Some random things that happened or I thought about this past week...
» The first day off due to the snow and ice in the area was fun, and I was able to get all sorts of things done (see the point immediately below). The second day was torture as I was bored, had no reason to step outside, and utterly nothing to do inside. I haven't been as glad to go to work in a long time as I was on Wednesday. At least I was able to get out of my apartment...
» I added a new skin to my set at BlogSkins. It's called (appropriately enough) "Snow and Ice" and while it's a relatively simple design, it's been the best received of my designs so far. I wonder if people there are beginning to wonder whether I'm only going to do imageless designs. Well I will until I find a hosting situation where I can limit external linking of my images to specific websites, forcing users to either save the images into their own webspace or look really foolish.
» A little birdie showed me a link to this silly yet addictive Flash game that's been making the rounds. It's set somewhere in the polar regions of the Earth and the only characters are a penguin at the top of a cliff, and a yeti with a baseball bat at the bottom of said cliff. All you do is click your left mouse button twice: once to get the penguin to dive of the cliff, and once to get the yeti to swing the bat. With luck and timing, you launch the penguin like a ball, and the program will tell you how far the bird travels. The longest I've hit it was 588.3 (Feet? Meters? Who knows?). What's your best?
» On the Academy Awards nominations--or more specifically the one category I care about, Best Original Score--the only surprise was that I didn't realize that Horner scored "House of Sand and Fog". I haven't yet heard the scores for "Cold Mountain" (I tend to take a dislike to soundtracks that relegate an important part of the musical experience of the film to a tiny handful of tracks at the end of the disc) or "House of Sand and Fog" (I've long since gotten to the point with Horner that unless he cuts loose and enjoys himself with a project or does something interesting, I feel I know exactly what he brings to the table). But of the scores I have listened to, "Return of the King" is the obvious class of the group. However, if the Academy decides to vote elsewhere thinking that they gave Shore his award for his work two years ago, then I wouldn't mind seeing Newman win the award for "Finding Nemo". It's a precious, bouncy score which is pleasantly reminiscent of his work on "Oscar and Lucinda". I would back Elfman this year (it's almost painful to see how overdue he is for some kind of recognition) if I didn't feel that his work on "Big Fish" didn't sound so thin and dull.