Photo: C.P.Storm

If you, like me, will be spending your day pulling SOAP service results into Smarty templates, you may be looking for a way to get in the Halloween mood before you head home for the day. Sure, lots of folks can and do have Halloween parties at work, show up in costume, etc. Then there are those of us who will be having onsite client meetings, making the only apropriate costume "corporate camouflage": dress shirts and khaki's.

One way to keep up the professional approach to your day, but still get some Halloween mood going is this collection of vintage radio horror programming. Back before TV took off and radio became little more than news and music, there was money and effort put into radio programming and if you haven't ever listened to stuff from this era, you owe it to yourself.

Photo: Bruce

This weekend, we again revisit the high holy day on my calendar. It sits in my favorite month of the year (though it's now sadder that my grandma has passed), with Sit on Your Ass and Watch Movies Day, fantastic weather, Halloween and the 25 hour day.

Digressions aside, the 25 hour day is usually used by most folks to sleep in on Sunday. However, consider the possibility of using the day as a much better starting point for what usually end up as New Year's Resolutions. After all, if you've been wanting to start getting up earlier, what better day than one where it *isn't* earlier to your body. Use the extra hour to start exercising, because you aren't giving up even a single minute of your normal 24 hour day.

What else?

Photo: Windell Oskay

MAKE Magazine's been collecting a nice list of projects for spooking it up for yourself. For several years, we've gone through a really well-done haunted house put on by the Jaycee's here in town that goes through a natural cave system. It's made me want to do something in that vein ever since the first time through.

So, I'm starting to buy and make stuff to gradually build up my own little haunted section of the block. Next week's prime bargain hunting time as stuff goes on major clearance sales at nearly everywhere that sells anything in black and orange.

I've also been checking through this great long list of projects that the whole little underground community of haunters have put together detailing how to come up with great stuff with cheap materials. I'm particularly intrigued by the projects involving "monster mud", which is joint compound for drywall mixed with black paint. There are some really neat projects using that goop.

You can check out the photos submitted by participants in MAKE's contests to come up with cool Halloween stuff.

Oh, and anyone with a spare $100 to throw around can buy me one of these.

Last year, I mentioned some of the fan-created merchandise for the movie Serenity and the TV series, Firefly. Most of that merchandise, put up on sites like Cafepress was created in part because Universal (the people in charge of the movie) hadn't really put out anything. Like all good markets, when demand outstrips supply, there's an incentive to create, and the fans did just that.

Now, a year later, Universal shut pretty much all of those sites down. Many of the people in charge of those shut-down sites were OK with that. After all, the trademark *is* owned by Universal. Not worth fighting. However, one site got a bill from Universal for $9000 in back licensing.

This struck fans odd, and given that the big damn heroes in the series (the Browncoats) were rebels against the central authorities, they acted as you might expect. They've put up a site to gather all of the billable marketing hours that fans put in to promote the movie. Many, many people put in dozens of hours of work to promote the series *without pay* that Universal benefitted directly from.

The logic makes sense to me. After all, if the merchandiser made $9000 that Universal "deserved", then the fans deserve the $1.2 million that the free marketing adds up to as I'm writing this.

I've been tempted to bill service companies for my time spent waiting when service people don't show up and seeing this Browncoat invoice just makes me smile.

I seriously dig Dean Koontz' writing and have enjoyed pretty much everything he writes (though the ending to The Taking pissed me off). He does the suspense/thriller thing as well as anyone. Of course, that's not too unique. The shelves are full of thrilling plots.

However, Dean actually has a mastery of the English language that many of the other books lumped in with his are just lacking. That's particularly noticable when you listen to thrillers as unabridged audiobooks. For instance, while I like the characters and stories of Patricia Cornwell, the "micro" level of her writing gets irritating when you hear every word. Koontz doesn't suffer from that.

A while back, I ran across a series of audio recordings by Dean Koontz, released as a podcast. In that series, he talked about his new book, The Husband. As a bit of a writer, I really dug the behind the scenes look at writing from someone who seems fairly accessible.

Based on the bits he talked about specifically related to The Husband, I new I probably wanted to read it, so, I added it to my SimplyAudiobooks, which brings me to today.

I'm sitting with headphones on, and the audio only paused to quickly write this up, listening to The Husband, wanting very much to stay hooked up until this thing plays out. The premise: holding an ordinary man's wife hostage, because a man who *doesn't* have access to $2 million, but loves his wife is more likely to be willing to do whatever they're asked. The actual book itself fleshes that out in seriously creepy ways.

Definitely worth the read if you're the least bit into the thriller genre. And, if you're into audiobooks, the narrators on pretty much all of his that I've listened to are pretty good, capturing the subtle differences between characters.