Wow.

I've only seen the first three episodes and I'm hooked.

When I first saw ads for "Lost," I thought it was just some show cooked up to capitalize on the "Survivor" craze, but now I'm blown away.

I love how the characters are revealed so slowly. First, it makes it a little easier to keep up. The producers/writers must have realized that it would be insane to try to develop all the characters in the first couple of episodes because there are so many. Also, it adds to the suspense. Each episode provides just a few more details about a couple of characters, which sometimes just raises more questions -- as if there aren't enough of those to go around as it is.

Then there's the island, which seems to be the paramount mystery, and a character unto itself. I'm not going to say any more, because I don't want to ruin anything for anyone who hasn't seen it yet (like I have a lot of room to talk, I've seen only three episodes).

If you don't care about spoilers, you can check out Liz's entries on Warm Glow, and I'm sure there's plenty of talk on various "Lost" forums.

As for me, I'm going to avoid any references to the show until I'm caught up.

More photos on Flickr.

I went to the Georgia Aquarium this morning before work. Please enjoy this short video of my visit (music by YACHT).

I also have a bunch of pictures, which I will be uploading soon.

In classic 1995 / Web 1.0 fashion, I'm declaring this site Under Construction.

Note: this post does not count toward my resolutions.

Update: I'm now prepared to declare this a stable, 1.0 design.

This package of Grapples (pronounced grape-el) caught my eye at the grocery store.

I was a little anxious before my first bite. I didn't know if the inside would be like an apple or a grape -- and I didn't know what to expect it would taste like.

As it turns out, the Grapple has the consistency and texture of a Granny Smith. The taste? Exactly like an apple -- but not a particularly flavorful one -- with a faint aftertaste of artificial grape, like a popsicle.

I'm unimpressed, and will buy regular apples in the future.

The only use I can forsee is a mild prank. It would be amusing to see someone's reaction if they thought they were eating regular apples.

I'm going to try to create a QTVR (or a crude facsimile thereof) of my apartment in the near future. It's certainly come a long way since I first moved in.

After my computer scare last month, I decided to check out Firefox, based on reading several reviews comparing it favorably to Safari. I went so far as to make it my default browser.

No longer.

I can understand the appeal of Firefox (especially for Windows users who have few alternatives), and I like the customizations available through extensions, some of which add features that should be standard in any browser, like linky. And the web developer toolbar is awesome. But for day-in day-out browsing, I'll take Safari.

First of all (these are in no particular order by the way), Safari's much more responsive on my machine (1GHz 12" PowerBook G4). Firefox took much longer to launch and I experienced noticable lag when doing simple actions like opening new tabs.

Second, I like being able to close a tab with out switching to it. Firefox provides one 'X' button at the end of the row of tabs which will close your current tab, but Safari provides an 'X' button on each tab so you can close without switching.

Third, I like using cmd-shift-left and cmd-shift-right to cycle between tabs. Similarly, I like being able to use cmd-~ to switch between open windows. Also in the keyboard shortcuts department, I like that I can use cmd-# (where # is a number, like 2) to open links stored in my bookmarks bar. That kind of access to frequently used links is great.

Lastly, I like the aqua-style radio buttons, checkboxes and submit buttons in HTML forms.

I know there are extensions that recreate some of these features in Firefox, but why track them down when I have them all in one package already?

I've been learning PHP lately. One of my first scripts will help me (and you) keep track of how I'm doing on my New Year's resolutions. Based on the numbers I provide, the script generates graphs for each one. You can see the results on my new Resolutions page. I didn't create a graph for the "3 miles in 25.5 minutes" goal because it doesn't really lend itself to a one-dimensional percentage-based chart.

Update: Here's the source if anyone wants to take a look.

This is one of the times when smell-o-vision would be cool. This will get me well on my way to keeping my New Year's resolutions. A) I can easily get three or four meals out of this, B) It cost less than $20, and C) I'm writing a post about it.