web-goddess

Woohoo! The weird little opera guy Daniel finally got booted on Australian Idol tonight. He seemed nice enough but I got really sick of overly theatrical style. (You’re next, Hayley!) I’m totally in the Ricki-Lee camp. She rocks! She’s Australia’s own Beyonce. Chanel and Marty are sentimental favorites, but I don’t think either of them has the star power to win it.

I had a couple more comment spams today so I finally implemented my “moderation on old posts” plan. Basically, any post older than two weeks is still open but new comments don’t appear until I approve them. Let me know if you notice any weirdness. (You shouldn’t.)

Wow, Ebert’s new site has finally launched! Now I can finally read all 500+ entries in his Little Movie Glossary. I was amused to note that he uses a Powerbook (naturally). I was not amused to note his wedding ring. 🙁

Later: Yowch. The site update has broken every single review link from the IMDb. Bad move, web developers.

Tiki Mac. Shweeet.

Crap. What a day. The class turned out to be a bit of a debacle, mostly because I seriously overestimated how much material we’d get through. I figured that since I’ve taught people to knit before individually, teaching a half a dozen wouldn’t be that hard. I was so wrong. Each person could only manage to follow the pattern for about thirty seconds before yelling for help. And it wasn’t that the pattern was hard, it’s just that they needed to be shown every little thing. Me, I’m a book learner, so that’s why I spent hours writing down explicit notes on everything for them. (Mental note: Don’t bother next time.) By the end I was apologizing all over the place because I felt terrible that we’d only accomplished so little. Most of them seemed happy though, and a few actually managed to “get” it before they left. I guess it was a good learning experience for me, huh? Next time I need to remember not to be so ambitious.

So what did I do afterwards? I came home and flopped on the couch, hoping to clear off some TiVo and do some knitting. Two hours later, just as I’d started The Princess Diaries, the f**king television exploded. Yes, you read that right; our TV just exploded. So now there’s no telly. This sucks.

Sorry for the lack of posting, but I’m all in a tizzy because I’m teaching my very first class at the shop tomorrow morning! I’m teaching “Sock Knitting on Two Circulars,” which should be pretty fun. Wish me luck…

Who’s the best homebrewer in the house? Snookums is the best homebrewer in the house! He just won three places in the 2004 New South Wales Brewing Championships. His “English Mild” won 2nd place in the “Low Alcohol” category; his “American Pale Ale” tied for first in the “Pale Ale”; and his “Chocolate Cherry Stout” won Highly Commended in the “Fruit & Specialty”. Pretty cool, huh?

Retro coolness.
A few weeks ago I ordered a View-Master from Amazon for my little brother Joey’s birthday. I was lamenting to the Snook that nowadays you only seem to be able to buy the “themed” View-Masters, like Winnie-the-Pooh and Finding Nemo, and they only come with a few disks each. (I ended up buying some old disks of Disneyland and fairy tales off eBay.) Anyway, the Snook suddenly goes, “Hey, did you ever have a Talking View-Master?” I’m like, “Whatchoo talkin’ about, Willis?” I’d never heard of such a thing. He claimed to have a View-Master that took special disks with little records attached to them and the viewer would actually play the sounds as you watched the scenes. Wha?? I was skeptical. He kept imitating the voice of his Spider-Man disks, walking around for days going “The Amazing Spider-Man!” in a nerdy American accent. So, since his Mom happened to be coming down this week – and since the Snook family are notorious packrats that never throw anything away – he had her bring it over tonight. It actually exists! The sound doesn’t work yet but the viewing mechanism still seems pretty good. He’s got a canister with about fifty old disks in it too, like Disney stories and Star Trek and “Wonders of Asia” and Aesop’s fables. I have been having a total View-Master nostalgia trip. Some of them are live-action and some are cartoon, but most are those weird diorama-type things where the characters are little dolls set up in three-dimensional space. It’s so weird playing with one of these again, like falling through a time warp. We’re going to crack it open and clean it up and see if we can’t get the old record player working again…

The squeaky blogger gets the grease!
Remember the rant I had a few months ago about my frustrations with my local Apple service centre? Well, apparently somebody over there was vanity-googling the other day and turned up my site. As a result, I got an e-mail from the Service Manager apologizing for all the difficulty I had and offering to arrange an “extremely amicable” price to replace my monitor with a refurbed one they had. Isn’t that kickass? I’d basically been planning to put this sucker out to pasture when the new G5 arrives – what with my additional hard drive problems and all – but I’d love to still have an operational laptop if possible. He’s quoted me a price well within my budget for fixing it so I’ve asked the Snook to help me replace the drive. If all goes well, I should have double the Mac goodness is less than a month! (And of course, I’ll amend my earlier post so other Googlers get a better impression of the service.)

Behold the home-brewing cat!