If you enjoyed the written tale of the investigation of the Hannah House, there's a slight possibility that you will be able to tolerate the following video.

So after toiling in obscurity here at NUVO for almost three years, I've finally scored a by-line in the paper — and in the cover story, no less! Sure, I'd written a web-exclusive review of a Duncan Sheik concert earlier this year and a few web-only April Fools stories way back in 2005, but this is the paper we're talking about here! Dead trees!

Seriously, though, considering that NUVO has a weekly readership of about 85,000, this is probably my widest exposure yet. (Unless, of course, you count that baby picture of me with my tallywacker out that my Mom loves showing to people.)

Anyway, if ye be wantin' to read my wordy prose, pick up a copy of the October 24, 2007 edition of NUVO Newsweekly — available at liquor stores and street corners everywhere inside the 465 loop. Or, if you're more of a shut-in, check it out online by clicking this handy link.

Most of my tale you will find told in the captions to the photos but here are two miscellaneous things I that I learned on the best vacation ever (you know, so far):

• Quit while you are ahead
  And by that I mean, "the instant you get ahead." Otherwise ... well, let's just say eventually the odds will catch up to you.

• Vegas bums are copying Indy bums
  Today I saw a guy using the old "Why lie? I need beer" sign ... and it was working! This has me wondering exactly how bums pass word to one another of the best signs to use. Is there, like, a website?

Anyway, without further ado, feast your eyes on these:

I don't normally post stuff like this here, but I figure it's a good excuse to show you a funny picture of me in a goofy-looking ghost costume.

NUVO is gearing up for its mildly-scary and mega-entertaining Halloween issue — and we want you to be part of it ... if you dare!

Send us your stories of haunted places and scary spaces to haunted@nuvo.net.

If you want your weird-but-true scary story considered for print, send by Oct. 17; otherwise, the deadline is the horribly frightening Halloween itself: Oct. 31.

To tell you the truth, it was boring. I can't even imagine what they covered in Week 1 of "GD114: Digital Imaging" (which might as well be called "Basic Photoshop Basics") because in Week 2 we covered such advanced topics as "Which one is the lasso tool?" and "How to switch the foreground and the background color."

Which is not to say I didn't learn anything — I picked up a few keyboard shortcuts and I figured out how to do a gradient mask, which is something I was actually wondering how to do the other day. Plus, I figure theoretically the course will get more interesting when we get into vector drawing and other things I have no experience with ... but, then again, if I was going to do vector drawing, wouldn't I fire up Illustrator?

Anyway, we were given some time to play around with CS3, which is a pretty cool program. (I dig the way the pallets are arranged ... pallet management is always a headache for me and I've been using the pallet dock lately in a similar way to the CS3 pallet system, so yay to Adobe for reading my mind.)

Here's what I came up with:

... the answer to my question is "yes".