Happy Birthday to Me

OK, so my birthday isn't a national holiday this year--I'll have to wait until 2009 for that if I've calculated correctly--but there is cause for celebration.

Levi, the man who puts the mon in DVDMon.com, has given the site a facelift. Many of the reviews weren't accessible in the past few months but are now back and same as they ever were. The good news for me is that I can recover the published reviews I lost when my computer unexpectedly melted down at Christmas. (You can find a list of all my reviews on the site by following this link.)

If you haven't noticed, a couple weeks ago I added direct links in the righthand sidebar for the reviews I've posted on this blog.

In blog news, from the "strange but true (as far as I can tell)" department, I received an actual e-mail from an actual reader. The note caught me by surprise as it was from Kristen McGary, the director of THE ADVENTURES OF OCIEE NASH. Considering that I've done virtually nothing to publicize this blog except for telling some friends and putting the link in the signature to my Home Theater Forum posts, any legitimate correspondence comes as a complete surprise. I'm guessing that she found my review by plugging the film's name into Google, as second page results direct searchers here.

Of course, the internet being what it is, I can't verify with total certainty that the e-mail is from who the writer claims to be. I don't have any reason to believe otherwise, so I'm taking it at face value. Her e-mail was very kind, much more than I expected since I was highly critical of her film. (I gave it a D.) She made some good points about her film and the process, but that's as much as I'm willing to divulge from the private correspondence. I wrote her back requesting permission to post her e-mail to the blog. If she agrees, I'll tack it up here.

I guess the lesson is that you never know who is reading, which may be for the best when you're posting pictures of Canadian construction barrels instead of writing something substantive.