The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera web browser

Yesterday, I drove home to switch cars with my dad. On the way, I stopped by Helen's house to hang out. I mentioned that the three CDs I had with me were becoming repetitive. Helen promptly pulled out a Scottish Rogues CD and gave it to me for the ride home.

The Scottish Rogues are a bagpipe and drum group. The first ten seconds of each song are exactly the same. Each song includes a guy whooping about three-quarters of the way through the song and ends with a bunch of people clapping and cheering and asking for Jimmy to play some more music. In other words, I had a hard time telling that each song was different. And here I was thinking Helen would give me something that wasn't repetitive....

I cried today for the first time in recent memory. Maybe it was the stress of knowing I had to pack up my room and that I wasn't going to be able to motivate myself to do it. Maybe it was the dwindling hope of renewed friendship with Rebekah. Or maybe it was years of pain and turmoil rushing back as my father finally reached out to me and I habitually shut him out.

Whatever the cause, these Tuesday Tears have been hiding just behind my eyelids for weeks. Today was their lucky day to spring loose. Will next Tuesday be so lucky?

With three siblings, it can become difficult for everyone to keep track of birthdays. Fortunately, my siblings and I look out for each other: we call and remind each other of other's birthdays. Surprisingly, I'm usually not the one to forget a birthday.

Years ago, we were a very disjointed family living under one roof. Though we are now spread out all over the East Coast, we keep in touch and care for each other better. We had to get farther apart physically to come together emotionally.

Ken, oh brother of mine, today is your 25th birthday. Happy Birthday. Enjoy the lower insurance rates.

Happy 19th Birthday, Trina!

And I quote:

I've been doing that whole not expending energy thing with my soapboxing! My friends have all heard it so many times--I have actually stood on chairs in the lunch room in our building and proclaimed--that this week, I had a new thing....

Something would come up, and I would say, You know, see, here, I have to say... (beat) ...but you all know what I'm going to say, so let's all just make a mental note that a soapboxing episode occurred, and you can go through it in your heads at your leisure. I just don't have the energy to do it right now. So it happened. OK, go on. What were you saying?

Living Without Microsoft: We created Living Without Microsoft because the market dominance of Microsoft leads many non-technical people to assume that there really is no alternative to using its software. In many cases, there are real alternatives, and our aim is to help you find them.

This link was found and posted somewhere by someone far more Internet savvy than I.

Three buckets of blackberries and one bucket of blueberries jammed and canned. The jam was even nice enough to can itself; we didn't have to boil the jars to get them to seal. My step-mother and I had a lot of fun and I learned something that I can use for the rest of my life. This certainly makes up for not learning to drive stick (I'm still hopeful I'll learn to tie a tie this summer).

If only I liked jam.

Today, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac OS X. Changes focused mostly on increasing the speed of browser, including support for Quartz technology--a feature of OS X that provides anti-aliased (smoothed) fonts (amongst other benefits). Other browsers using Quartz technology for Mac OS X include Chimera, Mozilla 1.1, and OmniWeb.

I didn't have a date to my Senior prom in high school. My sister's friend--and to a lesser degree, my friend--Liz offered to go with me. We had a great time and the prom was probably better than it would have been if I had found a date on my own.

Liz will be on the July 7th episode of The Dead Zone. Here's what the show's Executive Producer, Michael Piller, had to say about her:

Have to tell you about the dailies I just saw from Enigma of the Stage Door Canteen and what a great find we have in the actress who plays the girl of Johnny's dreams. I hope we might be able to post a photograph of her.

It takes the skilled eye of an experienced professional to pick the exact right performer for a role from maybe two dozen actresses who come in to read lines from the script for a couple of minutes each. I was that experienced professional on that casting call. Remember the name Elizabeth Bennett because I think she's going to be a star.

And I didn't cast her.

I had someone else as my choice. Two someone else's to be honest. But when we sent the casting tape to our colleagues in Canada, the phone rang and they all asked: who's that other girl? So I went back to the tape and looked at her again, and she wasn't bad at the audition - in fact, she looked better on tape than I'd recalled. There's an old expression in this business about star quality: the camera loves her. Well, in the dailies today, I can say without hesitation that the camera and I love Elizabeth Bennett. And I discovered her. Almost.

My prom date is a star.