I was watching the X-Games on ABC (Wild World of Sports). This is the fifth year of the X-Games and I must say that the competition has gotten really good. I'm talking about stuff that makes me say "holy crap how did he pull it off without killing himself?!?" Like the motorbike freestyle -- kids in motorcross bikes hurtling 100 feet doing things while in the air that are just scary. One good thing about network coverage is that they cut out a lot of the boring performances and only show the top people competing. When it goes right that makes it interesting for people who have little interest in the sports. When it goes badly (like NBC's last Olympics coverage) it just turns everybody off.

Now, although the X-Games are dangerous and exciting, it's still not my kind of sports. I like objective competitive sports, especially team sports; and I don't think there are any of those in the X-Games. There are objective events like downhill dirtbike racing and various other racing events. But there are also a lot of subjective sports where people do tricks to score judges' points. It's because the events are derived from street and dirt games done by individuals and small groups. Definitely not organized enough for teams. Still, it is amazing what those kids can do...

Once again I'm going through my web site checking the links and pages. iCab is great for this since you can tell at a glance if it finds any errors. Surprisingly I found a few errors even in old pages that shouldn't be changing. But occassionally I change something globally and do a global search and replace (and I'm not checking a few hundred changes). Also, I started checking with Netscape 6 and some of the pages didn't turn out right.

It doesn't like URLs with an apostrophe ('), not marking the link as read. Also, it doesn't like URLs of the form "http:../..." which it doesn't interpret correctly. (Well, that was a mistake on my part as the http shouldn't be in relative links.) Going through the pages manually I also caught some other page mistakes which a link checker wouldn't have caught. It's good to go through it manually and see the flow again, see if it still makes sense. Though by the end of checking a couple of thousand links it's a bit tiring...

Also, again, I'm almost a month behind my journals. Never seem to be able to keep up. I get behind a month then spend a couple of months writing myself back to schedule, which I keep at for a week or two and then it slowly slides behind again. I can understand not writing when I went to Gen Con and was driving about (and I do have a few entries to write about that, hopefully before I forget). The week before I was really busy trying to finish some work before I left. The week after vacation I was really busy catching up at work again.

So I guess that accounts for the month. Not so bad after all. In the queue I have a movie review of "American Outlaws", Icee's ErzoQuest 4.15 journal, and several journals that cover my vacation. Shannon noted that Dave seems to have abandoned his email newsletter. You have to have discipline to make yourself write regularly, especially for those of us that don't write much. Even after two years of journals, I still have a hard time writing and it's still not very good writing either.

Sometimes I look back at an early journal and I think "wow, I wrote short paragraphs back then." Of course I look at last week's journal and I almost think the same thing. Eh, you have to keep writing and eventually it'll get better. I hope.