Hello.

Sunday, November 25, 2001 02:35 a.m.
Uugh. Stayed up late bashing my head against the unyielding rock that is "imperfect" implementation.

Saturday, November 24, 2001 06:00 p.m.
You know, I really like Mozilla. I just wish it was a little bit less sluggish on my machine. It's been several revisions now, and I'm starting to think that there's no hope in sight. If it just ran fast locally it would be godly. Ah well.

I'm supposed to be cleaning but I'm not. I should probably get on that.

Saturday, November 24, 2001 01:25 p.m.
Well, back in Portland. Had a nice day yesterday, considering that we spent most of it travelling.

Liz and I went to a Bob Dylan concert last night, which was great fun. He's got an amazing band on this tour... they played a really high-energy set all the way through and the crowd loved it. Highpoint for me was a really great version of the perennial classic "Tangled up in blue". That and they played "Things have changed", which I really like.

Downloaded yet another Mozilla build. Seems to be working happily thus far. I may do YET ANOTHER blog redesign... just as soon as I get an idea of what I want.

Today, though, I shall clean el house.

Thursday, November 22, 2001 10:16 a.m.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Wednesday, November 21, 2001 03:08 p.m.
I just ate Thai Chicken Pizza. It was good.

Liz and I went out with my parents and trolled around the used book stores downtown (there are 6 in the Cville downtown area alone). I got another Vance (as usual) and Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time (or just Time, as it was in the UK).

Liz got "The Clown of God", a Tomie de Paola kid's book and some old Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys stuff she remembered from childhood. Then we had crazy pizza at Sylvia's, home of the Pizza Nazi.

Now we are at home and relaxing.

Tuesday, November 20, 2001 10:56 p.m.
Well, Liz and I are safely and happily in Charlottesville. It's nice to be here. Here's a brief travelogue:

We got to Portland Airport early. Liz and I were kind of stunned to see National Guard at the checkpoints with M16s, and security was pretty tight. Both of us got "randomly" searched. Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen, since Andrew looks like he might POSSIBLY be a potential crazy killer guy, he's going to be "randomly" searched on every flight he takes from now on.

Anyway, our flight down to Philly was late and we were worried about missing the connection, so we got rerouted to Laguardia, where we would have plenty of time to catch the flight down to Charlottesville. The flight over to NYC was a little queasy... a fair amount of turbulence in a little Dash-8 but some beautiful ocean views and a GREAT final approach over the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. Nice.. I'd never been to Laguardia before.

Went there, had lunch, got on a plane (a Saab) down to Charlottesville. I got to sit in the back, which was hellaciously cramped. But it was a smoother ride down than before. We had to fly WAY around DC due to shadowy "homeland defense" reasons.

Got to Cville, more m16s and jackboots. But I was out the door and on my way to my parent's house. Now Liz and I are relaxing here... we had a nice evening chatting with my parents and I'm very happy to be here.

More later... Liz wants a turn.

(BTW: I DESPERATELY need a CRT monitor. Using one here is like crack.)

Monday, November 19, 2001 11:24 p.m.
It's Thanksgiving time! Liz and I are heading down to Cville to spend the holiday with my parents. We'll be back in Maine on Friday, just in time (I hope) to go see Bob Dylan play.

I probably won't be online much, but I will probably blog once a day or so.

Monday, November 19, 2001 12:55 p.m.
An interesting article. Washington post by way of MSNBC (I'm sure it's on the Post's site as well.)

And for the Johnny Watchers: The author interviews Eva Brann! Cool.

Monday, November 19, 2001 09:26 a.m.
"And we talked about Rilke, and about what a vain, oppressive country America was, and about beauty- her beauty, the world's beauty and how two people, pure in their souls, could love each other instantly."

"All the while I was thinking, 'Titties.'" -Ian Spiegelman

Sunday, November 18, 2001 08:47 a.m.
We went and saw Harry Potter last night. It was pretty cool. Not having read the books, I don't really feel like it would be useful to say much more than that. I have been assured by several people that the books are much cooler, but of course this is always the case, and there is always someone there to tell me that.

So I enjoyed it. Despite the fact that John "I'm so lame these days" Williams phoned the score in. I think it's time to shoot the old, lame film score composers before they further embarress themselves.

I was recently talking to someone (Remi?) about how Star Wars ultrafans annoyed me, since their devotion to a sadly diminished movie series hampered their enjoyment of great modern films. (This came up due to reports of fanboys leaving Monsters Inc after the trailers). I still feel this way, but it now strikes me as somewhat hypocritical, since two of the movies I was most jazzed to see were adaptations of existing material, which is almost the same thing.

Also, I was remarking to Liz last night that owning lots of classic DVDs was kind of the same thing. We were discussing proper narrative pacing, which is VERY hard to hit in a big splashy movie, and I realized that I was more sensitive to that because I could watch examples of great pacing anytime I liked, just by turning on the DVD player. Information breeds way too much perspective.

Saturday, November 17, 2001 11:17 a.m.
Uguhuhrororh.... got about an hour of solid sleep last night. Some days, sleep is just not in the cards.

OTOH, I still have Honey Nut Cheerios! Munch Munch!

I don't think Pitas is really a good blog-setup to do a quotes page on, but I might make one at some point. They'd all be stuffy SF novel quotes, though, because I'm lame like that.

I'm going down to see my parents on Tuesday. Should be fun, though Liz and I won't have a car. We'll have to see how that works.

I'm going to try to secure tickets to a certain movie today. Wish me luck.

Friday, November 16, 2001 05:02 p.m.
Well, I think I'm going to leave the top graphic as it is at the moment. You can click on the "who?" button if you'd like to see a page with the old logo. I think it's a BIT of an improvement. Liz has made a cute cartoon for her page as well, but I kinda like the one she has up right now.

Felt kind of blah all day. Not as bad as I've felt in the past, though, so that's an improvement.

Friday, November 16, 2001 11:48 a.m.
The always-charming Elise Dunphe has joined us. Perhaps "friends and relations of the Sarazins" will become its own blogmass.

Friday, November 16, 2001 11:34 a.m.
Mmm... waffles.

I'm experimenting with the logo a bit (as you might have noticed on the mainpage)... Liz did an ink-trace of it, but I haven't gotten very good scan results with it. It looks a little washed out. I shall continue to tweak it.

Liz bought a puzzle of a black-and-white photo. It looks pretty headache inducing.

And stuff.

Wednesday, November 14, 2001 02:25 p.m.
I thought last night's game went very well. I enjoy game sessions that are kind of in the middle of things, where not a lot gets done but there's a lot of action.

Of course, now I'm kind of getting into the whole RP thing again, which makes me queasy. Soon I'll want to GM a game (which I haven't done in a LONG time) and I don't really have the players... and I'll probably get into reading RP books and sites and end up with a lot of enthusiasm and no place to put it. Sigh. This happens about once a year. I occasionally wonder if there are good RPers to be found in Portland, but the comic shops here scare the hell out of me and I don't know where else to turn.

It's kind of gloomy up here today... lots of clouds. My very UNambitious objective for today is to reorganize my bookmarks so that they make more sense.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 07:34 p.m.
Well, Liz is now off doing some work at el store. So I have reclaimed the computer. We had a nice, somewhat sleepy day out at the mall.

My pet peeve of the day: stores with strong, unpleasant intentional smells. I feel like wearing a gas mask some days.

I think I am gradually replacing my video-game playing habits with DVD watching, reading, and writing. OTOH, I was positively transfixed by some of the shiny new alien-blasting toys at Best Buy today. So I think I'm moving slowly in a largely horizontal but slightly vertical direction. That's life in a nutshell.

One thing I really like about DVD: it gets people who aren't movie buffs to talk about movies. And I think that some of the "collector's" stuff on DVDs gives people more of an appreciation for the process of making films.

A lot of people really like the DVD restorations of classic flicks: old movies get patched up and get a whole new audience. I think this is cool, but I'm even more appreciative of the effect DVD has on movie from just 20-30 years ago. All those wonderfully bad 80s action movies (before "action" became a synonym for "music video crap") are perfect for DVD.

Hee hee hee. IGN is getting really pathetic. Offering premium ad-less content to paid subscribers is one thing. Begging me for money in a big bold type quite another. I think some of the IGN sites (DVD and Gear) are OK, but honestly fan sites do a better job and IGN has shown a fair amount of disrespect to its audience in the past. So I'm not exactly shedding tears for them.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 01:27 p.m.
Updated the links page ONCE AGAIN, this time replacing the silly descriptions with quotes. See if you can figure out the system by which I chose them.

Of course, now the HTML on that page is a nightmare. Oy.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 11:30 a.m.
Well, Liz finally took the plunge and now has a blog! You can find it here. She's also been added to my links page.

So that brings the blogmass count up to, I dunno, some ungodly number.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 09:58 a.m.
Seth- my deepest apologies for posting such an unflattering picture. It has been replaced with something much more appropriate.

Susie- you could use a bit of my webspace if you'd like to put up the odd picture or two. Just letting you know.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001 01:15 a.m.
You will now (or quite soon) find nifty little pictures in my links section. I tried to make them as weird as possible, but it's hard given the small size and sucky freeware editor.

Your deranged brother-in-law lives only to serve.

Tomorrow Liz and I will pool our resources and... well, who knows. We might just accomplish something.

Monday, November 12, 2001 05:18 p.m.
Susie! Bow before her unholy might!

Well, today was looking like a productive day, but the first half hasn't been, really. Got some cleaning down, but not as much as I'd hoped. Probably need to kick myself offline for a while.

Monday, November 12, 2001 11:28 a.m.
Wow, I actually woke up BEFORE Liz today! How many times does that happen?

What's REALLY weird is: I had this dream before I woke up that I woke up really late (4pm) and went on a hike with my parents. We then went to a church where a high school friend of mine was promoting his new book, a novel about vampires. There were weird guys with masks dancing around the church.

Things I'm gonna do today: Clean up the bedroom (this might take a while). Clean out the car (eck). Do some scanning of my "Fall in Portland" pictures that I just got developed. Make a page linked off my blog for pictures I want to post.

Sunday, November 11, 2001 11:20 p.m.
Time to archive. I'll probably also make a few minor changes in the page's functionality (e.g. I still need to fix the link to Liz's art page). I may put up a little statement of purpose or something similar... I've thought about doing that lately, since it's become clear that I'm allowing fairly extraneous things to mold my blog, and I'm not altogether comfortable with that.

Did a LOT of cleaning today. Felt nice. When I was but a wee lad, my parents used to ponder why I seemed to like cleaning and yet had a messy room. I think it was because I like to organize more than clean. I like to rearrange related objects so that their functionality is improved. With me this mainly manifests itself with devices that create light and sound and require lots of cables (I love cables). Elizabeth has a similar personality trait, though it manifests itself more in the rearranging of furniture. Come to think of it, we may be about due for a furniture switch. Except that the couch is going to disintegrate the next time someone tries to move it. I should really do something about that.

The Pats had a pretty pathetic game today. They won, but they tried REALLY, REALLY hard to lose. Had it been any team but the Bills, I think they would have. And Brady, as flashy as he is, is starting to sweat, I think. Perhaps the dread pirate Bledsoe will return with a vengeance. Should be interesting to watch.