7:00 PM:

Sundown is right around the corner again, so I've gotta make this fast...

Monday, I missed yet another linguistics class, the fourth in a row, on account of being asleep at the time when it was taking place.

On Tuesday night, I finally managed to get some sleep within the hours that most of the human population of the Earth generally designates as appropriate for sleeping, and I repeated the feat on Wednesday night! I took this as being a step in the right direction, even if I did manage to sleep for only three hours on each of those nights.

Thus, I did make it to the linguistics class on Wednesday, finding that my worst fears were not realized, and that I didn't miss our second test. It'll be this coming Monday. The cramming shall probably commence shortly.

After an exhausted Thursday, my lack of sleep from the previous two nights caught up with me. I fell asleep circa 11:30 PM Thursday night, and woke up what seemed like mere moments later, at 12:30 PM Friday afternoon.

But this is still within the "normal" range, and it is good. The question now is what'll happen over the weekend. That's anybody's guess.

Not much else to report right now, otherwise. Except that there's one last poetry reading on Monday night, should anybody reading this in the New York area be interested. If so, drop me a line and I'll give you the details.

3:49 AM:

One more product endorsement: Opera is easily the best of the graphical browsers available for Windows. I've just upgraded from version 5.02 to version 5.11, and was happy to note that they fixed the most annoying bug in the former, so that minimizing or maximizing any one given window doesn't affect all the others.

It's wonderful, otherwise. The use of multiple windows within the browser is super; the ability to open links in the background while staying on the same page is insanely useful; the keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures are a dream come true. I love the way you can assign a nickname to each bookmark and then use it to call up the page in question; all I have to do is type "3wa," and the ThreeWay Action message forum comes up. I love the ability to turn images on and off straight from the toolbar. I love the "zoom" feature, which lets you magnify or reduce pages, including the graphics on them. And I love the ability to switch between the viewing a page the way it was designed, and viewing it with your own settings, which is very useful for taking hard-to-read pages with small print and weird colors and displaying them in plain black Times New Roman on a white background.

The catch is that while it's as compliant with HTML standards as any browser gets, not all Web pages are. This includes the page used to post an entry using Blogger, which is apparently designed to play well with the last generation of browsers. This is why I need to call up my old copy of Netscape whenever I want to post an entry here. The same goes for a small handful of other pages.

The only other nitpick is that while it does just fine with Flash, most plugins, and Javascript, its implementation of Java isn't the greatest, being both slow and crash-prone.

Even so, in the past couple of months, not only has Opera become my most-used graphical browser, but it's even supplanted my beloved Lynx as the browser I use the most. I still use the latter regularly, but not as much. Opera rules.

I'm breaking a couple of my own rules in asking this, but I can't help myself.

So... confidential to the person at the University of Michigan who found this site on Saturday through a Google search on "Shmuel"... you don't have to answer this, but I'm insanely curious. Who are you, and do I know you? Or were you looking for some other Shmuel, and the school association was a coincidence? If you don't mind letting me know, I'd appreciate it if you'd drop me a line. Thanks.

A couple of entirely unrelated matters:

The first is that, amazingly enough, it's April 23rd, and I still haven't started reminding people of my imminent birthday! Shocking, I know, but I can assure you, I shall be derelict in doing so no more. You'll be hearing about it fairly regularly from this point onwards. You may wish to begin composing your congratulatory e-mail messages for the blessed occasion.

As for that, you have your choice of two calendars. On the Jewish calendar, it's 8 Iyar, which coincides nicely with May Day this year. On the secular calendar, it's May 10th. I go with the latter for most intents and purposes, but either is quite acceptable.

The second thing is that, coincidentally, one of you sent me an e-mail the other day wanting to know where my Amazon.Com wish list was. As that reader discovered, it's not listed on their site, but it can be found at the bottom of my Surveys 'n' Stuff page.

Of course, I would never be so tacky as to directly suggest that the latter point be cross-referenced with the former. An e-card will do just fine, when the time comes.