Caoine

Twas The Night Before Halloween

I feel that Devil's Night is right up there with Christmas Eve as far as pre-holidays go. Chris and I stopped by a party last night to drink pumpkin ale and catch up with friends we haven't seen in a while, although we were home by one and asleep soon after. Either way, the party featured iPod, Beard Poppa, and Captain America costumes, so I consider it a success. Today has been all about watching the various horror movie marathons on cable and eating things that have to do with Halloween. I made those cookies the other day, and someone gave us a box of Halloween Krispy Kremes this morning for reasons I won't go into now. I also picked up a mini-bin of conversation pumpkins at Dylan's Candy Bar. They're like the conversation hearts you get at Valentine's, but they say things like "BE MY VAMPIRE" and "TRICK OR TREAT" instead of "PAGE ME" or whatever. (I admit that while I was at DCB I also picked up an oversized chocolate spider web lollipop, but I devoured it days ago.) All good stuff.

We're taking a break from the many available werewolves at the moment, mainly so that Chris can nap and I can listen to PHC's Halloween show. But I would be surprised if there weren't more werewolves between here and tomorrow morning, I tell you what.

NPR Nerds, Take Note

I love NPR, but although I have a perfectly good radio and I'm aware that you can stream recent shows from their site, I'm almost never in the mood to listen to the radio when I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm almost never home to hear my favorite shows to begin with. So it turns out that the high-quality radio show files you can get from Audible are a boon for me - I can get each day's All Things Considered on my iPod to listen to as I commute, and I no longer have to be home on Saturdays (or sitting at my desk later on) to listen to the news from Lake Wobegon. Not to mention the audiobooks which are, I guess, the primary focus of the site. I'm not a big audiobook person myself, but I won't turn down a little David Sedaris or Calvin Trillin from time to time.

The Festivity Continues

Chris and I made Halloween cookies tonight - which is to say that I did the cooking and he helped with the decorating and the eating. I just used the sugar cookie recipe from Joy and a little royal icing tinted black (for the bats) and orange (for the pumpkins) and left white (for the ghosts). There were also copious amounts of sprinkles that made the whole thing pretty festive, I think. (That picture was taken before the heaping mounds of excess sprinkles were shaken off, but you get the idea.)

I Heart My Creative Subconscious

I really hate it when I have a dream so totally normal that it's indistinguishable from a regular day. I often have dreams in which I wake up, take a shower, and go to work - then the alarm goes off, and I really wake up and take a shower and go to work. I mean, what the fuck? Can't my subconscious do any better than showing reruns of what I do five days a week anyway?

Sometimes I have normal dreams in which I've lost something or found something or had a conversation with someone, and when I wake up I have no idea whether or not it actually happened. Did I really drop that ring down the drain in the kitchen sink? Did I really talk to my friend from high school about what I've been doing since graduation? I'm going to have to start taking notes during the day, I guess. But then I'd just dream that, too.

King Of The Pumpkin Patch

Oxfam-Play?

A couple of you have asked whether it's possible to use my referral code for things bought from Child's Play wish lists, thereby donating to two charities with one purchase (since I'm donating my referral fees to Oxfam. I think this is a great idea, but as far as I know there's no way to have a purchase be both for an affiliate and for a wish list - if you use my link generator before adding the product to your cart, I don't think it will still be considered a wish list item. But I'll definitely look into it; there may be something sneaky we can pull off. I've already made my Child's Play donation, but I'm sure many of you are planning to make yours closer to Christmas.

While we're on the subject of charities, I thought I'd point out that Oxfam has a Tribute Gift program (as do most charities). You might want to consider this as an option for Christmas - I know there are people on my list whose taste I'm not all that familiar with, and I'd rather send money to Oxfam in their name than buy them books or CDs that they won't enjoy.

(Even More) Best Search Queries

1. popcorn stuck to tonsils
2. sexual pumpkin carving designs
3. roofies date rape powerpoint presentation
4. lacy hedonism
5. kant view smoking ban
6. how does "orlando bloom" "spend christmas"
7. OS X install optimization "what the fuck"
8. pumpkin carving offensive designs
9. tycho and gabe actual pics
10. heavens to megatroid

Too Early For Santa Hats

Has the Christmas season (at least in retail terms) always started in the middle of October? Urban Outfitters stores have had their Christmas crap out for two or three weeks already, while I'm still thinking about carving pumpkins. Last night I stopped by the Crate and Barrel in SoHo looking for some Halloween stuff I saw in the catalog only to find that they've gone all Christmas, too. I guess I can understand it in November, but October?

The Good, And The Really, Really Bad

Despite our love for the Netflix entity and our general tendency to avoid midtown on weekends, Chris and I caught two movies this weeekend: Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Garden State. The first was really, really bad. It was almost so bad it was good, like Equilibrium (which was at least so bad it was funny), but Resident Evil wasn't bad enough to be good - it was just plain bad.

Garden State, on the other hand, was a real treat. I understand why people told me that I'd like it if I liked Lost in Translation (which I did), although Chris actually liked it more. We'll definitely be seeing it again, either way.

Working

There are some things I avoid discussing on any of the Internets, and my job is generally one of them. There are good reasons for this - after all, I don't want to get dooced. But I thought I would mention that this week marked the end of my time as a contractor at my company, and I've accepted the offer I got to stay on as a full time employee. I'm aware that it's becoming more and more common (especially at IT companies) to hire new people only as contractors at first or to have some sort of three-month probation - but that doesn't mean I didn't get nervous as the end of my three months started to draw near. Now that stress is gone, and in its place I have the prospect of benefits and a raise. Let's hear it for the new economy!

A few of you have asked, so here are a few sort of general tidbits about what it is I do, exactly: at my full time job, I'm a web developer, so I do a little of everything that's involved in producing a site. Generally that means things like XHTML, CSS, PHP, Perl, JSP, Java, MySQL, and Oracle. I don't do a lot of graphic design these days, which is a first for me, but I don't actually miss it that much.

I also do freelance and contract jobs on the side - mostly small web projects for friends, and more recently the occasional bit of technical writing or reviewing for a couple of publishers you've probably heard of. I don't really do it for the money anymore; it's more that I like to have other things going on. And given the kind of jobs I had when I was younger, I'm very happy with where I am professionally right now.