I finished Chapter 6 yesterday and passed the 2/3 point in terms of word count. I was tempted to take a crack at Chapter 3 today but, upon reflection, I figured I probably wouldn’t finish it today, which would mean working on it tomorrow, which would mean delaying my planned review of the manuscript. The first 1/3 is due on Friday in polished form, so I plan to spend today and tomorrow going over the approximately 70 pages. I’ll send the revised draft to my agent for his thoughts on Tuesday and do some more tightening up and prettying up for the rest of the week.
The scene on 24 where Mary Lynn Rajskub and Janeane Garofolo go head to head at the keyboards was excellent. The show is doing fairly well so far this season. It does tend to get bogged down in soap-opera-esque blather from time to time, but it’s holding my attention after four hours.
I went to Circuit City yesterday to see if the liquidation had begun. I’m contemplating buying a small flat-screen TV. There was a big 30% off banner flying on the side of the road a block from the store, but when I got there I found a lot of people leaving without buying anything. When I got inside I talked to a harried man working one of the registers. I mentioned the sign and he said he’d already complained about that one, but the liquidators were in charge. The discounts hadn’t yet been approved for that store. I told him I was sorry about his situation and he thanked me. “I’ve had people screaming at me because they expected to find big discounts,” he told me, “so I appreciate the compassion.”
I know very little about flat screens, so the array of specs was a little bedazzling. The compartment where ours would go is 36″ wide, so I figure a 32″ diagonal is about as big as I can go. I saw a model with a lower contrast ratio (5000:1) that was $100 more expensive than one with a higher contrast (8000:1), which seemed counter-intuitive to me. There were other specs that didn’t mean anything to me. Does anyone out there have any recommendations for things to look for or avoid–like number of connections, resolution figures, contrast values, etc.? A few of the no-name sets didn’t impress me at all, but Samsung and Sony looked decent.
