Whenever I go home my parents give me a bunch of food to take back. Sometimes my mom gives me this frozen orange juice, usually someone that was on special. Donald Duck orange juice is a rather bitter concoction that I still drink somehow. This last time though it's just a Safeway generic brand, and it tastes ok. Not as much into orange juice as I was when I was a kid, but it does taste just fine...

Another philosophical note that I notice when I reread these journal entries. These are rather stream-of-conscious writings and I never bother to recheck for grammatical errors and punctuation. So when I go back over them I spot the mistakes that I miss when I'm writing. But these are really meant only for my reading so I don't bother to recheck.

On the other hand, when I write anything that's supposed to be read by other people, I check and recheck my writing a few times. I just so do not want to make a mistake, and a bad impression thereof. People don't remember that you wrote something good, they'll remember the stupid mistakes. Less inclined to do it when writing to my friends, I guess I'm more secure with them...

I use ClickTV when I want to search to see what programs will be on. It has good program descriptions, a fast search engine, and a quite extensive database. The problems are that sometimes the servers are overwhelmed and out of service, sometimes the search engine index is out of date so it misses shows, sometimes the search engine doesn't find your search terms (which it found last week), and sometimes I rely on its database too much and forget that they do miss quite a few programs. It also uses massive tables or something for its listing view so it draws slowly. And yet I still use it as my main television program search engine...

You ever notice that I tend to qualify every statement I make? I very rarely say "always", "never", "every time", or any absolute term. Even the last statement I wrote "very rarely" instead of "never". If I do mean something it's because I'm absolutely sure I'm right. But most of the time I don't complete knowledge of a situation and I make many mistakes so I don't like commiting to something I'm going to be held accountable for...

Oops. I forgot to mention what my favorite movie of 1998 is. After looking at the list of movies I saw that year, the honor goes to "Saving Private Ryan" because I like military movies and it was an excellent movie to boot. I saw it on video a few weeks ago and it still chokes me up in certain parts. Honorable mention goes to "Zero Effect", which I thought had a fine performance by Bill Pullman.

Looking back at my past favorites, I can still agree with "Crimson Tide" in 1995. "Apollo 13" was also a good movie that year, but how can I not favor a submarine movie? 1996 was a weak year, and if I had to choose again I might go with "Courage Under Fire" instead of "Star Trek: First Contact". But that was a good Star Trek movie and the best of the three Next Generation ones made so far. I'm not too sure what I was thinking when I picked "Starship Troopers" in 1997, other than I really liked the attitude in the movie. "Contact" is another good movie that year and it could easily have been number 1.

For 1999 I'll unofficially pick "Shakespeare in Love" which was a movie that deserved its Oscar. Even though Ms Leick was in "Chill Factor", I don't think I'll ever pick an action movie. It's the plot and characters that I remember years down the road. I guess we'll see if I still feel the same way a year from now...