It's late, but I thought I'd write a paragraph or two about Oscar, the 1991 comedy with Sylvester Stalone starring as the 1930s prohibition mobster-gone-straight, Angelo "Snaps" Provolone. What a riot! I was rolling on the floor laughing regularly and raucously. Hopefully my friends didn't mind.

I'm something of a word-play afficionado, or at least one who appreciates a well written word gimmick. Oscar is chock full of 'em, packed with puns and a myriad of malapropisms, and I love 'em all. That's not to mention the well crafted situations full of comedic confusion.

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I've been a fan of Science Fiction author Orson Scott Card ever since I read his novel Ender's Game as a teenager. What a pleasant surprise when I and others in my family discovered his regular columns he writes, one titled Uncle Orson Reviews Everything for a local North Carolina newspaper, The Rhinocerous Times, and another column for The Ornery American web site titled War Watch. His columns are consistently enjoyable.

UPS finally delivered my new speakers for my computer. My old pair had since retired to Hurricane, Utah, to the abode of my parents, since one of their speakers had...

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Way to go, OSI and Eric Raymond, at shedding some light and truth on the utterly ridiculous SCO-vs-IBM lawsuit. Check out the OSI position paper at http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html for an excellent read as to why SCO's preposterous claims should be laughed at and thrown out.

Well I've got my copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I picked it up at around 3:00 AM this morning at the nearest Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart beat Amazon's price and I got the book earlier. Sorry, Amazon.com, and sorry local Mom & Pop bookstores. Slow reader that I am, I'm only a bit over a hundred pages into the book. I don't think I'll be doing anything useful today...

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Having read the interesting account of Ars Digita's rise and fall, Diary of a Start-Up (Update: The previous link to the article now redirects to Eve Andersson's personal web site. If anyone knows the address where the original article is still available, please let me know. --Aaron) sometime last year, a story which kept me riveted for some reason, when I stumbled across an alternate account at http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita, I couldn't pass it up either. I enjoyed both reads, but suspect Mr. Yoon's account is probably nearer the truth. There are some useful lessons to be learned from the experiences, from both viewpoints.

After reading Mr. Yoon's version, I do wonder where OpenACS is today, feature-wise. I could use a good easy-to-use content management system that lets me roll my own applications. So far everything on my site is hand-coded HTML and PHP, and since I don't have free time enough to do it justice, I really dislike my sites. Sure, I like certain parts okay, and some things are quite nice, but I can't help but believe that a good content management system with some custom programming could match existing features and offer a boatload of new ones. I'll have to explore it.

Call this a test post, why don't ya! This web logging stuff is in PHP and needs some more exercise to work the bugs out. Thus this uninformative, useless pint of babble. But then again, that's what this page is for. I can say anything I want to, at any time. And no one is forcing you to read it.

Okay, to make it a tad more interesting, I'll add a list of liks to web sites of family members:

• My brother, Kendall has his own web site.
  
• My sister, Janna, owns this treasure.
  
• And don't forget my mother's new site (still under construction) she hopes to use while teaching sixth grade.
  
• Oh, let me add a local Geocacher's web page as well. [UPDATE: Originally the page was hosted at www.eq.net/caching]

The Best Trick-or-Treat
by Aaron D. Gifford

It was already a fun Halloween night. My best friend Jed and I had dressed up as Count Dracula and Frankenstein respectively, or as best an approximation as we could dream up with limited resources, scrounging around the box of old clothes and fabric scraps in Jed's attic and pillaging the trunk of stuff my parents kept in the cellar. We had made our neighborhood trick-or-treat rounds, and had a respectable sugar stash. But that was only the beginning. The best trick-or-treat was yet to come...

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