I just got done watching the season premiere of Buffy. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope for this season.

BoingBoing has a link to a a Wired story about Horror writers against illiteracy.

Horror writers against illiteracy. The Horror Writers of America are hosting a charity auction on eBay to raise money for American literacy charities.

Among the items up for auction: a rare softcover advance copy (bound galley) of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs issued by St. Martin’s Press in 1988; the first U.S. hardcover edition of Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game; and a bundle of limited-edition prints depicting scenes from Stephen King novels such as Carrie and The Shining.

And here’s a link to the Auction items. Some of them are pretty cool, if only I could afford to spend more money right now.

As I’ve been setting up this Radio to LJ mirror I’ve been getting more peeks into how LiveJournal does things. In particular I’ve been looking at how LJ formats its posts and what your options are for changing how it looks. LiveJournal is just horrible if you want to customize how your stuff looks. Radio, MovableType, and Blogger all have pretty good template systems that let you do anything you want quite easily. From what I could tell of LiveJournal it’s not quite the same. It’s like you have variables for different sections of the Journal that you set. I guess for me it isn’t just a question of configurability either. LiveJournal feels much more closed. I’m more limited by what they allow me to do as opposed to what I want to do.

So why bother with LJ at all? Because I lot of my friends are there. And at least one or two have complained that they have to go someplace else to read about what’s going on in my life. I also like the idea of bridging the two communities. So for now I’ll experiment with mirroring posts. If it ends up not working then I’ll just stop doing it.

Big thanks to Bryant over at Population: One for his help with the blagg and LiveJournal plugin stuff too.

This is a test post.

Holy Heck. After FIVE months of complaining to my landlord about the broken faucet in my kitchen sink it is being fixed. It’s taken the guy litterally 10 minutes to do. Why did this have to take so long?

The NYTimes has an article on the 10 most beautiful experiments of all time.

…Most of the experiments — which are listed in this month’s Physics World — took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator.

What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear. [New York Times]

I even remembered some of these from science classes back in High School.

This one comes from a mailing list I’m on. BookCrossing.com. It is kind of like Where’s George for books. The idea is that you enter a book into their system and label the book with the BCID (BookCrossing ID number). Then give it to a friend, or leave it in a coffeeshop, or donate it to a charity. When someone finds the book they are supposed to go to the web site and make an entry that they found the book. One page I found interesting was their status page, which lists books that have been recently released or caught, and some other stats. My favorite is most travelled books:

1. The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde
2. The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
3. The Paradigm of Uncertainty by Lori
4. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
5. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

Personally I’d have a somewhat difficult time doing this because I don’t like giving away books I’ve read. Well, unless they sucked, in which case I don’t care too much. I should look around my apartment and see if anything qualifies.

Plato. “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.” [Quotes of the Day]

So earlier today I posted to my LiveJournal that I wish there was a way to mirror my posts from here to there. Almost immeadiately a friend there pointed me to someone else I knew who was doing just what I wanted to. So of course I had to look into it.

I now have it set up to post from my blog to LJ once an hour, adding any posts that weren’t there yet. It’s pretty cool. I used a tool called blagg along with a modified version of the LiveJournal plugin. So far it looks like it works okay. One thing I want to do now is have it so that my mirrored posts use the comments code from my actual web site, so that there is one master list of comments for any given post.

Thanks for bearing with the spam over on LJ.

From boxofficeguru.com is a report of a good weekend for Spirited Away:

The Japanese animated blockbuster Spirited Away sparkled in its North American debut grossing an estimated $450,000 from only 26 theaters for a vibrant $17,313 average. Buena Vista released Japan’s highest-grossing film in ten major markets this weekend and looks to add another ten next weekend as it continues its steady rollout.