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According to Hercules on Ain’t It Cool, Angel returns Wednesday, October 1 at 9 p.m. That’s over two whole months away! Didn’t our favorite television shows once return in September? At least that’s better than the October 30 premiere date for Tru Calling.

This weekend my sister told me about the Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products, a website trying to document every branded item from all the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. I told her that it sounded like a webmaster with way too much time on their hands. Anal dedication aside, it’s too bad you can’t actually buy items from that catalog.

Wow. Some idiot actually spammed my blog in the comments of the previous entry. It’s kind of flattering that this knuclehead thought my blog had enough traffic to merit the effort. Then again, it was probably as random as a drive-by shooting.

The IP address of the spammer was 68.160.245.170. It’s probably a DHCP address in New York but I blocked it from future comments and trackbacks. Feel free to block it as well.

Before I rush off this weekend to visit my mom in Southern California, I popped into Borders earlier tonight to buy a book for both sides of the dull plane ride. Since the human characters of “Seabiscuit” seemed so interesting, I picked up the large paperback edition of that book. (I chose the larger one because the line spacing of the smaller paperback was too tight for my tastes. Hey, I’m a typography snob.) Like Lay’s potato chips or popcorn, I can’t just eat one book so I decided to also grab Ben Hammersly’s “Content Syndication with RSS.”

During checkout the clerk asked me, “Are you buying the book to read before seeing the movie?” And, of course, I answered, “Yes, although I’m still looking forward to watching RSS on the big screen.”

With my own site and my Blogger account, do I really need another blog at Sparkpod? Of course not. But what can I say, I’m addicted to fooling with weblog systems.

Sparkpod debuted so recently that I actually got the username “don” when I signed up for the free trial. Maybe I can be that lucky when TypePad opens its doors.

It’s a pity that you can’t get rid of that “sparkpod” logo at the top of the page but I do like the inline editing feature. Plus, it’s using WebObjects, technology from the home office in Cupertino.

Yesterday my Trogdor, The Burninator!! shirt arrived in the mail and I’ve been wearing it all day. It was quite popular with the iChat guys at the office. Normally I would think they were just sucking up again since I’m the new boss, but Peter admitted he’d ordered the Homestar Runner figurines. A real fan. He even said I could fondle them when they arrive. Maybe that is sucking up.

Anyway, the shirt is very cool. I even plan to sleep in it tonight. Start getting some real mileage and an excuse to buy a Stinko Man Blue Ringer shirt.

My wife went to the hospital for her stress test on Monday but we still haven’t got the results from the cardiologist. Although she did hear him mutter “hmmm, a right bundle branch block” as he glanced at the electrocardiogram. What a geek.

While a left bundle branch block indicates something scary, a right bundle branch block happens in perfectly normal, healthy people too and doesn’t always mean heart disease.

God-willing my wife’s cardiologist can tell his left from his right.

That was one nutty Open Championship they played out at there Royal St George’s today. Thomas Bjorn dropped his game in a bunker and handed the Claret Jug to Ben Curtis, a virtual unknown and rookie playing his first-ever major. Meanwhile, Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, and Davis Love III were all poised to take over but couldn’t even keep their scores under par.

Of course, this tournament still isn’t as crazy as the 1999 Open Championship when Jean Van de Velde blew it at Carnoustie.

Uh oh. Looks like “High Plains Drifter” is on AMC again now. And I’m just a sucker for dialogue like, “You’re going to look pretty silly with that knife sticking out of your ass.” Guess I’ll have to stay awake a little while longer.

What is it that keeps me up at night playing with the web? Why do I even need a blogger account and blogspot website when I have my own blog here? And after seven years of writing web browsers you would think I could just put those down too.

Nope. I’m an idiot.

The results from the portable electrocardiogram monitor are in and the doctor says that nothing significant was observed in the function of my wife’s heart. Go figure. So either the EKG from Friday was a fluke or the arrhythmia he detected then is hiding out in her spleen.

Now she needs a stress test just to be sure. That’s where she goes to the hospital and climbs on a treadmill to run until she breaths hard and a cardiologist dogs her like a personal trainer.

Well, the news could be much worse. I for one am glad that they still can’t find anything wrong.

Fifty Mozilla team members were downsized by the company formerly known as Netscape today. Which means most of the people I still know there have been handed their walking papers. Ugh. Including one who has six weeks to find employment elsewhere or face deportation. This is depressing.

At least the Mozilla Foundation will keep the Lizard alive.

Guess I’ll have to get my fix on the new characters page.

So I’m trying to decide whether the reason I can’t sleep is that I have too much work to do or that my wife and I won’t learn about her electrocardiogram until later this evening.

She sure was cute wearing that portable monitor this weekend. Sort of like a girlie Vulcan with a tricorder. Only it had too many wires. Wires connected to sensors so sticky they gave her little hickeys when the Doctor removed them. Made me wonder how long it’s been since I gave her a hickey.

I can’t tell if she’s worried. She is sort of like a Vulcan that way too. I’m not sure if I’m worried either. Kind of anxious, I think. Anxious and awake.

Dave still says “Don - in danger of vanishing from my link list due to lack of update” about my site in his blogroll. And this from a guy who hasn’t posted since June 24!

You’ve got two whole weblogs, Dave. Write something in one of them. ;)

It’s really gross. Especially if the mouse has been on your desk and in use for awhile. Grey and compressed gunk. That kind of material I expect to find between my toes or something. And this with an optical mouse too.

Looks like Slashdot found ppk’s modern browser saga. By his reckoning I’ve been working on web browsers since the end of a Middle Earth-like “Second Era.” Being on the inside that long is some kind of saga, that’s for sure.

Whatever the motivation for his commentary or accuracy of his history, I certainly agree with his prediction that “Safari shows every promise of becoming a far better browser than Explorer 6.”

Once again I’m hacking the site. Like I’ll ever stop. And not just the CSS again. But it would be good to force your browser to reload the style sheet on this page. Heck, you should just reload every time you visit the site. That’ll have the side benefit of inflating my page view stats. Of course, my ISP will hate that.

Seeing it on Slashdot makes it official, AOL is launching its own blogging service. Available this summer, “AOL Journals” (a less geeky term than “blogs,” I guess) will support RSS and publishing via instant messaging (AIM only) and telephone. They’re also doing some kind of photo publishing integration via “You’ve Got Pictures.”

Of course, this is old news, or at least an old rumor, ever since TypePad was announced. But it looks certain that Google isn’t the only 800-pound gorilla in the blogosphere.

Friday night my son visited a school buddy and was re-introduced to Strong Bad while they were surfing around on his friend’s PC. I think they watched every “email” episode that night, and “laughed their asses … er … butts off” as my son put it when he proudly showed me his discovery.

What my son forgets is that I showed him Strong Bad and all the other characters at Homestar Runner over a month ago! Jeez, I never get any credit for being a cool dad.

While my neck is now feeling much better, my wife scared me silly earlier today with a phone call during lunch telling me that she was having chest pains. After a bit of clarification, both she and I doubted it was a heart attack, but I headed home quickly to take her to the doctor.

Unfortunately my wife doesn’t have a regular doctor. So I had to look one up via our online insurance registry. Have you ever tried to find a doctor on Friday afternoon? Unless you’re bleeding out of your ears, they don’t make appointments. Thankfully the local urgent care center wasn’t too busy and they took our insurance.

I thought my wife was just having some muscle pain or indigestion. So I was really shocked when the doctor called me in to tell me he had detected an arrhythmia, a heart rhythm anomaly, while performing a routine electrocardiogram on my wife.

Now she’s wearing a portable electrocardiogram monitor overnight in order to record a painful cardiac episode. And if that isn’t bad enough, they’ll probably have to perform an echocardiogram if the monitor doesn’t find anything conclusive.

So this is why I can’t sleep tonight.

My old buddy Bart Decrem (we’re both veterans of the now defunct Eazel) makes an interesting evaluation of desktop Linux, both from a technology perspective and in terms of marketplace developments. But whether Linux outpaces Mac OS X in terms of desktops anytime soon (as Bart believes), I don’t think it’s going to take away from the Mac installed base. More likely it’s a threat to Windows since, in Bart’s words, “desktop Linux is now ‘good enough’ for significant classes of users.” Bart quotes an unnamed source:

Our clients are not asking us to replace all of their Windows desktops. They’re asking us to help them figure out how they can reduce the number of Windows desktops.

Is “good enough” really what’s needed? Hopefully Windows users want something better than that.

After my post about Style Master, a friend at the office pointed out that CSSEdit has been using the Web Kit since the end of June. Which is even nicer.

CSSEdit along with Kung-Log, Shrook, and WebDesktop are all using the Web Kit. Here’s hoping Brent Simmons gets NetNewsWire using it soon to improve previews.

Looks like Style Master 3.0, released today for Mac OS X, supports Safari. This is both smart and nice. Of course, now I’ll have to make sure Westciv has documented CSS support in Safari correctly.

Spotted on Boing Boing and Gizmodo today, Kensington’s WiFi Finder might be the must-have gadget for my PowerBook that doesn’t even connect to it. Kensington claims it’s “the only WiFi detector on the market today.” But at 2.95 inches long, 0.39 inches high, and 2.17 inches wide, it seems a little too big for my pocket. Maybe that hook is supposed to fit on my computer case (which is not made by Kensington)?

Update: I found out from Scott Knaster in a comment on Diane’s blog that this gadget costs less than 25 bucks! As I wrote in the next comment, “My American Express card has some work to do!”

I went to the chiropractor today to get the massive kink out of my neck that’s causing me all this pain and stiffness since Tuesday morning. After some pleasant but mostly ineffective physical therapy to loosen my knotted muscles, my chiropractor tried to do little delicate adjustment on my neck. And for the first time in years doing this to my neck, something went wrong. Major spasms-of-pain kind of wrong.

Still, he’s a very good chiropractor and immediately put me in manual traction to reduce the stress and spasm. And then he wrapped my neck in a large ice pack to reduce any swelling. It worked well enough so I could make it home. He even gave me that ice pack to take with me.

So it’s lots of ice, Advil, and cheap muscle-relaxing wine for me for awhile. But I’m going back to visit my chiropractor on Friday morning. I still trust him. And I know he felt horrible that he couldn’t fix me up right away like he usually does.

I’ve done something stupid to my neck again by leaning over my PowerBook late last night. Ouch. I’m so stiff I look positively military. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from typing tonight. Ugh. This will require a visit to the chiropractor tomorrow. Or perhaps decapitation if I can’t get an appointment.

If the site looks like ass then force this page to reload (and depending upon the lameness of your web browser, you may need to empty your cache too). If it still looks like ass after that then it’s probably intentional.

Although it’s been over three months since my last blog entry, I’ve not forgotten that I run a website. But it sure seems that way. I’ve been so busy finishing Safari and the Web Kit for the Fruit Company’s 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference that I haven’t had time for much else.

Of course, I didn’t miss the last-ever visit on Tuesday night from the Slayer or this season’s final twist with everyone’s favorite vampire. Sure, I was busy. But not that busy!