Well, the site is finally online. And as of this afternoon, I’ve added a third style sheet to the list of selectable skins—another light-on-dark style, it mimicks the mostly violet style sheet I used to use on my old site. I’ve called it “Moonlight Knight,” in another symbolic method of linking it to things long past.

Yesterday was my birthday. It was a good day, marred only by the mishap I had in the evening whilst installing one of my gifts—two 512 MB sticks of Geil PC3200 SDRAM. One of the sticks was most definitely bad. At first the system wouldn’t boot up at all, but it finally did after I’d switched the order of the sticks, taken one out, swapped them, yada yada. Okay, I thought I was home free after I got the machine to POST, but the thing would not stop crashing. I couldn’t play any game for more than ten seconds without a reboot. Since these are the exact same symptoms I had when one of my old Crucial RAM sticks went bad last year, I RMA’ed the whole gigabyte of the stuff back to NewEgg. It shipped out Priority Mail this morning. Hopefully they’ll get some working RAM back to me in short order.

In other news, my family and me spent the weekend in Orlando—at Disney World, actually, most of the time. I’ve become quite accustomed to going there, to the point where it’s almost like visiting a relative’s house. I’ve been there so many times, it no longer seems necessary to go on any rides or visit any attractions. For the most part it’s like a great big “central park” where you can just walk around, enjoy the weather, do some shopping, enjoy some really good food, and maybe catch a show here and there. The Old Key West resort—more like a country cottage than a hotel—is enough of an attraction in its own right. This time we stayed in building 45, which overlooks the little river connecting the resort to the Downtown Disney shopping district (where the Virgin Megastore is). Great location.

Besides the unfortunately defective RAM (damn, the stuff was FAST while it worked, though), I did snare a few other great gifts, namely a couple of Xbox games, the second volume of Red Dwarf, a new watch, and some cinnamon muffins and blueberry pancakes. (My wife knows that secret about “the way to a man’s heart,” let me tell you.) The two console games I bought were the new 007 shooter, Everything or Nothing, and the Battlestar Galactica game I’ve mentioned here before.

I was expecting the Battlestar game to be lacklustre—I mean, TV/movie games usually are—but I found it to be tons of fun. All of the sound effects from the series were in there, beautifully updated, sounding perfect as ever. The Cylons have the traditional vocoderized voice patterns, and the ships are nicely modeled. Conversely, the script is lame and the voice acting is pretty forgettable (you feel like you’re watching a generic episode of Stargate or Enterprise, rather than the storybook-like plots of Battlestar), but the gameplay makes up for it. Zipping around in the Viper fighter, destroying Cylon raiders with the laser cannons and smart missiles…wow, it’s really a lot of fun. There’s a good amount of strategy involved with protecting and aiding your wingmen, and the game includes a pretty innovative system for altering the characteristics of your weapons loadout while you’re in the middle of flying a mission. This basically means that you can adjust the attributes of your missiles while in-flight, setting weights to four different parameters (including power, agility, and some other factors).

As for the 007 game, meh…I was in a hurry when I played it, and I totally did not read the manual beforehand (unlike with the BSG game, for which I thoroughly studied the book from cover to cover)…but my initial impressions of it were “it’s okay.” As I mentioned, I’ve only played a tiny little snippet, for the majority of which I was basically just running around mashing buttons and hoping stuff worked. At least the real Bond continuum characters are in there, with the actual voices of people like Judi Dench and Pierce Brosnan. Speaking of which, Pierce really doesn’t seem to be cut out for voice-overs…he sounds TOTALLY artificial…but then again, I only heard a couple of lines. Need to play more before I start handing out judgments.

Just as things start to calm down, I now find myself faced with another potential freelance job—brought to me by none other than the Bikini Website Guy of much lore. This time the job isn’t for him, but a friend of his, who has decided to start selling his own line of clothing. I really don’t know how I get myself into these types of jobs, but…well, first it was bikinis, now it’s gangsta wear. That’s right. Hip-hop style hoodies, jerseys, skullcaps, all that kind of gear. The dude apparently is in tight with a lot of pro rappers and hangs with da homies in New York all the time. He needs a “fun and entertaining” site (with lots of pictures of girls, noted Mr. Bikini Guy) that comes equipped with a merchant account and all the trimmings for buying product online.

Supposedly, this site only needs to be “just a few pages.” I seem to recall originally hearing that the bikini website would require even less than that, and I wound up basically designing two complete sites from the ground up with that one. Still…I find myself tempted by the lure of the dark side…namely, money. All the crap that’s gone wrong with KITT isn’t going to pay for itself, and what with my Trans Am’s warranty running out in a couple months, I have a feeling that any money I can get my hands on will come in handy.

So, that’s what I’ll be forced to think about over the next couple of days. A large part of me really doesn’t want this job—after all, if I thought I didn’t have much in common with a bikini retailer, I really don’t have anything in common with rappers. But of course the guy’s all like “If you don’t want to do it, I just don’t know what I’ll do” and all that shit. I really am sick of that. Hmm. Sounds like I’m pretty much making this decision right here and now. The worst part is, I think if I agree to this, they’re going to decide after the fact that they want a Flash site. I am not fucking doing Flash. Period.

Wooo! Well, it’s nearly 5:00…time to leave work soon. I’m actually rather liking not having loads of work to do all the time. I’ve been jonesing to get back to work on my story-writing pasttime, which I’ve neglected for quite a while. After all, it’s one of the few things I have on my plate that doesn’t cost a cent of money!

More updates later. I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood last night…some further entries might yet come of that.