Apparently, one of the other houses on my block is being sold for some $750 000 dollars. (Or at least that's what the people selling it are hoping it will sell for.) Granted, it's a considerably nicer looking building than mine, but still! Suddenly, my rent looks awfully reasonable.

Also surprisingly reasonable is Microsoft Office 2007. I've heard a lot of negative things about the new design from various people, but so far I quite like it. And I've heard Word 2007's styles feature utterly shames Word 2003's, which would pretty much be enough to sell me on the upgrade all by itself. Microsoft OneNote is also surprisingly good. Oh, Microsoft--! When did you get so competent? This experience almost gives me hope for the upcoming Windows 7 release.

Not reasonable at all is Dreamwidth's system for journal customization. Okay, sure, it's exactly the same as LiveJournals, but at least LJ has enough decent prefab looks that only the hardcore need mess with their customization system. I'm determined to bend the confounded thing to my will, but I make no guarantees on how long that will take.

Unrelatedly, I was reading about The Art of Memory the other day, and trying to come up with a place I could use for the architectural mnemonic. For the longest time, I couldn't come up with any place I could get a clear sequence of more than about 20 places from -- but then it came to me! Instead of physical places, I could use scenes from Chrono Trigger! Not only I have pretty much memorized that game, but the way that the game's designed makes it so that the scenes are each visually and emotionally distinct from each other, which is perfect for a mnemonic base. The only problem comes in deciding what counts as a 'scene'. Does Chrono's arrival in 600 A.D count as a scene, even if there's no dialog? Do dungeons count as scenes separate from their bosses? These are certainly difficult questions that need to be resolved before I move ahead with my plan, but I think the potential is definitely there.

So I got a dreamwidth account, partially because I've been thinking for a while now that it would be nice to have a creative journal that doesn't require me to sign out of this one but mostly because I just couldn't resist the rare opportunity to grab a user name that's a single, descriptive English word. That's prime internet real estate, my friend.

Anyhow, the journal is at egregious.dreamwidth.org. There's nothing up there at the moment, and there probably won't be for a while yet as I'm a bit short of free time this week, but it's a start. Sort of. We'll see.