...to bring you one of the best television commercials I've ever seen.

Then again, I'm a nerd.

Thursday morning, I got up bright and early to drive Squelch to the airport, then off to middle Washington to see my friend Jim. Jim was one of my two best friends in high school; I went on to college, our friend Vinny went into business, and Jim joined the Army. I saw him perhaps twice after that, once when he was finished with Basic Training, and once when he was home on leave. So this would be the first time in... well, way too many years.

He's a changed man. CEO of an ISP, city councilman, father... We spent all day reminiscing and catching up, then off to dinner with his family and in-laws. I wasn't aware that Washington was such big wine country. A couple of glasses of Riesling at dinner (and one of the restaurant's excellent dark microbrews), a couple more glasses of other wines after dinner... whoo. Good thing I wasn't driving.

I set my PDA to wake me at 4 AM, as I had a long drive ahead of me... and apparently slept right through it; I awoke at 4:45. I got on the dark, twisty, turny mountain roads back towards Portland. On the way through, I stopped back at Hash HQ just to see if anyone was there, to say "howdy" on my way down to California. Martin, Steve and James were there; they convinced me to try getting a standby flight from Portland down to Sacramento, as they scoffed at Microsoft Streets & Trips' estimate of 8.5 hours. As the prices they were suggesting were about what I'd pay in gas, and I wouldn't have to do all that driving, I agreed.

The two airlines that had flights to Sacramento didn't do standbys, and they were all booked up that day anyway. Well, there went an hour and a half I could have been driving. C'est la vie, I guess.

Finally, I arrived at the apartment of the truly cool (and utterly adorable) sarahbellem, who showed me around Sacramento and took me to the Tower Café (if I remember correctly) for dinner.

In the morning, we met up with two of her fellow students and drove to San Francisco for shopping. I bought Karen some things. I also learned that the fast-food restaurant called Hardee's down here, is "Carl's Jr." in that area of the country. It's also "Roy Rogers" up in the Northeast — or at least, it used to be, at one time, judging from the burger wrappers I saw with both names printed on them years ago. Hooray, useless trivia!

Anyway, back to Sarah's apartment, where we watched some Black Adder II before it was time for me to leave again. I drove through the night, twelve hours to the minute from her apartment back to SeaTac Airport. I slept right through the first takeoff and the in-flight movie (something with Adam Sandler). As my now painfully stiff neck prohibited me from going back to sleep — those dinky airplane pillows are utterly useless — I fired up the laptop and watched the new Doctor Who the rest of the way home, where I was greeted by my lovely wife.

Here endeth the tale.

If you don't care about the new Doctor Who, stop reading. If you haven't seen it, and avoid spoilers like the plague, stop reading.

I'm overjoyed to see Doctor Who being made again. I was thrilled to see a Dalek again, and that its last remaining handicap — the lack of dexterity inherent in a toilet-plunger appendage — has been overcome. And the new Dalek weapon effects are quite nifty, too.

But for crying out loud, could the writers please spend more than thirty seconds thinking up the plot? A Dalek regenerates itself because it sampled the DNA of a time traveler? Now, if it had been The Doctor's DNA, that might be at least easier to swallow, as Time Lords possess regenerative capabilities. But the DNA of a human who just happens to accompany The Doctor through time? (And what foresight the Daleks had to build DNA samplers into the outer shell of their head casings! I guess when they want to sample a creature's DNA, they normally just pick it up and drop it on their own heads?)

Still, its updated looks were snazzy without deviating too far from the originals (it'll be fun to model in 3D!), and it was so much more crafty than previous Daleks; it played Rose like a Stradivarius.

And as big as the plot holes were, it was light years beyond the crappy 1996 pilot for the American Doctor Who. Which brings me to the thought that Christopher Eccleston shouldn't be the Ninth Doctor, but the Eighth. Not only was the American version about as bad as Highlander 2, and thus just as worthy of being ignored, but if Peter Cushing doesn't count as an official Doctor, neither should Paul McGann.

Like calligraphy? Try the Digital Scriptorium at Berkeley! I'm partial to the Secretary hand, myself.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue should make some good reading for anyone interested in early 19th-century slang. Though sometimes you have to go look up the definitions as well; for example, "TO FUNK. To use an unfair motion of the hand in plumping at taw." It's kind of like the jargon file, only without the hypertext.

In a similar vein, the Online Etymology Dictionary is pretty nifty as well.

Well, Karen and I saw Return of the Sith tonight. Based on Episodes I and II, I went into the theater with low expectations. ROTS failed to meet them.

(Whoops, looks like I've got to add some text to keep the spoilers out of the synopsis version of my LiveJournal feed. So let me take this opportunity to say that, while I found Episodes I through III really disappointing, I still love the original trilogy.)

And don't even get me started on the acting or dialogue...

I record the experience here, with a few more useful keywords in the description of the problem, in hopes that it may aid some other hapless soul desperately Googling for a solution. So, anyone looking for "Can't send email", or "email times out while sending", try giving this a shot.

People like this frighten me. Even trying to imagine what it must be like to be so destitute of a rational, critical mind is disturbing.

Synopsis for gamers: Steve Jackson had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot, as his game "Illuminati: New World Order" contains all the exact details. Such as the World Trade Center being nuked.

In other news, I really like this new icon.

Often, I'll follow links in my site's referrer logs, if they're not coming from obvious spammers. But I'm not going to any page on a server named "trannysurprise".

Nope. Not gonna do it. 'Twouldn't be prudent.