09/14:	Check out Apple's ad touting the first personal computer classified as a weapon. (Quicktime video)
09/14:	The U.S. Army uses Macs to serve their Web pages for security reasons.
09/14:	Laurel Krahn (who helped turn me on to Homicide) is quoted in a Chicago Tribune article on Web Logs.
09/14:	If you were intrigued by Tony Isabella's review of The Factor but have been unable to find it (as I have), you can order it from the writer/publisher, Nat Gertler, at nat@gertler.com for $15.00 postpaid (inside the US).
09/14:	Similarly, if you've been stymied in finding issues of the critically-heralded series Pantheon (written by Bill Willingham, in case you were ever a fan of his Elementals series), you can order it from the publisher, Lone Star Press.
09/16:	The Stanford Theater Web Page.
09/18:	I'd been thinking of buying a Palm PDA when Handspring - founded by Palm's founders - announced their PalmOS-based PDA to ship this fall. My cow-orker Tom convinced me to hold off on buying something until the Handspring Visors ship.
09/18:	Liberty Meadows creator Frank Cho talks about his syndicate's changes to his comic strip.
09/18:	G4 Power Macs exude a funny smell during their first few days of life.
09/18:	Nanci Griffith's new album, The Dust Bowl Symphony, is apparently recordings of some of her old songs with the London Symphony Orchestra. Ugh. After kicking off the 90s with two superb albums (Storms and Late Night Grande Hotel), she's released two forgettable albums of covers (okay, I realize that I may be her only fan who finds them forgettable), a good album in Flyer, a weak album in Blue Roses from the Moons, and now this. C'mon Nanci, quit noodling around and give us your best shot with some new material!
09/21:	Bill Bradley says gays should be able to serve openly in the military. Good for him!
09/21:	chiasmus (ky-AZ-mus) n. a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases.
09/23:	Jesux (hay-zooks): the Linux Distribution that will not lead you into temptation. (Serious, or not? My guess is not.)
09/23:	Tony Isabella reports that Warner Brothers is fighting the claim of Jerry Siegel's heirs to half of the copyright on Superman. I pretty much agree with Tony's take on the issue.
09/26:	My friend Jim Rittenhouse comments on why he doesn't read many other on-line journals.
09/26:	Another journaller speculates by CJ's sex.
09/26:	And, for yuks, a non-link: Brown & Williamson Tobacco's customer service number is 1-800-578-7453. The introductory message is hilarious!
09/28:	Brown & Williamson Tobacco's customer service announcement made the national news. (I mentioned it on Sunday.)
09/28:	The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: All the bad prose you can stomach.
09/28:	Mother of football player Dimitrius Underwood blames his suicide attempt on an unnamed cult.
09/28:	The Penguin Brigade: A runners' group, forwarded to me by my sister, who I think is a little agog at the fact that I've taken up running.
09/30:	The Small Press Expo, for small press comics publishers.
09/30:	CJ's Yahoo Club is currently featuring a discussion started by her husband about relationships, polyfidelity, and the like. (Starting around message #212.) I always enjoy stuff like this. I think David is mainly arguing out of interest rather than out of a strong first-hand stake in the subject. I've thought about starting a Yahoo club for my journal, but haven't found a particularly good reason to do so, since by-and-large CJ's is fairly quiet, and she has a much larger readership than do I.
10/01:	Mars probe lost due to failure to convert between English and Metric units. Geez!
10/01:	Metajournals, the site for people for whom simply reading journals is not enough, is publishing again.
10/02:	Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura makes several controversial statements in an interview with Playboy. The best - reported on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! but not in the mainstream media as far as I can tell - is that if ever reincarnated, Ventura would like to come back as a 38DD bra. Thanks for sharing, Jesse.
10/04:	Apple iBook TV spots. (Requires Quicktime.)
10/04:	Egads! Fellow Bay Area journalist Jennifer was mugged last weekend. This made me a little more aware that I'm in an urban area, and that I live alone, relatively far from most of my friends. Makes me a little more uneasy.
10/04:	My old fantasy baseball league in Wisconsin had a tight season, with four teams tied for fourth place. Yow!
10/05:	Apple rumor sites to check out? I regularly read Mac OS Rumors, MacInTouch, and Think Secret, pretty much in that order. (Given how quickly MOSR had info up, and that Steve has mentioned them directly on occasion, I suspect that someone from that site was invited to today's presentation.)
10/05:	Menlo Park, CA, Historical Association cancels history book on the city due to 'inflammatory' chapters. Apparently they didn't like unflattering sections on the history of blacks and Jews in the relatively up-scale city. So much for truth in history.
10/06:	Tony Isabella writes a concise explanation why John Byrne's Spider-Man: Chapter One series isn't worth the effort. Pretty much why I gave up on it early on. Peter David has covered similar ground in his columns in Comics Buyer's Guide recently.
10/07:	What does Google say is more evil than Satan himself? (At one point, the top match to this query was Microsoft's home page.)
10/07:	I've gotten several nice comments from Webloggers around the net about this links sidebar. A Weblog is not a journal so much as a log of interesting site around the Web. For samples, check out Bill Humphries', Laurel Krahn's, or Lynette Millet's.
10/08:	CJ got her new G4 Power Mac. It sounds very cool. (We have them at work but I haven't used one yet.) I've told myself I will wait until Mac OS X comes out next year before I buy a new machine. Especially since I don't really need a new home machine right now.
10/13:	The Interface Hall of Shame, which is pretty interesting reading. I don't agree with all their observations (they seem to dislike visual effects with minimal functional use, which don't bother me much unless they're blatant, such as the evil HTML <blink> tag), but many are worthwhile. They have a report on the controversial Quicktime 4 interface.
10/13:	After two of its members resign, The Menlo Park Historical Society reverses its decision not to publish a book on the city. This was a pretty controversial subject which got a lot of media attention out here, and I'm pleased to hear about the outcome.
10/13:	Do you use the Sherlock search program on the Mac? Then you might find this page of Sherlock info useful.
10/14:	Want to see what my new car looks like?
10/14:	In the wake of posting better-than-expected profits for the previous quarter, Apple stock has risen nearly 10 points in the last two days. Woo-hoo!
10/14:	In an oldie-but-goodie, Madonna's interview with a Hungarian magazine proves hilarious after being translated multiple times.
10/18:	Diana Rowland writes an interesting article on her 'pepper spray exam' during training to become a sheriff's deputy.
10/18:	Read about the modern ghost town of Centralia, PA. Maybe he'll add some more pictures sometime soon.
10/18:	I used Sherlock to find some Web sites which list peoples' names and their etymology, figuring they'll be useful if I ever start writing again. Good-looking sites I found - which appear worth browsing in their own right - include The Etymology of First Names, Surnames: What's In a Name?, and SurnameWeb.
10/18:	I also thought The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names was interesting.
10/19:	Vote for ESPN's Baseball Players of the Century's Decades in the next few days. Why not? It's free!
10/21:	Encyclopedia Britannica has made the on-line version of their product free. However, their servers have been dreadfully overloaded the last few days as a result.
10/21:	One of the favorite breakfast-haunts around the Bay Area is Hobees. I find them perhaps a tad on the vegetarian side for my tastes, but still enjoy going there.
10/21:	CJ writes about brainless copy protection schemes thrust upon her/us by developers (or marketers, or salespeople; who cares?) who have anything but the happiness of the customer in mind. This is truly one of the more brain-damaged software concepts I've read about in this decade. Whoever came up with this idea should be taken out and shot.
10/22:	It seems that much of what the media has reported about the Columbine High School massacre earlier this year is false. The two suicidal attackers were not part of the "Trenchcoat Mafia", and didn't target any specific victims, but, rather, wanted to kill everyone in the school.
10/28:	Tony Isabella received a remarkably caustic letter recently, which he laughed at. Worth reading just to see how nasty some people can get. I sometimes get hate mail like this, too.
10/28:	Lee's Useless Super-Hero Generator is pretty amusing.
10/28:	Roberto Clemente's family is angry he was left off of baseball's All-Century Team. Who, I wonder, do they feel should be booted off so he could be let in? Sheesh.
10/28:	Speaking of which, Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist Dan Barreiro writes about Pete Rose's folly. I think Barreiro sums up the issue excellently, and he's basically won me over to his (admittedly, not uncommon) point of view.
10/28:	Hey, I recently received e-mail informing me that a site called PlanetOut runs the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. I really do enjoy this comic strip (it's basically a lesbian soap opera, and creator Alison Bechdel has a real talent for writing sociopolitical satire in that venue); it's also been collected in many books. Sort of a Generation X For Better or For Worse, with lesbians.
10/31:	An outstanding Baseball America article on Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez.
10/31:	Back to the Pete Rose debate: Rob Neyer's October 26, 1999 ESPN column explains why he feels that Pete Rose should not be reinstated, and that even if he admits that he bet on baseball, then Major League rules require that he be banned for life. He also refers to an excellent Pete Rose FAQ, which even includes images of some of the physical evidence against him.
11/04:	Have I ever raved about October Project here? They were one of my favorite rock groups earlier in this decade. Turns out some of the members have formed a new group, November Project, and will have a new album out soon. I can't wait!
11/04:	Here are the result of Baseball's All-Century Team fan poll.
11/04:	And the Players of the Decades fan poll results.
11/08:	Pete Townshend will soon release a Life House box set. This is the project which spawned The Who's best album, Who's Next. It sounds like it will be somewhat padded, but I'm a big enough Who fan that I'll surely buy it.
11/08:	Townshend also reportedly has a Web site, which is interesting because it has not yet been set up. All you get is a directory listing of the login script files. Bizarre.
11/08:	I've heard that Sports Night, one of my favorite shows, has been cancelled, but have not been able to confirm it. An alternate rumor is that it's simply not running during November sweeps month. Anyone know anything about this?
11/08:	Apple stock rose 8 points today, closing in on the $100/share mark. The prevailing theory seems to be that Microsoft competitors generally gained in stock price as a result of the anti-trust ruling against the company, though Microsoft's stock price itself did not fall much.
11/10:	National Public Radio archives the full audio of some of their shows on their Web site, notable for Weekend Edition. I discovered this because I was searching for the name of one of their recent profilees, Gideon Freudmann, who plays what he calls "CelloBop", and found the full interview with him. I may have to buy one of his albums.
11/10:	Are you dubious about the righteousness and/or practicality of the libertarian philosophy? Then check out Critiques of Libertarianism. I went through a brief libertarian phase back in college, but it mainly served to reinforce why I'm an ardent liberal. I was especially amused by the collection of USENET articles A Libertarian Tricked, especially since it perhaps says more about the twisted format of debate that occurs on the Internet than about libertarianism. (I'm an old USENET hand, by the way, having been one of the most prolific posters on the system circa 1989-1991.)
11/10:	Check out the November 10, 1999 edition of Master of the Obvious, Steven Grant's column on the Comic Book Resources web site. It's a good essay on the hows, whys, and drawbacks of the dance that the comic book and film industries do with each other.
11/10:	An excellent article on San Francisco Giants GM Brian Sabean.
11/15:	Goats is an off-the-wall Web comic strip which I discovered a few days ago and am enjoying a lot. Apparently the creator builds some frivolous Web sites spinning off from the strip, the recent - and very funny - one being Brains4zombies.com.
11/15:	Longbox is a comic book archive which seems to be building an index of characters, series, covers, and so forth. They have the bare bones of a structure for their database, but most of the useful information is not yet there. Perhaps worth keeping an eye on. (A "longbox" is a 4-foot-long box commonly used for comic book storage. It holds just enough comics to potentially cause back injuries if you're not careful, and "short boxes" are now becoming more common.)
11/15:	Lois McMaster Bujold has her own Web site.
11/15:	Charles de Lint and local fan Jeanne Gomoll will be guests of honor at WisCon 24, Memorial Day weekend of 2000 in my former home of Madison. I probably will have vacation time stored up to make one significant trip next summer, so I'll have to decide if I want to do that, or visit my folks, or attend Worldcon, or the San Diego Comicon.
11/15:	If you're into Weblogs, here's a good 'Blog index. I decided that this journal is in part a Weblog (hey, readers have been saying they like "this little webloggy thing in the right-hand column") and I added it to the list.
11/16:	The Ad Graveyard, real advertisements that either didn't see the light of day, or were pulled early. Some funny (and sometimes tasteless) stuff here.
11/20:	Psycomic has a very busy page design, and that design has so far dissuaded me from digging very deeply into it, but it does seem to have a very comprehensive comic book reviews page, if you like that kind of thing. They review many new releases every week ("many" is "twenty, sometimes more").
11/22:	One of the best Weblogs I've come across is Mike Gunderloy's. The former editor of Factsheet Five, a zine review magazine, his log is filled with links to exotic, funny, and sometimes useful sites.
11/22:	For instance, Mike includes two interesting links today: WebElements, a web-based periodic table of the elements, and The Molecule of the Month.
11/22:	Some links regarding Bay Area SF fandom: The regional convention BayCon, apparently the only regular annual science fiction convention in the bay area, which is pretty surprising.
11/22:	San Jose will host the 2002 World Science Fiction Convention.
11/22:	The Bay Area Science Fiction Association (BASFA) apparently holds weekly meetings (social gatherings, I suspect) in the south bay. I may check them out sometime.
11/22:	The Peninsula Science Fantasy Association (PenSFA) apparently holds biweekly gatherings. I think this is the group that Bill invited me to a few times, but I was too busy at the time to attend.
11/24:	How to write unmaintainable code.
11/24:	Next time I go up to San Francisco, I want to wander in to Borderlands Books. It sounds pretty cool.
11/27:	Tired of the Windows Explorer on Microsloth Windows? Check out WinBrowser, which provides a file browsing interface similar to that of the NeXTStep WorkSpace. (Mac users, of course, don't have much interest in either one...)
11/27:	Tony Isabella writes a succinct description of his ongoing work to preserve First Amendment Rights in the Medina, Ohio County Library, against the efforts of the "Vicious Coalition".
11/27:	I've already mentioned the in-production Homicide: Life on the Street TV-Movie, right? Looks like they'll have every major character from the show's 7-year run in it, and it could lead into a second TV series (since the show that NBC replaced it with on Fridays quickly tanked). And, if you're a Homicide buff, be sure to check out Homicide: Links on the Sites.
11/29:	Bill pointed out a page on Extreme Programming, which is an approach to software development (design, mainly, I think). I think the Extreme Hour is one example of it, presented less as a methodology than as some sort of geek party game. It's pretty amusing to read. I haven't plumbed the first EP site in depth yet.
11/29:	So, if you were asked which rock group would first release an album with "Dot Com" in its title, Jethro Tull wouldn't have been very high on your list, would they?
11/29:	Fun with Java: An applet animating the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system's schedule. Fun to watch for a few spare minutes while the compiler's running.
11/29:	A while ago, Jim sent me a link to The Atomic Mac, a Macintosh program which provides a wealth of information from the periodic table of elements. It looks pretty cool, although you can only access a few elements until you register.
12/02:	The Comics I Don't Understand Page, a periodic collection of apparently incomprehensible comic strips. I scratch my head over these jokes myself, sometimes.
12/02:	CJ recently noted a huge archive of Mutts comic strips, which should give you a good taste for the strip.
12/02:	From the department of tasteless advertising comes this use of Adolf Hitler's image to hawk space heaters.
12/07:	Konzentrationslager, a series of Lego kits which depict scenes from a World War II concentration camp, were designed by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera. Strangely compelling, I think these are meant to be real art about a difficult subject in an unusual medium, not dark satire.
12/07:	A short primer on The Gentle Art of verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin. Interesting to read, in that I know myself to be someone who vacillates between meeting confrontation passively, and meeting it with my proverbial teeth bared.
12/09:	The Astronomy Picture of the Day.
12/09:	Visit scenic Latveria.
12/09:	If you ever wonder about the project I work on, here's a very positive article about our place in the application server market.
12/09:	Jenn asked me to plug her SF Bay Area Journals Not-a-Webring.
12/11:	Comic book writer Joe Simon files to reclaim the copyright for Captain America, whom he created nearly 60 years ago, using the same law by which the heirs to Jerry Siegel filed to reclaim half of the copyright to Superman. Which characters will be next? Potentially eligible icons created circa 1940 include Batman, The Flash, Captain Marvel ("Shazam!"), The Human Torch, and The Sub-Mariner.
12/11:	Another Universe actually looks like a pretty good general-purpose comics and media news and info site, although their Web page layout is rather cluttered.
12/11:	Looking for a copy of Isaac Asimov's story "The Bicentennial Man" to read before you go to see the Robin Williams movie based on it? The book you want is Robot Dreams.
12/15:	An amusing patent for popular cat toy. I wonder if they'd really be able to defend this?
12/17:	A fascinating article on the housing and traffic situation in Silicon Valley, and why many affluent people in the computer biz elsewhere in the country are declining to move here.
12/20:	You might have seen the message going around the Internet claiming that the full moon on the Winter Solstice this year - which is on Wednesday, for those keeping score at home - would be the brightest full moon in 133 years, for a variety of reasons. Well, The Boston Globe is reporting that this is just another Internet hoax.
12/23:	I recently learned (from Comics Buyer's Guide, of all places) that the food chain Boston Market filed for bankruptcy protection and is about to be bought by McDonald's. I've enjoyed Boston Market for several years as a fast food place with much better food (taste-wise) than your typical burger joint. I'd figured they were doing quite well, but apparently they expanded too quickly.
12/23:	Have I plugged Bob Rokazis' Anything Goes Trivia yet? It's a comic book trivia page which I visit nearly-daily. I think I get about half of them right. Rokazis is a longtime comic book writer and was DC Comics' "Answer Man" back in the 1970s.
12/23:	ESPN's Athletes of the Century series will feature newly-discovered footage of Babe Ruth's famous "called shot" from the 1932 World Series. The episode will air either Friday or Sunday, since ESPN is keeping the order of the top four athletes secret. My bet is that Ruth is #1, though, so that would presumably be Sunday...
12/30:	An amusing Y2K compliance statement from Hart Scientific.