Tonight, on a Very Special Episode ™ of CSI ™, Nick Stokes tries to save a little girl who everyone else is convinced has already been killed, but… he can hear her voice in his head, leading him from clue to clue.

Gah. I hate Very Special Episodes. I like the character of Nick well enough, but c’mon. First the two-hour season finale, now this. Are they setting him up for a write-out, or did George Eads just work this kind of thing into his contract back when he was threatening to quit the show a couple of years back? Feh.

Ah: It pays to Google, my friends.

The plot of this episode was modified at the last moment to accomodate for a sudden change in William Petersen’s availability — originally, Gil Grissom was going to be the CSI convinced that the younger daughter was still alive. (Source)

Fair enough, then… but still. Can we get back to our regularly scheduled mayhem next week, please?

Today I burned the second of five DVDs in a series of VHS-to-DVD transfers made possible thanks to a wonderful person who found the tapes and loaned them to me. I need to play-test the disc on my entertainment center, but I’m generally hopeful since I now know how best to process these things.

I also played Heroes of Might and Magic IV with my son for a few hours. There’s a soft spot in my heart for the Heroes line of games, as well as a smaller soft spot for some of the regular M&M series. We had a pretty good run, and hope to finish the game off in the next visit or so.

No, really, I think that’s all I got accomplished today. Tomorrow? Prep work on the anime site. (Astute readers will remember I promised something along those lines a little while ago…)

Look! Look! Check out the upgraded gallery!

Thanks to the incredibly-well-designed import method, all old links to gallery content will still work, by the way. Oh, and those of you for whom I’ve set up Gallery installs should poke around this new system and decide if you want me to do the upgrade or not. Just let me know, eh?

Not bad for an hour and a half of work, is it?

I’m probably going to tinker with the generally-unused anime site over the next few days. Why? Because I’ve got an itch to tinker, and I want to see if I can actually put the site to good use, that’s why. (I did fix a couple of annoying stylesheet issues this afternoon, mind you.)

In the process, I’ll be upgrading the gallery to, er, Gallery2. Actually, that’ll be Step Number One. Maybe that’ll get done some time tomorrow if I wake up early enough to tinker with it before helping friends move.

The next step will be to implement this nifty little WordPress plugin.

All of you who can see where this is going, please move to the head of the class…

It was amusing enough when I saw that someone tried to log onto this webserver as a user named “fluffy.” Imagine the laugh I got out of seeing one industrious little hacker try the following names (among a few hundred others) to get onto Washuu, however:

darkman (man, just don’t watch the sequel. what a stinker.)
romeo (tragic shakespearean characters are gother than thou.)
quake (with fear?)
ping (naughty, naughty PS2 accessory!)
pong (yes, go ahead and hack into my uber-l33t networked table-tennis game.)
taz (taking time out from trying to eat bugs bunny, apparently.)
kimi (that’s a very pretty name.)
reebok (running shoes…)
nike (…are sensible…)
adidas (…username selections? in what alternate universe?)
die (another day.)
jem (do kimber and stormer know what you’re really doing on the internet?)
jaime (the co-worker I’d least suspect.)
callhome (why? did I leave the oven on again?)
notorious (underrated duran duran album, can’t find it anywhere, dammit.)
toto (never liked that “africa” song very much, but the “dune” soundtrack is pretty cool.)
alexandru (my daughter will find this amusing. or disturbing. something like that.)
banana (come mr. hackerman, hack on my banana…)
bootcamp (yeah, that’s where you camp the boot sector and frag the operating system as it loads.)
coupon (a word I now cannot help but pronounce as “koo-pun.” damn you, comedy central.)
phoebe (the sitcom character I’d least suspect.)
dummy (no comment.)
stud (again.)
hacker (finally, truth in advertising.)
sexy (something that the person trying to hack my servers most assuredly is not.)

Okay, that’s about enough of that. I think I’ve fixed Washuu’s “swatch” setup so from now on I won’t get a massive list of illegal usernames on Monday morning…