Yahoo! is so brain dead sometimes. I had to upgrade the web hosting account or drop it (which I don't want to do just yet). But the automated procedure insists that you sign up for a domain name (which they'll pay for). I just want to keep using the same URL (http://tartan.simplenet.com) which doesn't require creating a brand new domain. The other option was to transfer an existing domain to their service, as if I'd ever do that! Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way around it so I created temporary-domain.com. I'm going to keep it up, strictly as a redirect, until the end of 2001. I figure by then everybody who cares should have fixed their links -- if you don't check your links at least once a year then you deserve whatever happens.

I'm starting to research car insurance options. Right now I'm under my mom's insurance carrier because the car is under her name. She says she wants to pay it off so that she can transfer the car to me and I can take care of it myself. So I go to four web sites and fill out the quote form. They all have different options and services and their various web sites range from rather amateurish to quite professional. No matter what, I'm probably going to get insurance from AAA. I've wanted to use them ever since I got my driver's license.

Although it's early in the month, I've already planned my cultural activity of the month. I'm going to see "Mamma Mia!", a musical playing at the Orpheum in San Francisco. I've heard it's very good, lots of ABBA songs. It'll be on January 28th at 14:00, which should not interfere with any travel plans to Boston. Kind of pricey though, $45 for the nosebleed section and $85 for the best seats. I borrowed a Bay Area Backroads book from Steph so next month I may try one of those if the weather starts getting better.

This month's charity contribution is TidBITS. Well, not really a charity, but a worthy cause in my opinion. Information is always good, and TidBITS has provided good Macintosh information for years and years. Also, I have a little TidBITS contributor badge on my web site and I'm listed on the TidBITS site, so it would be wrong if I wasn't up on my yearly contributions. Since this is not a real charity, I can't get Oracle to match my contribution. So next month I should look for a worthy charity that I can have Oracle match.

Is it just me, or do computer clock chips just suck nowadays? Even my new PowerBook would be drifting like crazy if it didn't time sync every week. It used to be just PC computers, they'd drift a few seconds a month. My old Macs only drifted a second or two a month, which is about as good as a cheap watch. But now all the computers we use at work drift horribly, if not for doing time syncing it would be a real pain resetting the time every three months. Same for that new VCR I bought, it drifts much more than the two-year old model I own.

Another random thought: a computer game is only as good as it's random number generator. Although today's games and computers use rather sophisticated RNGs (really, pseudo RNGs) so it looks to people that they're truly random, old games on old computers could be rather biased. I remember a Yahtzee game on my Mac (TripleYahtzee?) which was biased towards rolling 6's. So if you roll 4-4-2-6-6 you might go for the 4's to fill up that row figuring you can do the 6's later. Worse yet, 4-4-4-6-6 and you have a better chance at Yahtzee with the 6's.

I broke down and bought iMovie2 from the Apple store. Probably should have gotten it on eBay since I haven't really gotten around to using it for the last couple of days. On first impression it did a much better job changing the brightness of a movie clip than the shareware movie editing program I was trying out. It's kind of slow though. Change that, it's very slow. It took 10+ minutes to process a 40 second movie; the other program doing it in 2-4 minutes. I still need to read the online help (sigh, not even a PDF manual anymore) and maybe brush up on techniques for brightening an image.