Will CueCat land on all four feet? Well, what do you expect when your company gives away its product for free?
(via brainlog) Like Dan says, there’s otherware software you can use to take advantage of the free scanner you can pick up from Radio Shack (the official software package is tacky anyway).

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Toggle table borders bookmarketlet (Win IE). Very useful for when you’re trying to figure out how someone set up an interesting page design using tables (source).

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Spyder Games. This new MTV soap opera is more in the Bold and the Beautiful vein than Undressed is (tv cameras rather than film stock, cheesy set dressing, cliched “hand on the doorknob” shots), but it’s still as instantly addictive.

Speaking of soap operas, my favorite song recently is Rupert Holmes’s take on the subject. Every song of his is a little gem — a self-contained little one-act play. I’m looking forward to the Fynsworth Alley rerelease of his classic album Widescreen.

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I’m trying to post an entry from my Palm using Avantgo.

Update: Hah! Successful!

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Just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Two guys rigged up a CueCat and some x10 equipement to open their dorm room door when they scanned their IDs.

Sadly, while the home automation kit I ordered worked in the temporary non-res hall apartment I’ve been living in, it doesn’t seem to work in the new hall director’s apartment I’m moving into this weekend. Probably because there are too many circuits. I’m combing the internet to find troubleshooting tips so that my plans to automate my water fountain and christmas lights are not in vain.

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cheesylights.com. A requisite part of dorm room decorating. I’m currently searching for some chinese lanterns to hang in the living room of my new apartment (which will of course be controlled by my fun new X10 switches).

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Hit-or-Miss hits 1000. Hooray for an entirely arbitrary milestone of entries. Maybe I’d be a little more excited if I didn’t feel like my site was total shit lately. Enough of this pointless navel gazing, where are the links? The reason why I do this site is so that I can keep track of interesting sites and articles so I can find them later. But lately I’ve been passing up blogging just about everything I read online because “everyone else” has already linked it. That’s not doing me any good.

I’m feeling pretty shitty about my personal life too. I could pour out so much more bile and sturm und drang on these pages, but there’s no reason to make this site completely negative.

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I auditioned for GREASE the other day. I wasn’t expecting much. I just hoped that I would at least get cast in the chorus and have the chance to sing and dance (which I love to do).

But no. The cast list went up tonight and I was cast as Eugene, the “class valedictorian.” That’s right — the school nerd. As immortalized by Eddie Deezan in the film version.

I’m been running from the image of Eddie all my life. One of my favorite movies as a kid was Midnight Madness — I longed to be a member of the cool, regular-joe Yellow Team, but I knew people saw me as a member of the White Team, the moped-riding geeks. That’s the kind of guy I was as a kid and I hated every minute of it. I cringed everytime I saw a movie featuring Eddie being made fun of, because I saw myself and the way that I was treated by others.

But then I discovered theatre and things changed (a little, but enough). I got cast against type. When I acted, I was able to show my peers that I could actually do something that they thought was kind of cool and that I was kind of good at it. It was theatre that lifted me out of the depression of my adolescene and gave me the strength and courage to grow up and face the world.

I’m sure that Eddie is a nice guy in real life and he’s made a nice career for himself playing an easily-recognizable type, but I don’t want to be that guy again. I haven’t done any theatre in four years, and I miss it enormously. But I don’t know that I could go through all the psychic and emotional baggage that playing that role might dredge up.

Maybe I wouldn’t be so upset if I was getting the chance to sing and dance. But I don’t want to be that guy who dances awkwardly for a laugh, and Eugene is reportedly not a singing role (if nothing else, I found this great theatre role resource, stageagent.com).

Maybe I’m making too much of this. But I couldn’t bring myself to initial next to my name on the cast list. I’m probably going to call the director tomorrow and ask her if I can just be in the chorus. I’ve just got to figure out all this stuff going on in my head before the first rehearsal Wednesday night.

Update inside.

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