Absolute Watchmen

I ordered Absolute Watchmen from Amazon a week ago, and it showed up in the mail today. I haven’t reread Watchmen since it came out, but I’ve meaning to pull out the original issues and reread it for some time. Now, I’ve got it in a nice big hardback! Watchmen is a definite classic. The wikipedia article for Watchmen has a lot of good info, and links to a bunch more stuff.

WSJ redesign

The Wall Street Journal launched their (print) redesign today. The paper looks good, and has not been turned into USA Today, which I guess was the main thing that people were worried about. There were some pretty good articles in the paper today, too, including one on Virgin Comics. I actually haven’t gotten around to reading any of their titles yet, but I’ve heard good things about Snakewoman. The article was accurate and reasonably well-written, but the headline used one of the standard comic book newspaper article cliches: “Holy [fill in the blank] Batman!” In this case, it was: “Holy Heroes of Indian Lore, Batman!” OK, so maybe they *are* starting to resemble USA Today in some ways. Oh well.

Keyboard stuff

My Microsoft Ergo 4000 keyboard is working out OK, but still feels a bit weird. I want to get a second one to use at work, but it’s looking like I can’t use it with my KVM. Bummer. Maybe I can find a way to get myself a nice new USB-compatible KVM.

There’s some good stuff on the keyboard over at Coding Horror and a review at CNet that pretty much confirms that the keyboard won’t work with a PS/2 adapter.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Today, I finished watching the last few episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist that were on my TiVo. I’ve been working my way through the 51 episodes of the series on and off through most of this year. It was, apparently, a hugely popular series in Japan. It’s definitely worth watching, if you’ve got the time to sit through all 51 episodes. It’s got a lot of light moments, but also a lot of heavy ones. It’s got complex characters and complex themes. The ending is satisfying, but it doesn’t tie things up in a neat bow; it leaves you with a lot to think about.

emusic

I just spent some time going through my Amazon.com wish list, looking for CDs that I’ve had on there for awhile, and that might be available on eMusic or through iTunes. I was surprised to find a couple of oddball items on eMusic. “Fishing With John” by John Lurie, the soundtrack to his odd TV show on IFC, is available on eMusic and iTunes. It’s $17 on Amazon, and the usual $10 on iTunes. Through eMusic, it would cost about $5.75, since there are 23 tracks, and I pay (generally) a quarter a track. So, a pretty good deal.
“Angles Without Edges,” by Yesterday’s New Quintet, is also $17 on Amazon. It’s got 19 tracks, so it’s about $4.75 at eMusic. I have to remember to keep checking eMusic before I buy something at Amazon or iTunes!
Alas, The Brak Album doesn’t seem to be available on either eMusic or iTunes, so that’ll stay on the Amazon wish list for now.

Windows Vista

Newegg has a nice page on Windows Vista. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to upgrade my home desktop PC to Vista or not. I think it meets the required specs, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work. If I can manage to supress my natural upgrading urge for a few months, that would probably be best. By April, there will probably be some decent new video cards that are definitely Vista compatible, and maybe they’ll even have stable drivers by then. I have a pretty decent AMD processor in my machine, but it’s not dual core, so that might be a problem. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new motherboard and processor any time soon. And I really don’t want to buy a completely new machine either.

maintenance

For some reason, installing my new keyboard today got me started looking at certain things on my PC and applying some upgrades. First, I upgraded the drivers for my video card, since I discovered that I’d been getting some weird messages in the event log related to my video card. Then, I remembered that I hadn’t gotten around to installing SP1 for Visual Studio 2005, so I went ahead and did that too. Both of those things are pretty big installs, so that killed about four hours, between downloading and installing. Maybe I should consider doing a year-end backup tomorrow, too.

Keyboards

I’m typing this on a new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I like split keyboards, and this is a pretty good one, though the keys are spaced a little differently from the way they were arranged on my old keyboard. It’s got a bunch of extra keys on it for launching applications, zooming in and out, and going back and forward in your web browser. It also comes with an attachment that gives the keyboard a reverse slope. I tried that out, but couldn’t get used to it, so I took it off. Apparently, the reverse slope is better for you, and I can see the point there, since it would allow you to avoid bending your wrists at all.
This is a USB keyboard; my old one was a PS/2 keyboard. I was actually using all my USB ports, so I had to pull my Zip drive to free up a port. Now, I have to decide if I want to buy another USB hub so I can plug the Zip drive back in, or if I just want to mothball the Zip drive.

Delicious Library

I’ve been entering my audio CDs into Delicious Library. I’ve entered about 200 so far; probably another 200 to go. I just found one good reason why it’s worth my time to do this. I bought a (used) copy of “Are You OK?” by Was (Not Was) from Amazon a couple of weeks ago. I was quite sure that I only had that album on vinyl and not CD. Well, now I have two copies on CD, since I just found my original CD while I was entering stuff into Delicious. As a side note, the main reason I bought the new copy was due to a strange desire to listen to “I Feel Better Than James Brown”. Now, I’m feeling a little conflicted about that.