Well, I think I have an official date picked for the Grand Switchover of 2005 - July 10, in fact, or this Sunday. That is, the templates I now have in place seem for the most part to be working just fine (with still a couple of tweaks left in all of them, of course), which means I'm pretty much ready to finally shut down my Geocities site for good and to move this new journal to its permanent location (at the root of this website, that is, instead of the "/blog" folder it's found in now). Plus I will have a full five hours of internet access this weekend, thanks to my new pass at the cafe I just purchased; and I'll need this much time on a desktop, in fact, because there are officially one gazillion things to do to make the Switchover complete. (I've got to put up a "this site has moved" page at my Geocities URL, and another at my old AvantGo channel; get my new AvantGo channel set up and activated; move the actual location of the new blog, and rebuild all the archvies, configuration files and template links; load all the pages you see referenced in the black bar at the top of the page [about, contact, etc]; visit Bloglines and myYahoo and all those other sites desktop visitors see listed in the "subscribe" sidebar, to get direct links set up for all those services; oh, it just goes on and on, really.) And of course I still need to get all the final details finished of my template designs, the final tiny changes that are left to the desktop version and mobile version and print version and RSS version and all the rest.

And speaking of that, I have exactly one major change left to the templates, and I've decided to let all of you have a say in whether or not it should happen; I'm thinking of getting rid of the trackback option found at the bottom of each entry. Why? Well, because I've now posted something like 20, 25 entries now with this new MovableType system, and not a single person has sent a single trackback to any of them; and since it's more of a pain in the ass to have the option on than to turn it off, I've been thinking of just saving myself the hassle and indeed keeping it off. Anyway, if you like having the option but simply haven't used it yet, for whatever reason, feel free to drop me a line at ilikejason at hotmail dot com and let me know; or simply do the more impressive thing and actually trackback to today's entry, to show me that people really are interested in using it. Otherwise, come Sunday I'm simply going to get rid of the option, and save myself the trouble of constantly having to delete spam trackbracks.

Hey, I wrote some lyrics for the theme song of the ABC miniseries Empire, showing in a six-week run this summer. Wanna hear 'em?

IT...IS...EM-PI-RE!
IT'S...ON...A-B-C!
LOTS...OF...SEX AND BLOOD!
IT'S...SUM-MER...AFTER ALL!

Man, is it even possible not to love Empire? Hunky heroes! Half-naked toga babes! Effeminate evil senators! Heads on pikes! Homoerotic double entrendres! Dennis Haybert getting stabbed in the neck! Right on broadcast television! Bald British villains, for chrissakes! Bald British villains! "You will never be Caesar!" "Oh yes I will, bee-atch!" IT...IS...EM-PI-RE!