-sized collection of sixteenth-century jokes and anecdotes transcribed from two jest-books of the time.

Well, strangely enough, I've been informed that Internet Exploder refuses to display the woodcut in the entry above. It loads the image, according to my referrer logs, but doesn't actually display it. Most perplexing. It has something to do with the right alignment. Oh well, here it is, in all its crude glory:

Since February 1996, my homepage has looked more or less the same. Before that time, it was the same old plain text that defined most of the Web (black on grey, if viewed with Netscape 1.1). I turned the background black as part of the "Paint the Web Black" campaign in protest of the so-called "Communications Decency Act".

And it had been that way ever since. In fact, it has looked that way for as long as my wife has known me. Oh, I've added to it, sure, but the overall design has remained unchanged. But the CDA flap was nearly six years ago, so I felt it was time for a change.

I'm not sure whether or not I like the new look. Perhaps it's just my deep-seated resistance to change. It's better organized, I think, but somehow it just doesn't have quite as much character as the old one.

Publix makes really disturbing holiday commercials.

There's the Thanksgiving one with the pilgrim salt-and-pepper shakers (which never fails to anger Karen, because the salt shaker acts as though the dog licking it is a worse fate than being manhandled and cast to the floor by an evil infant).

And there's the Evil Christmas Ornaments commercial, where the "angel" atop the Christmas tree facilitates the theft of a family's celebratory comestibles by shorting out the lights, permitting the other decorations to pillage the dinner table under cover of darkness.

But the latest Thanksgiving commercial was really creepy. At the beginning of the ad, a child writes "Happy Thanksgiving Grandma" on a leaf with glitter paint. Suddenly, a gust of wind sucks the leaf out into the world, where it floats (à la Forrest Gump) into another family's house, where it lies until an elderly woman picks it up and reads it amongst the bustle of dinner preparations. Does she turn to the child in the room and thank him for the thoughtful message? No, she does not.

Instead, the music turns ominous as the woman walks outside into a shower of falling leaves, to the wonderment of her family, who draw together to watch her exit the house.

What the hell? Why does the music turn ominous? Was Grandma's exit from the house into a cascade of dead leaves symbolic of her dying on Thanksgiving day? Or did she suspect the leaf was placed on the table by a deceased grandchild, rather than by the living one who was present? There's nothing visually threatening at that point, so why the melodramatic accompaniment? Why the modulation into the minor key, why the suspenseful chords?

And why does Publix have this obsessive need to turn holidays creepy?

I dreamt last night that I was in an art class, trying to do a painting in the style of the Old Masters.

The teacher came up to me and began berating me for making "dead art", as she called it, saying that real art was all about rejection of past artistic styles, and held up Marcel Duchamp as the paragon of Art.

I tried to respond to her, but I was unable to make a sound, which frustrated me greatly until I woke up, still frustrated. So I'm going to set down my arguments here, in hopes that the constant tic in my lower eyelid will finally go away...

First of all, there's that whole "rejection of the past" which which the Dadaist movement (and much hideous 20th-century "art" music) was suffused. This is not just something I dreamed: a couple of years ago, a local artist was given a commission to create some sculpture for the interior of a new mall. She made some very lifelike bronze casts of children playing, and was roundly condemned by the local art community for committing the heinous sin of making non-abstract art.

But I digress. To my mind, you can only reject a technique if you're capable of using it -- otherwise, your "rejection" is little more than a case of sour grapes.

For instance, the famous "L.H.O.O.Q.", a purchased lithograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache pencilled in by Duchamp, fails to impress me. Had he actually painted a copy of the Mona Lisa (or an entirely original portrait) and then defaced it, I would be more disposed to consider Duchamp an artist who rejected what had gone before, rather than a talentless hack lashing out at an artistic tradition in which he lacked the ability to play a part.

Yes, I'm elitist: I venerate talent and tradition, and disdain those who consider them unnecessary. If Jackson Pollock's random paint splatters are a product of artistic genius, then any excitable orang-outan can be a genius if provided with a canvas and some tubes of paint.

When it comes to art, I'm ultra-conservative. I love the Old Masters (and Salvador Dalí). I love Renaissance music. I love Chaucer and Shakespeare. I hold out hope that, within my lifetime, artists (and musicans, and poets) will again be universally respected for their ability to create beauty, rather than their ability to shock.

But that won't happen until the pathetic sheep in the galleries stop praising crap for fear of being accused that they don't "get it".

I used wget to scarf down all the Buffy PDF transcripts to read offline at my leisure, and just got finished reading all that were on the site. I went back, and lo! there were five more waiting for me. Happiness!

I know I'm anal-retentive, but the proofreader in me wonders if it would be offensive to email spelling corrections to whomever is putting up the transcripts.