First: my new mattress arrived today. After three years sleeping on a two-inch-thick futon, I’ve upgraded to something approximating a normal bed. That’s one more piece of my 2004-era minimalism left behind. The closet I use as a bedroom isn’t quite wide enough for a full-size mattress, so I had one custom-made to fit – there’s about an inch on either side in which to tuck in the sheets.

Second: I bought another pair of skis. My 191s are fun, fun, fun on the wide-open groomed runs, but too much work on steep, fluffy, technical slopes. Down in the REI basement I found a used pair of 170 cm Rossignols – they’re a bit dinged up, but the price was right, and they’ll be fun to play on for the rest of this season. If the experiment works out, and I decide I like skis this short, perhaps I can upgrade next season.

Here’s an incredibly cool piece of random freeware: iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin which creates a calendar listing all the upcoming local shows for all the bands in your music library. Looks like most of their calendar data comes from JamBase, who seem, as far as I can tell, not to be evil.