All of my plans for this evening were cancelled by a solid inch of ice coating every available outdoor surface. I still have power, but the streetlights went dark at around 10:00. The trees will be sweeping the sidewalks by morning.

So I did what any other red-blooded American would do when stuck inside on a bitter Friday evening in April: I looked at porn.

No. Scratch that. I did my taxes. There was a heart-stopping moment when I though I would owe something in the neighborhood of $2k, but a quick review of my math showed that I had used Cosine when I should have used Sine, and I will in fact be getting a little back.

So what to do with this minor windfall?

I could get a new digital camera – not that there is anything wrong with the current camera. I could bulk up my DVD collection, or my CD collection, of my bookshelves. I could get a good start on a liquor cabinet. Or the contents thereof, anyway. Maybe a good suit. I bought my current suit just after I graduated from college, eleven years ago. I haven’t worn it since 1995, and it was a little tight around the waist at the time. I could buy a new sword or two. Not very practical, buy quite high on the nifty scale. Furniture is out of the question, because I can’t fit much of anything through the doorway into my apartment. A bike might be fun, but I have no place to store it when I am not riding.

Option paralysis.

I added a little more content to Master Lee’s site, this in the kung fu and tai chi forms pages. A little here, a little there.

Today’s reason why Internet Explorer 5 can Eat Shit And Die is that it comes in such a wide variety of distinct flavors: IE5 on the PC, IE5 on the Mac, and IE5.5 on the PC. Three entirely different beasts, one major browser release. So not only is the rendering engine crap, but just try coding a workaround with it’s half-and-half support of the standards. Makes we want to break things.

And so to bed.