Like every year around this time, I head on over to H&R Block to file my taxes. So the good news is I’m getting about $2k back. Half of that is going right into tires for my car and the other half is going into savings.

After I got out of there, I headed straight over to Best Buy and picked up a couple of things:

• Brotherhood of the Wolf – A French film about 2 people investigating a mysterious “beast” terrorizing a countryside. This is one of the most beautifully filmed movies I’ve ever seen.li>Dogma: Special Edition – I already have this movie in non-special edition form, but this version was on sale and it’s always fun to watch Kevin Smith DVD extras.li>Vulgar – I haven’t seen this yet, but if Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier are the producers, it can’t be that bad. I’ll let ya know.li>John Mayer‘s Any Given Thursday – It’s just good stuff. Ever just clicked around on my title image above?

I couldn’t find Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: Criterion Collection. Next time.

Apparently, Radio’s built-in backup/restore scripts don’t like to backup any posts containing character entities (either in the title or text). Time to hit the discussion group and find out why.

radiofree: “The anti-war march in Los Angeles yesterday was a rowsing success…”

Wish I could have been there just to experience something like that.

President’s Day is tomorrow and for a lot of people (including myself), that means 3-day weekend. So much has gone on this weekend, though, and I figured it was time for an update already.

Let’s start with the big news. You can’t go anywhere without hearing about it. Of course, I’m talking about the Spice Girls reuniting. After 5 years, all 5 spice girls have been able to put aside their differences and are back together again. You gotta love Fark simply for headlines like “All 10 Spice Boobies to be reunited.” Now that’s girl power!

Don’t think the weekend was going to go by without me talking about the start of the NASCAR season. The big bad Daytona 500 was today and it had to have been the most boring one I’ve ever seen. That’s saying a lot coming from me considering I do find great entertainment in watching what is essentially cars driving around in circles for hours upon hours. 4 hours of rain delays and they only finished half the race before they called it. Congrats to Michael Waltrip, but I would have much rather seen the thing finish while they were running and not sitting in the garage or under umbrellas. Anyway, now that football is over, I have something to do Sunday mornings.

Ok, now V-day. It was good. I’m big on finalizing V-day so I can plan a little, but I didn’t really know until a day or so before. I went out with this girl who I simply can’t say anything bad about. We’d hung out a few times before that and she was just too cool of a cat not to ask out for that night. Anyway, no reservations anywhere so we called around and decided on this little Italian place. Good food. Too much food for me though. It was late by the time we got back and she ended up stay over at my place. We (well, I) got up late and we had a late breakfast. Took her back to her place around 3pm or so and that’s where it ended. Good times. Let’s see where they take us.

Anyway (man I say “anyway” a lot), it’s time to go. How did your weekends go? Girl power!

So here’s my Valentine to all of you. Go ahead and click on it to see it. Sorry I couldn’t get all creative and make my own, but I really liked this one (considering our current state). Anyway, it’s the thought that counts, right? Happy Valentine’s Day.

Ok, I’ll ask the question. So, what is everyone doing for Valentine’s Day? I’m still not very sure, but I know I don’t want to do the “man I hate v-day, I’m hanging out with my friends” thing. Asked this one girl is she wanted to go out and she said yeah, but things are never set in stone. So what are you doing now?

MacCentral: “Apple on Wednesday updated its recently introduced Safari Web Browser. The update addresses issues reported from users and delivers overall performance improvements.”

Two of the biggest problems with Safari is Shockwave content performance and CSS rendering. Apple says to have fixed both of these thing. I’m sure I’ll let ya know what I think. Let’s hope that server connection lag is also taken care of.

Since the recent crash of our SAN at work, we’ve been looking into new backup procedures and, in turn, are trying to estimate storage usage for the next 2 years. It’s gotten me to think a lot about personal storage at home. Originally, I thought I’d just add a DVD-RW drive and do monthly archiving and weekly backups. Now I’m thinking of just moving my 80GB drives into a decent stand-alone file server I could build with a DVD-RW backup and archive system. I’ll update this post later with specs and prices I find today. Whatever I decide to do, I need to do it soon because I am all out of space.

About 4 years ago, the position I held at my job had a lot of down-time. That being the case, my friends and I took it upon ourselves to learn Macromedia’s Flash 3.0. What ended up happening was us going back and forth trying to top each other’s movies. Most of them were incomplete. Some were just showing off some stupid “effect”. Some were pretty damn funny (at the time). Anyway, I just found some and I’m getting a good giggle out watching them all over again. Not because they’re funny. It’s because they’re so bad. Check it out.

• berry_pistov_snail_01.swfli>berry_pistov_snail_02.swfli>evox_blood.swfli>evox_love.swfli>hero.swfli>homepage.swfli>mr_q_tip.swfli>nightline.swfli>plane_project.swfli>richie.swfli>shannon_dragon.swfli>uts.swf

You want to see something really pathetic? Wait until I put up some of my personal web site I found from about 10 years ago. Scary.

I think this car is retarded, but Lisa (might) like it.”