Sony is launching an amazing new eBook reader and I’m so psyched about it! The Sony Librie is going to be much bigger than a PDA but boy is it worth it. Not only does it size in close to a paperback book, but the resolution is a stunning 170dpi. This means that text will look more like it’s supposed to, you’ll be able to clearly read serif text, and the “pages” will look more like those of a book. The Eink technology used to produce the super text is amazing because it only draws current when the screen is being repainted. No current is necessary to maintain a screen, therefore the battery life on this little baby is going to be astounding. In typical sony style they’ve jammed some other useful features into it including a USB port, a Memory Stick slot, voice recording capability and most likely a qwerty keyboard. All of this in a stylish little package means that Elise is going to save a lot of money on tech eBooks that get re-written ever 12-18 months anyway and there will be more space on her bookshelf for Harry Potter, The Gunslinger and Rand Al’Thor.

Have you ever been to a site and seen links to every webring on earth? A certain site I bumped into today reminded me how much I hate webring abuse. Why is it not enough to just join two or three webrings that your blog or site relates to? Why do bloggers have to have 10 or 20 of these cut and pasted linklet monstrosities on their pages? I understand the urge to try to drive traffic to your site. I run textads for that. I’m sure there are also other outlets for bringing in traffic like finding yourself on the top of a Google search for a moderately popular topic - which might I add is not hard to do, i’ve done it twice. At any rate, let’s not abuse the webring code, people.

Blogrolling’s taken a proverbial dump again. I just killed the call for the script on my page so it wouldn’t hork the sidebar loading. Someone’s gotta come up with something better than Blogrolling. Seriously. Right now I feel worse for the people who paid for the service. Furthermore, it’s damned near impossible to have a ul or ol with blogrolling unless you pay for it so you can add certain things before and after the links. Whatever. I’m so over it and again I find myself looking for a better solution and I’m not finding one. Calling all geeks: come up with something better than Blogrolling that doesn’t use JavaScript, is easy to manipulate, has more options, and is preferrably free.

You might’ve been.. yet things look different. That’s because I added more stuff of course. I also fixed some busted stuff and reclaimed some unused space in my main pages. I’ve also tried to keep my navigation more consistent (and how do I hope it worked). I said I wasn’t gonna do it and I did it. I put the buttons back on the page (actually I made new ones that matched the current theme). I took them off originally because I thought they’d be a navigation horror, boggle screenreaders, and piss people off. Well it turns out I found out exactly why I put them on the page in the first place. When they’re aligned like I have them, they save a lot of space. Trying to write out explanations to all those links or just having a ridiculously long scrolling list of links didn’t work either (and most of that stuff shouldn’t be in a blogroll). At any rate, they work. I’m still looking for a couple of good ones.

Can it be? Can it possibly be that I got my OfficeJet d135 which is connected to my Mac to just print something over the network from my PC? I think it could be. The Mac is being nice to the PC right now and I should be happy about that. The key to the whole thing was using any old postscript printer driver. You think I’d know that after being the interim plotting slave at PSU for a while, but no. Cold logic took over and I attempted to *gasp* install the proper driver for my printer. Heaven forbid, right? After a bunch of muddling, and a little websearching at one of my favorite sites (MacOSX Hints) of course someone says “Use a postscript driver” so I do and it works. All the people sing…

Kiefer Sutherland is creepy, man. He freaked me out in Lost Boys, he freaked me out in Eye for an Eye, and most recently he freaked me out in Phone Booth. In Phone Booth he was just a voice but he still freaked me out.

I guess Phone Booth was supposed to be a psychological suspense thriller. I think it failed miserably. If it wasn’t for Kiefer being creepy it would’ve been a complete dud as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t feel connected to any of the characters. I find Colin Farell’s performances hollow. His accent was about as authentic as Lasagna at a Chinese restaurant. I was really disappointed that Katie Holmes wasn’t used more throughout the film. I think they just used her for her star power, but she only had about 5 lines in the film. Forest Whitaker was awesome as always, but it didn’t make up for how pathetic this film really was.

I am going to finally let go of the elisehines.com domain this year. It expires on 3/24 and it has little use to me these days. Essentially all it does is get forwarded to justelise.org and harbor hundreds of spam e-mails per week. I doubt I’ll buy it back in the future.

Please update your e-mail addresses (change the elisehines.com to justelise.org), bookmarks and all that jazz. Thanks!

If you’re looking for a quick list of all of the Oscar Winners, The Internet Movie Database main page has a list of all the winners with appropriate links. LOTR:ROTK cleaned house with 11 awards tying Ben Hur and Titanic. Everyone in New Zealand got thanked, and I do mean everyone because they all appearantly worked on the movie.

Johnny Depp got robbed by Sean Penn for Best Leading Actor. I was very very very disappointed as Sean Penn deserves no more respect than my right shoe. If Johnny had to lose I would’ve been happier if he lost to Bill Murray. It was about time for him to make a comeback and get recognized for his work. I personally didn’t see Lost in Translation, but it won for best original screenplay and marked the arrival of Sofia Coppola as a force to be reckoned with in both writing and directing. She presented with her dad
and it was cool to see the two of them together.

If this hadn’t been a LOTR year, I would have been happy to see anything WITHOUT Nicole Kidman in it win. Her lack of sincerity and emotion in both her acting and presence on screen in general is a major turnoff considering she fancies herself an actress. At any rate, it was your typical Oscars. It was quite sedate. Billy Crystal was a riot, as was Jack Black’s duet with Will Ferrell. I’ll sit through another one of these when something or someone good is nominated. From the looks of what’s been coming out lately,
I think it’ll be a long time before we see anything good.