Today the Qs, the stock tracking the NASDAQ 100 Index, closed at 26.74. The value of fifty shares was $1337.

States that aren’t using Joe’s Filters (yet): Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Rhode Island, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Spent the evening lurking in the NYCFCPUG (New York City Final Cut Pro User Group) meeting at the Soho Apple Store. Of the product demos, the one that most caught my imagination was the particle system in discreet’s combustion (um, the all lowercase thing is kind of goofy and dated). It’s not that I want to use particles for anything specific, it just looked like fun to play with. Years ago I received a copy of KPT Final Effects and spending hours rendering little useless particle animations simply because they were beautiful to watch. Those same animations now preview in realtime and interact with the user input.

This brings me to something I’ve been thinking about dabbling into sooner or later: OpenGL. OpenGL is the graphics rendering engine used many 3D games and applications, and seems to have a terrific particle foundation to play with. The NeHe OpenGL tutorials look like a great place to start. Sites like that are something I aspire to create; curiosity acted upon and given back to inspire others.

Wow. Less than four hours after posting the link to the new Joe’s Filters site, the Googlebot showed up and seems to be indexing the whole site. Which reminds me that I don’t have a robots.txt file yet. Or a favicon.ico icon.

The new Joe’s Filters website is now open for public testing, including a new beta version of Joe’s Filters. This is a large part of what I’ve been working on for the past few months, but there’s a lot more left to wrap up.

The existing Joe’s Filters site isn’t redirecting yet and I haven’t announced it on those pages on purpose. The site uses a lot of technologies I only recently learned so I’m letting traffic drift until I’m sure everything works.

An hour and a half later, dead-mouse guilt has set in.

A few minutes ago, armed with only a broom, I went monster ape-shit on a mouse in our apartment. I have never willfully never killed an animal before.

Partly there is a primal satisfaction, 10 minutes later I’m still bristling and shaking with adrenaline. Virtually no guilt, which surprises me. At one point I had the mouse pinned and was working to channel my inner caveman to finish it off, I was looking for help from that deep remnant of prehistoric hunter at the foundation of our genes. “Be a man, be a man, be a man,” was recited under my breath several times.

The actual killing involved a series of frantic slapshots of the mouse against the front door. The now-unconsious mouse (I didn’t check for a pulse) was then scooped into a small cardboard box. The box was closed, shaken vigorously and sealed in a plastic grocery bag. That grim package was then sent nine stories down our building’s trash chute.

The decision to kill the mouse was made because I’m a parent now. Lila is crawling and I was not about to have her sharing our floor with filthy, potentially disease-ridden rodents. And it’s not like you can just ask them to leave or give them a portion of the house to call their own. Years ago in another apartment I spent a lot of time devising complex and non-lethal mousetraps. One caught a mouse within 15 minutes of setting it up. Somewhere I have many, many hours of videotape of those traps in action. Those mice were released in Tompkin’s Square Park.

This whole episode will probably give me nightmares for quite some time.