Isn't it sad when your sidebars have more content than the main column of your front page?

My blog is so pathetic today.

Right outside the office I am working in right now in Princeton is a big, lovely tree. The kind of tree that has thinnish, bendy branches, but still manages to grow big and tall. It's windy here today, as a cold front blows into the region, and the tree is doing this amazing, joyous, swaying dance.

It's like the best day of this tree's life.

And I am thinking: this, this is what life should be like.

I don't know what that has to do with my pathetic blog day, exactly, but there you go.

Ruminating from Princeton, NJ

The ex-NSA-spook Cris, very nice guy that he is, just invited me to go out with him and his model girlfriend in Manhattan Friday night. Says Cris: "All her friends are models, and there are never enough guys."

Meanwhile in Austin, later this month Beck is playing at Westlake High School.

Famous people are playing at local high schools and I am being invited to hang out with models. Clearly I have crossed over into another dimension, one in which the standard rules of physics do not apply: the world...of teen movies!

Things like this are not supposed to happen in real life. I begin to wonder whether the jets and helicopters flying over Austin are not also part of this Hollywood-rules dimension. Maybe Top Gun is leaking into Teen-Movie Land.

Anyway, unless I need to make use of that night for plans with my local friends and acquaintances, I suppose I'll take him up on it. If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what New York clubland looks like from the beautiful-people perspective. And Cris is of the sort of friendly, personable disposition that essentially guarantees a fun and entertaining night.

And hey, if teen-movie rules continue to apply, when I get home to Austin I'll fall madly for the vaguely-geeky (but not too geeky, this is Hollywood) girl I'd always overlooked, just before the credits roll and the pop music kicks in. That could be cool.

Just don't let the pop music be Creed. Please. I'm begging.

Hardware-related delays have given me a bit of free time here, so I decided to tinker with the site a bit.

I fixed some of the more irksome differences in CSS rendering between IE 5.5 and IE6. They were causing things that looked fabulous in IE6 to look quite ugly in IE5.5.

Still a few alignment issues with the galleries, but things are generally looking much better.

To the IE 5.5 users, my apologies for the suffering you have endured. It should be much prettier now.