Friday, 12 September 2003: As if the second year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks wasn't already enough reason to hate yesterday, I now discover another one.

As I'm sure almost anyone already knows, beloved actor John Ritter died yesterday of what is being termed an aortic dissection which is an impossible-to-diagnose condition in which his aorta has, literally, a cut or tear in it. Nobody knew about it until it was far too late.

I grew up watching John Ritter on "Three's Company" and I kept watching it throughout my young adulthood and even now in syndication. This past year, Katie and I fell in love with his new show "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter". I loved this new show so much that I gave it four Kapgar.com Primetime Awards including a Best Rookie Actor award to Ritter himself.

You have no idea how bummed out both Katie and I are at this news. Losing Ritter is like losing a close friend even though we've never actually met him. He was just such a big part of our young lives for so long. This is truly the first time I've really been affected by the death of a celebrity.

Well, Heaven is a much funnier place now.

Thursday, 11 September 2003: Need I say anything about what is going through my head right now other than severe anger and hatred towards those Al Q'aida bastards who are laboring under the delusion that everything they do is for the glory of Allah and that they will be rewarded with eternal riches for what they've done?

Nope, didn't think so.

Wednesday, 10 September 2003: Do you remember several months ago how I mentioned that Hallee Hirsh's mom (Hallee played Anthony Edwards' daughter on "E.R.") sent me an e-mail thanking me for awarding her daughter the Best Rookie Kiddie award in my Primetime Kapgar.com Awards for 2002? Well, I just received another e-mail from her saying that she updated her daughter's trivia page on IMDb to include my award.

How cool is that? Kapgar.com now has a mention on the biggest movie reference site on the entire Web... the Internet Movie Database! I am completely stoked. I have a permagrin spanning ear to ear right now. I e-mailed her back saying that she could link directly to that entry if she so desired and provided her the proper URL. I dunno if she'll do that or not, but it would be even cooler that way. More promo for me and my little site. When you combine this with the fact that my Film Critique pages average nearly 15 to 20 hits per day (3 times what this page receives) over the last four months, well, you can understand my excitement. I know that 15-20 hits isn't much in the scheme of things, but when those same pages barely received 2 or 3 hits per day before that, you could say it's a big improvement.

This is really getting cool.

If you'd like to see it yourself, surf on over to Hallee Hirsh's IMDb trivia page.

Tuesday, 9 September 2003: Okay, this is one you gotta see to believe, Mcphee.com is selling what is bound to be the rage among collectors of obscure action figures -- a librarian. Yes, as in frumpy dress, short hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and, the best part, an action feature that allows you to press a button on her back and her arm swings up with a finger extended to shush noisy library patrons. Can it get any better than that? Librarians all over the country are in a tizzy about it saying that it "sets the library profession back 30 years" and that these figures are an insult to librarians everywhere. Why? It's funny. How does it set the profession back? I just don't get that one. Yes it's the stereotyped vision of a librarian much like the little old lady in Ghostbusters. But, what have librarians themselves done to eliminate this stereotype? Very little to be honest. The librarians at my local library look roughly like this figure, too. Hell, if I was a librarian, I'd be proudly displaying this figure on my desk just for kicks.

Monday, 8 September 2003: As we have been expecting, the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA) has finally gotten around to filing lawsuits against individual users of file sharing software. The 261 lawsuits in this first round target those users that have swapped "thousands" of files with their computers and continue to do so despite threats from the RIAA. I think the article I read said that those named in these lawsuits face fines of $150,000 per infringement. That means a fine for each music file on their hard drive. That one's gotta hurt.

Thankfully, I don't have to worry about being a target as I have not used a file swapping system for nearly two years if not longer. Ever since AU blocked out the gnutella clients from its system, I haven't been able to download at work and there's no way in hell I'm gonna sit through a download on my 56K modem at home. Not worth it.

I wonder how many people have actually stopped file swapping since these lawsuits have been announced.

Sunday, 7 September 2003: Hey, I'm finally playing catch up with the "in crowd". After weeks of frustration with my current cell phone losing its signal completely and unpredictably for upwards of 20 minutes when Katie's phone has a perfect signal and after suffering through numerous resettings of my phone when the memory wouldn't hold onto details, I have traded it in for a new one.

You see, Katie and I got a three-year service plan on our cell phones when we bought them at Best Buy and it's one of the few times I would recommend buying one of their Disservice Plans. We have had to trade in phones due to technical issues at least three times each. We have used this plan to upgrade from the old Nokia 5165 to the Nokia 3360 and now, I have upgraded to the Motorola T720. Yeah, I have a flip phone with a color screen and all the bells and whistles. Didn't have to pay much for it either since I was allowed to use the original purchase price of my 3360 towards the purchase of this one as well as Best Buy's instant $50 rebate. Paid about $30 for the phone. I can handle that.

Only problem now is that Katie wants one. She's jealous. Her phone is having some of the same problems that mine did. So we may have to cash in on our plan again.

La vita e bella, no?