more fun glossary features - Sunday March 10 2002

Last night had been a balmy humid night for walking, but today we were back into full-on winter weather again. Such is the way of New York City weather, stuck as it is in the uncertain grey zone between the Middle Atlantic and New England. Speaking of which, has anyone ever figured out why New Jersey zip codes begin with a zero? That's a little like making Florida zip codes begin with a 9.

I realized another one of those things today that should just be obvious but that you never really take the time to process: the difference in amounts between the toothpaste people put on toothbrushes in reality and the amount they put on in advertisements. But on the other hand, maybe if I'd used the advertisement-demonstrated amount of toothpaste every time I'd brushed my teeth, my mouth wouldn't be the maddening cave complex and terrorist haven it is today.

In the evening, after watching Six Feet Under with Ray and Eulalia, Gretchen and I saw a movie called The Perfect Specimen. We were roped in from the hilarious and unsettling beginning, which featured a teenage girl's father delegating the boyfriend interview process to a red-hatted employee of a company called DateCheck®. From there, the movie lurched between a number of unconventional movie themes, including the relentless fallibility of technology, the complexity of evil, and the charmingly folksy goodness of night staff. Perhaps this was the movie where at one point I randomly called out, "A Drew Barrymore lip-bite would have been appropriate there!"

Later on in the evening, I added a number of useful features to my Vodkatea.com glossary system. Now, not only is there a brand-new search system, but it can also display glossaries sorted by date in two different modes ("Term Journal" and "Calendar Journal"). These effectively make it double as a weblogging system with unusually good support for internal-linking.