And it's all downhill from here

Ended the day with a viewing of Order of the Phoenix with the gang; enjoyed, very yes.

Idea: Hogwarts College, the TV series, for all those pre-commitment trysts that ficcers can't get out of their system. It's like Smallville, but with owls.

Biscuit managed to sing the first part of Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel tonight.

I've just read through the synopses of every WKRP in Cincinnati episode, and God, I want to watch all of those episodes again and again. And with the original music, too. Pout.

In the last picspam, but not explained: gull steals Doritos. And only Chili Heatwave Doritos, too. Hrm.

Bug hunt

More tweaks on the Helmet Generator (no more embedding; it bores me)....

-- Fixed the hex-color bug (if a randomly-generated color produced a hex-color with leading zeros, those zeros were getting chopped off, leaving a five- and sometimes four-character hex color, which just doesn't work.

-- Fixed it so that hex-colors will now always be in caps. Not fatal, not by any means, but annoying.

-- The process for computing the randomly-generated colors into hex and assigning the random colors to the color-pickers was just wrong. If it's wrong enough that I can tell, it's wrong. Reconfigured the randomization sequence, now seems to be working, but hey, I could be wrong.

-- Restacked the layers a bit. The foam pads inside the helmet were actually atop the facemask at one point. Put the logo/decal layer back under the shine/darken/bling/reflect layers, so that will give it a little more depth, at the cost of lessened visibility under some circumstances.

I'm thinking this'll be it for major features. Flash can't save to local files, so there goes exporting the helmets as PNGs/JPGs. (I could save to the server and link to that, but...no, that opens up a whole new can of worms. Not for now.)

Why Deathly Hallows won't be a NYT bestseller

Imagine if the people behind the Nielsen Top 10 TV show listings decided that reality shows were "taking away" valuable attention from dramas and sitcoms. Let reality shows get their own list and the official Top 10 only include "genuine" TV shows, like CSI and House and Grey's Anatomy.

Imagine if Variety decided animated movies were just for kids and didn't belong on the box office Top Ten list, when more adult films like Knocked Up and Ocean's 13 needed the space.

Imagine if Billboard decided to banish country music to Nashville and reserve its list of Top Ten album for "real" music like pop, rock and hip hop.

Of course, that would be absurd. Any list of top TV shows that didn't include American Idol would be a joke. Any ranking of hit movies that ignored Shrek The Third or Ratatouille would be foolish. And any ranking of top CDs that pretended Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood didn't exist would be bizarre.

And yet that's exactly the status of The New York Times Bestseller list.