Dial-Up News

Gollum, the Wikipedia Browser

This is a pretty cool little program if you use Wikipedia a lot. Nothing to download or anything, just click the "Start Gollum Browser" button and you're off. I didn't try it out extensively, but I like the way it simplifies everything. I think I'll use it next time I'm doing research.

I had an entire entry typed out, but I lost it right at the last minute. So I'm gonna try it again.

Last night was amazing. Katie and her mom came in for the Jim Brickman Holiday Concert down at the Missouri Theater. Jim Brickman is one of Katie's favorite pianists, so when I saw the poster for the concert a few weeks ago, I was super excited. The only problem is, it was on a Monday night. Well, she convinced her mom to come with her (and her aunt, and her aunt's roommate, and her aunt's roommate's mother) to the concert.

We went out to dinner first, to a little dive downtown with great burgers. I had two and then got a warm cup of hazelnut coffee from Panera, a nice complement to the cold winter evening. After dinner we walked down to the Missouri.

Let me get this out of the way: the concert was absolutely fantastic. I had never heard Jim Brickman's music before, but I knew Katie really likes him. She was right, he's amazing. It was so perfect to sit there in the old, charming theater, sinking into the red plush velvet seats, hearing the beautiful notes of the piano fill the entire hall. He was a fascinating pianist, very versatile, dramatic, and, unexpectedly comedic. When he talked between songs, it was as if he was sitting there having a chat with old friends. (He even said it felt like playing in someone's living room for a group of good acquaintances.) The whole time I was torn between closing my eyes and letting the notes wash over me or watching his hands strike the keys with such passion and intensity. He also had a couple singers with him, along with a gentleman who played electric violin in a way I'd never heard before. He was going from hard rock to country to classical with such fluidity that it took me a few seconds to even realized he had changed. Everyone complemented each other so nicely that each song felt like I had heard it a million times before. (Some songs I had heard a million times before. In addition to his hits, he also played Disney themes and holiday classics, including a little bit of Charlie Brown.) I hated to see the concert end, but the night came to a proper close when we walked out of the theater into a beautifully lit downtown and a lightly falling snow.

I can't think of a better way to spend a Monday night.

Okay folks, let's try this again. Here's my newest blog, hosted by Blogger.com. I'm doing this because, well, updating my blog here was a royal pain in the ass. I had to create a new page for the entry and then update three other pages just to make everything look right. It wasn't worth it and it was definitely discouraging me from updating. So I'm going to try this for now and we'll see how it goes. I may change the template sometime to make it look more like my site, but for now I really like this style. So keep coming back because I'll be updating this thing a lot more than I normally do.