I really wish my cable system offered ESPN Classic as a free channel right now. They’re running the National Spelling Bees from 1996 through 1999 in chronological order today.

So why is this such a big deal to me? Well, for those who don’t know, I participated in the 1997 National Spelling Bee– as contestant number 38, naturally. (Yes, that’s where the 38 in Zone38 came from…)

Woohoo. I just got the call that my name was drawn for the Jeopardy! college tournament tryouts in Houston. Yay. I can’t wait– maybe I’ll make it onto the show this year… ::crosses fingers::

I think I’ve already mentioned the unfortunate Brazilian Google user I found in my server logs who, looking for a ROM image of his favorite SNES game, did a search for “dowload de mario word” and ended up instead at the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame.

But looking through my site’s access logs tonight, I found an even more amusing hit: Some Spanish Googler stumbled across the Hall of Shame by searching for “dowload nescape”!

OK, I’ll admit it. I was bored, and was playing around with a sound file editor listening to snippets of songs backwards. And then I stumbled across this bit from George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone”. (The sound file consists of the verse played forwards and then backwards.)

Is it just me, or does the reversed clip sound like an admission that he’s actually rather timid? 🙂

(And yes, other than the fact that it’s played backwards, this is completely unaltered from the original track. Spooky.)

Ah, linguistic pedantry. I’m not the only one guilty of it; check out the interesting and amusing grammatical rants at BarelyBad.com.

Aw, while you’re at it, just check out BarelyBad as a whole. Quite an enjoyable site.

Finally, Netscape has released a version of their browser based on the Mozilla 1.0 beta source: Netscape 7 PR1.

And in related news, the 3rd beta of Mozilla 1.0 was released yesterday.

Hm. I was just browsing through my server logs again (hey, I lead a rather boring life!), and it seems that my font page has been referenced in forum threads at VGMusic.com and Zophar’s Domain. Woohoo.

Nyperold just pointed out to me what may be one of the stupidest spellings/apostrophe uses that I’ve seen in a good while: "Thanx’s!"

I guess I’ll have to extend a hearty "thanx’s" to Nyp on that one… ::sly grin::

TrueType fonts abound on the web; a quick Google search turns up thousands of hits from both professional and amateur typographers.

But where are the PostScript fonts? They’re harder to find, but they’re out there. To start, the URW foundry has released their set of core fonts into the public domain as part of the GhostScript project. For more exotic designs, you can’t beat Apostrophe or Nick Curtis.

Last, but certainly not least, Adobe and Bitstream have even gotten into the act, releasing the Utopia and Charter fonts, respectively, as freeware. Note, however, that the versions available at that link are for Unix and its clones rather than Windows; however, I’ve gone ahead and converted them to the Windows pfb/pfm format:

• Utopia
• Charter

Edited 2004-02-05 to add: Using the latest release of PFAedit, which finally produces proper OpenType hinting, I’ve generated OpenType versions of the two above fonts as well:

• Utopia
• Charter

Grah. I hate those incessantly flashing banner ads. I wonder if any epileptic person will ever sue because those ads induced a seizure… 😉