Let it Snow! / Make it Stop!

Today we received our first real blast of winter in Grand Rapids, with heavy amounts of snow sticking to everything. From what I've heard, people are already in the ditch driving home and it's not pretty. My ForecastFox (formerly WeatherFox) extension is telling me "Heavy Snow, 30°F. Feels like 19°F." Great, I can't wait to step outside...

On the plus side, I like snow (except to drive in and shovel). My boss also just walked by my cube before he left and said that I could knock off early if nobody was calling. And nobody's been calling, so i'm just about gone. Our assistant told me that I have 5 unused vacation days remaining that needs to be used up before the end of the year. So, I'm driving home to Maryland this Saturday and coming back Friday. Hopefully the roads will be clear by then. It would suck to bang up my new-used car.

Oh, by the way, I bought a car two weeks ago to replace my truck that I haven't had for several months, now. I guess I owe a car picture... here's from when I was test-driving it. It's a 2000 Maxima SE, manual transmission.

Since we're talking about good things, I finally got sick of working on my home computer from 2 nightstands and a plastic drawer system. So, I went out to a second-hand furniture store and picked up this real walnut executive desk for $110.

It's really spacious and make late-night gaming sessions a breeze. I also think it does wonders for my back, compared to setting a keyboard on my lap, like I've been doing since January.

Well, if sitcoms are any indication, I should be getting my car smashed or getting myself smashed and hitting some old lady/garage door/fire hydrant/telephone pole/girl on a bike on the way home. Wish me luck!

Update!
It snowed way more than it should have. Even after getting off of work 3 hours early, brushing off my car took about 15 minutes, and driving home (which usually takes 30 minutes) took 2 hours! Once I got home and ate, I had to shovel about a foot of snow from our walkway! Check it:

Roads and Cones

On my way to work, I always cross the only part of a new expressway that's open. This Tuesday, the expressway opened up past where it used to stop (where I get off for work). If you live in Michigan, it goes without saying that you're going to see orange barrels everyday. There's no way around that. So, we've been putting up with the construction along the active part of M-6 for a while, now. I figured with M-6 now open, the work would pretty much stop. No such luck. My drive to work found one of the two lanes on M-6 to be coned off in both directions! Can't this stuff be worked out before the traffic is released into the wild? Road work managers are probably just as bad as video game managers with deadlines.

For a positive, a local radio station has been playing Christmas music since last week (so is Delilah, btw). I love Christmas music. I start playing it after Halloween. My brother and I went out a few years ago and bought just tons of Christmas albums at the store and ripped them onto my computer so I could make CDs of any Christmas song combination in a few minutes. So, I've had Christmas music pretty much on loop for a while now. I'm going to post a list of what I think would be different Christmas songs that someone might enjoy, so look for that.

Also, there's this randomness...

Who's been commenting in your journal?

1			36 comments	34.62% of total
2			15 comments	14.42% of total
3			11 comments	10.58% of total
4			9 comments	8.65% of total
5			9 comments	8.65% of total
6			7 comments	6.73% of total
7			4 comments	3.85% of total
8			4 comments	3.85% of total
9			3 comments	2.88% of total
10			3 comments	2.88% of total
11			1 comments	0.96% of total
12			1 comments	0.96% of total
13			1 comments	0.96% of total

These statistics were generated using the LJ Stats Web Interface by . Original idea from 's LJ Comment Stats Wizard.

Evil Deadman

Slashdot is linking to a story on Bloody-Disgusting.com talking about an Evil Dead remake. Apparently, Sam Raimi is behind it, but will not direct this one. The director is still undecided. There's another thread discussing the remake on the Bloody-Disgusting site.

From The Gate's article:

Hopefully though Campbell will return as Ash, a great director will be found, and the whole Raimi gang will join in, including Raimi's brother, producer/actor Ted Raimi, who often appears as a supporting character in all of Sam Raimi's films.

There's also a bunch of Google News links to the story available.

Green Screen Got Screwed

You might remember I reviewed three new shows this season that I liked a little while ago. One of them was Drew Carey's Green Screen Show. Well, sadly for the people who watched it, an article yesterday on thefutoncritic.com says that the WB is putting the show on hold for November sweeps. Sounds like the death knell for Green Screen to me.

Today, the once official page for Green Screen has mysteriously vanished and a message from a WB Green Screen forum moderator pretty much says it all:

Hi people.
The show, Drew Carey's Green Show has completed its run.
This board will be removed some time Friday night.

So, I'm guessing that means the show has no chance of returning whatsoever. However, Blue Collar TV and Reba are still not cancelled.

*sigh* Why can't improv stay on the air?

That's One Foxy Browser

For the uninitiated, Mozilla Firefox has been the long-developed open source alternative to Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. I remember when the gecko engine that it uses was first being written from scratch at Netscape many years ago. I downloaded it and it was very much in disarray, as you might expect from an alpha demo. Years went by, and Mozilla became it's own company disctinct from Netscape. The Mozilla browser suite continued to grow more bloated than was needed, adding a built-in email client, chat client, and web editor. Purists demanded a clean standalone browser, so the Phoenix arose from the proverbial ashes to fill the gap, for legal reasons was renamed to Firebird, and once again renamed to Firefox. Today, it finally reaches the long-awaited version 1.0. I've been using Firefox non-stop for over a year, now, and I love it. I never see a pop-up ad, no problem with randomly installed toolbars or bookmarks on my machine (like I have to deal with at work every day), and it's very efficient. You can open your pages up in new tabs across the top of the browser window, instead of having a dozen copies of the browser open in your taskbar. Firefox even has an RSS feed handler built in in the form of "live bookmarks." And if you ever want to add functionality to your browser, there are lots of user-created extensions available for download that can do everything from inserting bulletin board codes to update your LiveJournal to syncronize your bookmark list across multiple computers to download every file of a certain media type on a page to blocking advertisements to even acting as an FTP client. If you haven't yet given Firefox a look, you should try it today. At the very least, every web page author should add this to their browser testing arsenal.

You can download it for Windows directly from Mozilla's currently overloaded servers or you can probably get it faster by using the Official Firefox 1.0 torrent to spread out the bandwidth load across almost a thousand users.