Views from Medina Road

I have this idealistic fantasy that, in a calm and contemplative state of living -- a state I never quite seem to achieve -- I would have time every day to jot down a few insightful comments or pithy remarks about SF or current events or even, on occasional, my personal life.

Obviously this blog has never reached that idealistic state, but let me see if I can quickly record a few such remarks that have accumulated over the past few days.

The new Locus blogs are up and running. There are still a bug or two in the layout -- one especially in IE -- that I'll address shortly. I did all the design setup in Blogger; Liza and Jonathan took care of lining up content and contributions.

The Locus Poll is getting off to a slow start, perhaps because initially the header and link were too low on the homepage, over there in the right pane. I moved the link up, and votes picked up, but totals are still noticeably behind the totals in the first week last year, or the year before. I wonder if this is partly a reaction to the debacle over the abrupt rules-change near the end of last year's voting, but this is only cynical speculation, based on no evidence.

The background work, for which I have stood down from reading, and from posting weekly Monitor listings of new books and magazines (thought I will post monthly highlights from January real soon now), is still underway. So far this involves overhauling the awards index and database, not just updating awards data from the past year, but updating the layout of pages and cleaning up numerous formatting infidelities. Completing the awards db update is still another two or three full days of work away -- which means, another week or two in calendar time. After that comes the new enhancements...

Just posted Gary Westfahl's review of Coraline. I tried to see the movie today, Sunday, but encountered one sold out theater, and tried two others online to find only front row seats were still available at the times I wanted. Happy to see the film is apparently a big success, though after that experience I'm surprised to see the film has ranked only 3rd in this weekend's box office. Will see it soon, when I can.

Lots of rain here in SoCal this past week. Still have my job (knock wood). Watching the Grammys. Still jazzed about Lost. (I don't keep up with fan analysis, but since the big white flashes mean a time displacement, is that what happened at the end of Season 2 when they failed to enter those numbers in the computer and...it happened? Has anyone been speculating on what *that* meant? That the whole island had already moved foward or backward in time since the initial crash--..??)