Every once in a while SpeedDoubler's Copy Agent preferences gets zapped and it stops doing my backups. And then I don't notice until I need to recover a file or if I happen to visit the web site on Jennifer and notice it hasn't been updated. This time I needed to recover yesterday's journal, which I accidentally erased. But no backups, so I'll have to rewrite it. Sigh...

I've been developing my Java applet on Internet Explorer, which uses Apple's JVM and so has a stable and updated VM to work with. Whereas Netscape's JVM imple- mentation on the Mac OS is downright buggy. Even on Windows, I had to update Netscape from 4.5 to 4.7 to get my applet to work, and the only weird thing it uses is AWT. Speaking of which, the applet looks great when I use AppletViewer, a little less great when I use Mac IE, awful when I use Win IE, and downright disgusting when I use Win Netscape. The default colors and fonts are bad, and the controls are drawn badly. Like I care at this point, as long as it works I'm not going to spend time fixing it...

For people who don't like football, I suppose the Super Bowl's only draw is the new commercials that air during it. Me, those commercials stopped being interes- ting three or four years ago. For the most part it's just more of the same thing with something occassionally original. But when you get right down to it, they are only commercials, and this year there'll be a bunch of annoying dot-com ads.

Remember back when Bud Bowl I was a cool and original concept for a commercial? And then that idea got so overworked in succeeding years. It was kind of cool because at the time the Super Bowls were just a chance for the NFC to stomp all over the AFC team, which made for a boring game. In last few years, the game has been closer and more entertaining, although in any given year you can still get a blowout...

I've been trying to help my friend Michael with his story ideas. The problem with him is that he vacillates too much. He gets an idea, then develops it, then usually gets discouraged after talking to some people and drops the story idea. Some of his ideas are really good too, and I think I help make them a bit better just by being a sounding board. But it all comes down to writing ability and the desire to write. If he's good and wants it he'll write a good story no matter what the basic plot. But it is frustrating seeing him not get anything done since I've known him, something like a year...

I saw the State of the Union Address. I was taping some other stuff but those shows got preempted and I managed to tape the whole thing. There are still a lot of things President Clinton wants to accomplish in his last year. I don't know if he'll be able to do it, I don't even know if I agree with some of his many initiatives. But he's a smart guy and social engineering is an iffy science at best, so maybe what he wants to do is the right thing. After the Address ABC allowed a couple of Republicans to rebut some of President Clinton's proposals. Now, theire arguments made sense, but the way they delivered it left a bitter taste in my mouth. You should respect the office, always...

Here's a nifty little utility that I found. The problem with using multiple monitors, with multiple resolutions, is that the desktop icons get moved around if they'd appear outside the current resolution. So I kept my desktop icons in a spot where the smallest screen I used would work, meaning that in bigger screens the icons were in the middle of the screen. But, there's this little utility called Desktop Icon Manager (v 1.3). It's actually just an Applescript that can memorize you're icon positions, then whenever it's rerun it'll scale the icon positions to the current screen. Now my desktop icons start out at the edge of the screen where I can drag stuff on top of them and they aren't hidden by application windows.