kadmium

http://www.wordorigins.org/

For those of you who are anxious to try new things like posting pictures or playing with HTML, I’ve set up a new site where I’ll be posting links and tutorials about web publishing in general and using Movable Type specifically. I’m not quite done with the templates, so they may be a little rough around the edges.

Today I put up two items related to photos and the web, one is a tutorial I wrote about including images in your posts with Movable Type and the other is a link to a tutorial about photos on the Web written by someone else. Please let me know if you have specific questions about anything.

Now, go learn!

If you get a chance, go see this movie. It’s three hours long, has an all-Inuit cast, and it’s in Inuktitut with English subtitles. And it’s great.

The production company, Lot 47, also has a site.

A couple of weeks ago, Katie and I came within a hair’s breadth of buying a camper. It all started with one of my “Oooooo! That would be cool!” moments.

On Tuesday, termination dust appeared on the Chugach Mountains. Last night I had to wear a sweater and a jacket when I walked Auggie.

I took this last night while Katie and I were walking the dogs. Looking southwest over Cook Inlet, toward Fire Island. (Click on the image for a 480 × 640 pixel version.)

A few months back, Katie proposed that we go without TV for a week. I said it sounded like an interesting idea, then chose not to discuss it further. I’m very habituated to TV. I watch a lot of TV. Too much, really, considering what I watch. I’ll watch reruns repeatedly. I could ponder on the deeper reasons why, but it ultimately comes down to wanting to be entertained without having to think. An entertainment IV, if you will. Not very satisfying and not very productive.

Katie, on the other hand is much more discriminating in her television watching, at least when I’m not at home. She rarely turns on the TV on her own. There are a few shows that get her attention, but only the first time they air. She doesn’t watch reruns.

So with the upcoming week of faux-patriotism and force-fed grief programming coming up, I told Katie that I’d be willing to try. I have to admit that the idea of a week without TV is troubling, even knowing that I would end up turning it off in disgust most evenings anyway. But this morning I sat down and skimmed through the upcoming week’s program schedule and after mentally blocking out all the September 11 memorializing, there really wasn’t much interesting on.

We’re also not subjecting ourselves to a complete media blackout. We still get the paper, we’ll still listen to Morning Edition as we get ready for our day, we might even rent some DVDs. But we won’t have the near-constant murmur of broadcast TV in the background. It’ll be different. And probably better. But I’m still going to miss my IV.

Suddenly it’s dark in the morning when we get up. The sun isn’t high in the sky by the time I get to work. We only have thirteen hours of daylight today, and it&#8217s decreasing by about five minutes a day. The temperature of our morning walk now ranges from 40 to 50 degrees. The birch trees are suddenly half brown and the leaves are falling – all in the space of a couple of days. It happens so quickly. Just last week it was summer.

Katie and I are finally taking a trip. Yay! It’s been a while since we got out of Alaska, and we’ve got these two coupons from Alaska Airlines for $150.00 each that are going to expire in January 2003, plus we finally crossed the magical 40k threshold on our Alaska Airlines miles. So we’re going to go to San Francisco to see some friends we haven’t seen since we left Texas and celebrate our fifth anniversary and Halloween, all in one big, blowout four-day weekend.

We used some of our miles to get our tickets for half price, then used the coupons to bring the round-trip cost of each ticket down to $51.00. w00t!

Now we need some advice.