I love Savage Garden. I cannot help it, even if I thought they were too popish back years ago on the radio. I bought their album and it immediately became one of my top 5 albums ever, and still sits up there because I loved every song (and we all know how rare that is). Everything is so beautiful about the music, but most importantly they write the lyrics and they are just awesome. I'll include a few snippets.

"Animals and children tell the truth, they never lie
Which one is more human
There's a thought, now you decide"
-- The Animal Song

"We stumble in a tangled web,
decaying friendships almost dead
And hide behind a mask of lies
We twist and turn and we avoid,
all hope of salvage now devoid
I see the truth inside your eyes"
-- A Thousand Words

"I want to stand with you on a mountain
I want to bathe with you in the sea
I want to lay like this forever
Until the sky falls down on me"
-- Truly Madly Deeply

I really don't think they've had a song that I don't love to pieces.

I have seen these trailers a dozen times, and I am sick of it. In fact, I think this is already one of the worst ideas for a movie ever.

Let's see here, here's the formula. Denzel's son has heart failure and he can't finance any operations. So what would any American do in this situation?

That's right, take some hostages in the hospital and plead your case to the news.

Take some hostages, things will work out (personally I think daddy will be shot and happen to be a heart donor or something, or have life insurance that saves his boy..woo woo).

Bad grades this semester? Damn man, take some hostages.

Feel socially repressed at work or school or home? Dude, take some hostages.

Didn't get that job or raise? Take some hostages.

Bears lose in the playoffs? Take some hostages, get them back in it.

Excellent idea for a movie...

I've had this current black-minimalist design to my site for over a year now. While I do love it, there are still some parts that need some help. Overall though, I just have this bug, this urge to start in on a new site design, more cosmetic than organizational though, whereas every other site overhaul I have ever made involved redoing both cosmetics and organization. I love my headers, my layout, but am just looking for something new to look at.

Also, there's this new phenomenon (well, the company likes to think it's new, but it's not) called "blogging." Basically, a company came out with a free web news publishing tool called the "Blogger" and thus was born blogging: or rather, just putting up a news page and writing about whatever. Not a new concept, but, the company thinks it has broken new ground.

Now, anyone can browse the web and quickly happen upon a "blog" site. They are actually fairly easily recognized as they are usually over-ambitious in their graphic use, tend to have unorthodox link names (god help anyone navigating the sites), a front page with lots of rambling posts, a box for archive links, and another box or area with cryptic links to other blogging pages. In this fashion, you can read weighty (or not so weighty) ramblings from many different people and spend your hours attempting to educate yourself. I guess my sarcasm is showing a bit, as I think a lot of these sites are much too full of themselves, and tend to be slow, bulky, hard to read, and even more difficult to navigate.

BUT! Hehe, they are my major inspiration in redesigning my own site. I happened upon a group of these blog sites and I thought, "I need a new design." Here are a few sites of note. By the way, I only LOOK at the sites, I don't actually read, so I have no clue what content these links have.

www.thinkdink.com - This site is a nice one. I love the fonts and colors and images, as I think it both looks and feels great. I could complain about a few little things like the right pane's organization and all the "back to top" breaks, but really, this site gives a lot of inspirational ideas.

www.bluelikethat.com - Just from first glance, this site gives a great front page. I love the colors and the feels, especially from that logo in the right. But once you try to read the links or scroll down, there is a lot to be desired.

www.sixfoot6.com - I didn't like this site at all, then I liked it, now I like it less again. Once you scroll down you'll see why: CLUTTER! I have no clue what I should read, so I just skipped it all. I do like the 'random' placement of the content boxes and the integration of the front scene with the background. Too bad it scrolls laggy for me.

www.suspensionofdisbelief.org/entropy/ - I like this site the best in this group I think. I love the left pane with the faded background flanking the text and image. Really beautiful in my opinion. I also like the right hand menu boxes and how they each have a point, as well as their positions. I don't like the clutter in some of them nor the odd white links. Just tends to make it look ugly. I do love this integration though of background with foreground.

I doubt mine will look at good as any of these when I'm done, but that's just a sampling of what I am bookmarking for inspiration. :)

You know what they say, the only things guaranteed in life are taxes and death, but I would add typos to that list. Even after days of review, and weeks of using my new resume (only about 2-3 weeks), just today I noticed a typo error on the resume. For my latest job it was listed as occurring from 5/00 to 9/00. That should be 5/00 to 9/01. Great, heh. Ahhh typos be gone!

I was doing a random web search and came up with someone named Michael Dickey as a MIS faculty member down in Florida State University...and it's a girl! Talk about a small world, and an even smaller pool of name combinations...heh. Anyway, my search was just on how easily someone could deface my website. With the rash of corporate and political website defacings lately, one of the easiest roads into defacing one is to just stumble upon a web-based admin system that has poor security. This can be quickly done by a lucky search engine query. Luckily, I have decent security and I couldn't find it anyway. :)

guess I can say this program is complete unless any new bugs are found. Unlike my previous program which may not work on other computers, this one can work on any windows computer due to the built-in installation program. Anyway, I get ahead of myself. The program is a simple one to log journal entries (like a diary). I can write an entry in the program and then save it to a master list of entries. I do not use a database and instead use a plain old text file with my own makeshift database built into the program algorithms. It serves its purposes and a little more (it ended up housing this project's log files!). Feel free to download it and abuse it as you see fit.

I don't pretend to know all the movies, or have seen even half of them, but there's my take on the movies of the past year (hopefully as brief as I can make it).

Best Movies
The Man Who Wasn't There
Lord of the Rings
Save the Last Dance
Shrek

Best Acting
Billy Bob Thornton in Bandits and The Man Who Wasn't There
Denzel Washington in Training Day
the merry men in A Knight's Tale
the whole cast of The Man Who Wasn't There

Best Comedy
Bandits

Best Action
Kiss of the Dragon (no contest)

Best Cinematography
13 Ghosts
The Man Who Wasn't There
Lord of the Rings

Best Music
Moulin Rouge (no contest again)

Worst Movie
Zoolander (one laugh, "snap!")

Mentions

Hannibal came out early, and it ruined the character of Hannibal Lector, featured typical too-gross horror, and zero of the psychological horror that made Silence of the Lambs a classic. Big disappointment. Shallow Hal was an ok movie, but I love the fact that Jack Black is finally getting a shot at lead roles and the big time. I also enjoyed The Fast and the Furious because of Vin Diesel, who owns. 13 Ghosts got very little acclaim, but one of my favorite actors, Matthew Lillard did excellent and did at least get noted for his acting. The cinematography in this blood/psychological horror is excellent pared with wonderful setting and effects. This movie just outright was awesome. Robert Redford looked tons more comfortable in The Last Castle, opposite Gandolfini, than he did in Spy Game. The Last Castle was a nice flick. John Cusack is getting high profile roles again, and I think he is the best man for any romance movie because he does the whole cute and introverted thing better than anyone. Also, in his movie Serendipity, Kate Beckinsale was the HOTTEST woman I saw in a film this year. My friends did not like the movie when we saw it, but Hollywood coincidences-in-story aside, this movie was excellent. (What I mean is that I didn't take the story devices of coincidences that heavily, put it aside and looked at the actors and how they deal with and show their believable emotions.)

I went to see a movie tonight, and if you've seen the movie, you know the voice that I have running in my head as I write these words.

I went to that movie, and I walked out of it, alone, into the cold midwest winter, and I am sure it is near 10 degrees or lower. I love the feeling. It is the dead of the night, last showing of the movie and the air is thick with darkness and the faded orange-yellow of the streetlights. There are almost no people, and fewer cars; the college in this college town is still on break.

I love the winter, especially nights like these. You can walk outside and immediately register the lack of wind; completely dead still cold air, I swear I can sometimes see it crystallize in front of me, almost glistening but not moving. Each step, the air seemingly so thin, so conducive and still, that each tennis shoed step brings up a click on the sidewalk despite their aged wear. Each step not only rings out enough to my ears, but also seems more real when it is this cold, more felt, more experienced.

The cold then bites the nose just before it clears the passages right up. Face tightens within a few steps, by then already enjoying the gust from my mouth with a breath, the air so condensed that I can see twin jets from my nostrils, the air so still, that the lack of wind allows them to stay in their cones until they dissipate.

I love walking in nights like this, this cold, this still, and a town this quiet. It feels like life has suddenly stopped, just for a while. Everything is quiet, dead, still; frozen. I used to walk like this a few years ago, when life was a bit more chaotic, less decided, and was constantly clamoring to be decided; the formative years of early college where one finally chooses the course of his next five to ten. It cleared my mind, it let me think, and yet not think; just feel and experience.

Jeans suddenly feel cold, as the air permeates them and draws up the contrast of warm skin against cold denim. The first few steps in that realization usually bring up a child through the body, starting in the lower back, deep in the spine just above the tailbone. Teeth clench, drawing out the feeling of tightened face, warding off the natural chills, and yet, at the same time, relishing in the feeling, the feeling of experiencing the cold, experiencing being alive, and experiencing the work of art that the body is as it attempts to work despite ones efforts.

The thoughts that raced through my mind as I drove the mere blocks home from the theater (I should have walked) are already dissipating like my breath against the steering wheel, seeing the winter night with a windshield covered with splotches of frost already, glistening more than the air itself earlier. It is times like these when I wish I had a tape recorder in my pocket, or a better mental file, to digitally record words straight from my brain...alas, my Muse is always a bit too fleeting for my tastes...