To anyone who reads my blog and also has come to expect me to follow them on twitter: [bzzzzt!]
Twitter is dead to me. The only way I can access it during the day is via IM, and the only way I’m willing to do that is via Google Talk. As twitter is not porting to Google Talk, and hasn’t been for at least a month, I’m afraid I’m ignoring all y’all’s twitters. Sorry.
On the flip side, I encourage everyone to use the Google Talk feature! It’s much better than AIM or ICQ.
I can state with near certainty that this was one of the best Birthday’s of my whole life. Saturday was just about perfect, from waking up with out anything needing to happen, to drinking a pot of coffee, to playing Guitar Hero III (present # 1) to the party in the evening. ‘Twas awesome. I love it!
Jenn turned me on to the SciFi channel show, Eureka. It’s smart, funny, clever [add your own adjective here] and fun to watch.
At least it was.
This is the third season. We watched episode 2 last night and I have to say, “meh”.
By all means, rent/borrow/buy seasons 1 and 2. They were excellent. I’m waiting on more episodes of season 3 before I declare shark jumpage. It just hasn’t been as tight and focused as it used to be.
I’ve been reading a library book titled Great Scientific Experiments by Rom Harré. It contains discussion about the scientific method and how experiments contribute to it. It has 20 experiments that “changed out view of the world”.
It’s very interesting reading. A lot of each experiment’s discussion talks about the history and preconceptions that led to the particular experiment and how the experiment was a linchpin.
I like it. You might too.
Jenn and I went to see Mama Mia with some friends last weekend. The verdict: ack.
And that’s “ack ack ACK ACK” of the Mars-Attacks variety; watch this movie and your mind will melt.
It’s not bad so much as deeply annoying in some parts. I’m going to come at this sort of backwards: If the actors and actresses had been 100% non-big-names (like the lead Amanda Seyfried) then this would probably have been a pleasant experience. Amanda plays the sole daughter, named Sophie, of a former wild-child played by Meryl Streep. Streep’s character, Donna, had a series of flings 20 years ago with three guys in two weeks leading to the unknowability of who fathered Sophie. Sophie has the brilliant plan to invite all three father-possibles to her wedding in order to see which one is the sperm-donator.
The beginning of the movie starts out well. Things are topical and direct; the plot moves forward without any obvious forcing in order to fit in ABBA songs. (Oh yes! If you didn’t know, the entire story is hinged around various ABBA songs, with the lyrics telling the story of different parts of the characters’ lives.) Amanda is both a good singer and dancer, which given that this is a musical is somewhat (just a bit) important. Several scenes go by with Sophie as the center of the action.
Unfortunately [whoosh!] Sophie is suddenly sidelined and we learn that what we thought was a musical about Sophie (who can sing and dance) is actually about Donna (Meryl Streep) who can sing, mostly, but can’t dance at all. Then one of the father-possibles (Pierce Brosnan) joins in the singing and your head melts.
Ladies and Gentlemen, attention! Pierce Brosnan may have lots of face appeal, and look good in a clingy-wet white shirt, but he can’t sing worthy of the silver screen. When he opened up with his first lines, the audience in my theater started laughing, and we weren’t laughing with him. Ahh, Pierce. I’m sorry.
The various so-so voices and the one or two AHHHHH voices have managed to absoutely ruin my childhood. ABBA played a big part in my musical upbringing. I know most ABBA songs and a few of them word for word. Now as I listen to the ABBA Gold Album on my Ipod, I keep having flashes of the movie, with Streep or Brosnan doing their best to cause me palpitations.1
On story notes, the plot seemed to be rather forced at times because they just had to have “Does Your Mother Know” or other song in the movie. In this respect it was in the highest traditions of the “musical” where the story is heading full tilt for the next station when suddenly everyone stops and sings about it for a while. Some musicals do this better than others. I’m going to place Mama Mia in the “others” category. There were also a few weird, random, sudden plot developments that just popped up without any foreshadowing or obvious causes. One of these sent my head spinning, especially because I’ve seen the BBC Pride and Prejudice so many times. That’s the only hint I’m giving.
So, in order of movie plot development:
1I’m listening to ABBA, attempting to associate something else other than the movie with the music. I may have to put these songs on my running mix list in order to alleviate the damage.
Write write write. Writing about writing? I write in order to become better at writing? Ascribo ergo sum?
I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few years writing. Usually it’s miniscule blog postings or rambling opinion pieces. I’ve been writing approximately 1,500 word essays on traffic engineering (see Talking Traffic) at two-week intervals for the past year. Occasionally I am forced (damn job!) to write reports and memos and emails and letters at work. These, of course, receive the lion’s share of my editing energy. It seems that I am able to write at least a lot, even if it is not literature.
After last year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month: November) I had given it a thought that I might participate. After all, one of the thrusts of NaNoWriMo is to write, but not to edit. You can write a great deal if you don’t go back to fix all the bits that are wrong as you go.
But why wait ’til November? I turn 35 this weekend and it’s one of my New Year’s Resolutions to write at least one (crappy) short story this year. Why not make it a crappy novel instead? There’s also no real reason to do it during November because that happens to be when Thanksgiving is; an inconvenient holiday for project completion.
No, I’m thinking that the middle of September to the middle of October is an appropriate 30 days for this potential project. It’s after Dragon*Con, so I won’t be distracted there. It’s at the middle-end of my marathon preparation, but that shouldn’t interfere any more than normal. I think that’s a good time to sit down and write something crappy and derivative. Alien elves defeat global warming after the fall of the United States or something like that. With nanotechnology and dragons, too.
Slashdot brings us a review of the bood The Ultimate CSS Reference. Read about it there.
My question: Can any dead-tree guide to Cascading Style Sheets, ultimately web-based things be considered The Ultimate?
My Answer: No.
I might call it ultimate even if it were subscription based, but if I have to flip through a css manual that isn’t accessible via Firefox or IE, it aint good enough to make the cut.
The Mortgage Crisis™ and the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac Bailout™ and their confluential conflagration are a great example of policy being set by politics, ideology and the media.
Why?
Because not 1% (and I bet less) of the people who are involved have a single clue about the pros and cons of a government bailout. All the congresscritters are voting ideologically and/or to curry favor with the voters. Does anyone know that this will work? No. There have been good examples both for and against government bailouts (socialism!).
A bad example often cited is the airline subsidy after 9-11. “Look what’s happening to the airline industry now!” The detractors have a point: should we have left the airlines to sink under their own weight 7 years ago rather than watching them slowly implode (if that’s not an oxymoron) now? Or was giving them our hard-earned tax money a way to let them try (somtimes fail) to make operational changes over time that lead to a stable industry? There’s no real way to tell. Economists legitamately do not agree and if the experts can’t agree, what should us no-good layabouts think?
Of course, this isn’t about economics, it’s about politics and who is successful at pointing the finger at whom. I look forward to seeing how it all falls out, even though (maybe especially because) it’s my tax money.
Now hear this! Everyone who was a died-in-the-wool, rabid, gung-ho, balls-to-the-wall Hillary Clinton Supporter! If you do not vote for Barack Obama in November, you are directed to turn in your brain because you will no longer be needing it.
I keep hearing news stories of Clinton supporters who are vowing to stay home or vote for McCain rather than cast a ballot in favor of Obama. This may be a case of the media latching on to something (anything) they feel is news-worthy, but I can’t help but judge those people as extremely stupid.
Really! You (that’s Democrats and liberal-thinkers) have been chomping at the bit for 6 years now. You’ve managed to steal Congress (and then you’ve lamented over the crazy way that Pelosi and Reid have together done zip) and you’re looking forward to a Democratically controlled White House who will most likely nominate three Supreme Court Justices. But now that your candidate didn’t do as well as the other one you’re going to pack up your ball and go home to pout? That’s not cutting off your nose to spite your face, that’s pissing on everyone’s shoes and then complaining that your feet are wet.
The differences between Clinton and Obama are a matter of tone and preference. The differences between McCain and Obama compare favorably to the differences between rocks and sperm: there’s no real comparison.
So, take your ball and go home. Don’t vote on election day. Don’t participate in the get-out-the-vote campaign that Obama does so well. You’ll be the most derided voters in recent history; more despised as a group then the entire State of Florida was in 2000. You’ll make history and isn’t that what you want?
“The Chairstone recognizes the distinguished Schist from E-stone-ia”
I was listening to NPR on the way to work this morning and realized that I had no idea what the term “geopolitical” really meant. You hear it all the time in discussions of world events and foreign policy. After checking the definition (“The study of the relationship among politics and geography, demography, and economics, especially with respect to the foreign policy of a nation”) I don’t think it’s used in the correct context most of the time. This morning’s story would probably have been better off using “political” rather than “geopolitical” to describe some of the ramifications of Obama’s visit to Germany, but I’m (obviously) not an expert.
As the first sentence of this post shows, I started to think about the confluence of Geo (earth) and Politics. I was going to take the punning a bit further, but then I’d have sounded like an episode of The Flintstones, and that’s just not me.