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Color of Magic **** Quirky fun. First Discworld book. There are over 30 books in this series... eep!

I went to the Banff Mountain Film Festival last night at the Bagdad Theater.

We saw shorts on kite snowboarding in Finland ("Entropy"), crazy mountain biking in British Columbia ("Trial and Error"), rock climbing in England, and ice climbing in abandoned Swedish mines. The feature was a documentary called "20 Seconds of Joy" on a Norwegian woman's addiction to base jumping.

Although quite long at almost an hour, I thought "20 Seconds" was an excellent insight into adrenaline addiction. The other films were fine, but I missed the fun-loving/humorous element from previous festivals (anybody remember the rock climbing dog?).

I wish the Banff folks would find a way to publish an annual DVD series so we could see more of the submissions! One night is not enough...

Good Earth **** Simple yet enticing story of rural life in pre-revolutionary China.

If you ever find yourself locked out of your Windows XP box due to a forgotten password, and if you haven't enabled EFS, and if you have physical access to the machine, then Offline NT Password Editor will let you edit or clear away that pesky Administrator password in no time flat. I burned the CD, rebooted, and within 2 minutes I was logged in to the box.

I always knew this was possible, but I was surprised by just how easy it was.

This is probably a good time to extol the virtues of encrypting your data...

Next *** : Great job by Nicholas Cage (as usual), fun action movie, strange ending.

Lost World *** : Jurassic Park Part 2. Standard Chrichton, well written, nothing extraordinary, good read.

Pastebin - collaborative debugging tool. Cool idea for sharing source code and other whitespace-sensitive files.

This is a pretty good ad from the London city government on bicycle safety: Awareness Test

Stranger Than Fiction *** : Great concept, but something didn't quite connect for me in this love story.

I've decided to go for Seattle to Portland in one day this year. It's 202 miles. That's about 60 miles more than I've ever biked in a day. But hopefully with a lot of drafting from the pace line, I should be able to make it!

Unfortunately, I'm already falling behind the recommended training schedule...

Golden Compass ***** : Well written, inventive, engaging, and bound to annoy a lot of people!

Ultraviolet ** : Nicely filmed scifi but cardboard plot. See Equilibrium instead.

Norton Fighter vs. Botlas - part one and part two. Great example of viral marketing from Norton... Definitely check out part two: "Akihabara nerd attack! Akihabara maid attack!" Priceless!!

Recently, to save money and conserve natural resources, our condo association decided to stop sending paper statements for monthly dues. Most people in our association use bill pay to automatically pay their monthly dues, but a few people still wanted a monthly reminder to send in their payment.

We use Yahoo Groups for our condo messages, so I checked there to see if it had something that could do the job. Yahoo Groups does offer a "monthly periodic e-mail feature", but it is fatally flawed in two ways. First, it doesn't appear to work. Second, it doesn't let you specify when the message will be sent.

Fearing that I might have to write something up myself to solve this problem, I first started searching around for a solution. I was pleasantly surprised to find Letter Me Later. It's great! Perfect solution, very configurable, yet still easy to use. Check it out if you ever find yourself needing an automated e-mail scheduling service!