9:24 PM
Still at work, late on a Friday night, some random thoughts:

* I've been having an internal debate over the last few days over whether I'm happily dissatisfied or unhappily satisfied with my life.

* My MP3 archive has now reached a sufficient size (especially of obscure songs and songs downloaded on impulse) that loading it up and setting it on random creates a truly terrific radio station.

* The more I play, the more Simpsons Road Rage is proving that, gameplay-wise, it might actually be a better game than Crazy Taxi 2.

* Got my external hard drive working again, connected via a cheap Firewire card to my work PC. Should be a handy backup for my MP3 archive. Anything that protects me from the major pain in the ass it's been rebuilding since the Great Hard Drive crash.

* I feel a novel starting to form deep inside me...

* Already I'm wondering if the first thought above was too e/n. Don't want to lose any of the few folks who might actually be reading this. Of course, who knows; reading other blogs, it seems like e/n is par for the course. Maybe I should open up. I dunno. Tell you what: email me with any question, and I'll answer it, right here on this page.

* Went to the bookstore for a few minutes tonight, always a good time. Saw that the book A Beautiful Mind has been given a new cover featuring Russell Crowe just in time for this month's movie. Movie photo re-covers of books really annoy me. I was in publishing, I know about cross-promotion, and I know that Maximus the Mathematician will (for the nonce) sell more copies than the old one (happily, still shown on the Amazon page linked above) featuring John Nash. But the whole idea still annoys me, probably because the movie-based covers are usually so ugly. Even if they aren't (the movie cover to The Talented Mr. Ripley comes to mind), they're usually not as good as a well-designed cover that isn't (quite) as constrained by the Laws of Publicity.

(Incidentally, why does "Rifle Shooter Magazine" come up when I search for "Talented Mr. Ripley" on Amazon? EDIT: Link removed because it didn't work; you'll have to do the search yourself.)


Okay; enough abuse of the semicolon. Have a good weekend, everybody.