Category: Main

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A few things of no particular consequence

userinfomamishka came over this afternoon, and we had a delightful time getting her laptop updated to Snow Leopard (plus the .1 update) while watching the first two hours of the BBC version of State of Play. I really liked that, and it’s quite nice how the US version did a decent job of preserving the bones of the plot while condensing it down to two hours. John Simm is easily a match for my beloved Mr. Crowe, I’ll totally grant–plus, the BBC version has David Morrisey, who I’d first seen being awesome in the last Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Next Doctor”. It’s quite cool to see him in something else.

Meanwhile, I have made my first ebook purchase inspired by my recently joining the Outer Alliance: a short work called Rot by Michele Lee. It’s a zombie work, and it adds an extra level of tension by making the zombies still sentient while their bodies are rotting around them. You can check out the Outer Alliance’s spotlight post on Michele here, and her own page about the work here.

In addition, I’ve picked up copies of Treason’s Harbour and The Far Side of the World, since I needed those to continue the Patrick O’Brian goodness. Y’all may remember I listened to an audio version of Treason’s Harbour already, but I didn’t have a physical copy yet. Very much looking forward to reading The Far Side of the World, too!

I have issues with the 3.1 iPhone OS update: namely, it’s totally broken Smart Playlists. All of my Smart Playlists on my device are displaying out of order, although they’re fine in iTunes on my computer. So to get around this, I’ve started listening to a lot of my stuff via album view or via the podcasts view. As a consequence, I’ve been stricken with an urge to just listen to my entire collection in alphabetical order, just because I haven’t listened to quite a bit of this stuff in quite a bit of time. Still working my way through the A’s. I think I’ll do a summary post when I’m done with each letter.

And, last but not least, speaking of music, the Murkworks now has Beatles Rock Band. We played it some Friday night and it was highly entertaining, and a Beatles Rock Band gathering at our house is highly likely next weekend. We need more mikes to properly do the harmonies. And I am totally requiring some Beatles in my iTunes collection now.

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Mt. St. Helens Road Trip, or, Anna Visits the Splody Mountain

With userinforavyngyngvar visiting us over this past week, one of the things we wanted to do was drive down to see Mt. St. Helens. userinfosolarbird and I have after all lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1991–and we’d never once actually seen this famous volcano. Plus, since this was Yngvar’s second visit, I wanted to give him a shot at seeing something cool a little farther afield than the immediate Seattle area. Ergo, I took Thursday off with the plan to allocate that to going to see the splody mountain.

As plans went it was a good one. It did however go significantly agley, as it were, when I chose poorly in selecting our actual destination at the mountain. Silly me–I thought that something calling itself the mountain headquarters would be, oh I dunno, near the mountain. But it turned out to be on the south side, way past where we needed to be. So Dara wound up having to do quite a bit of extra driving, and we wound up reaching where we needed to be–the Johnston Ridge Observatory–after the facility had closed.

Fortunately though we were still able to park in the parking lot and walk around quite a bit, which gave us ample opportunity to see not only the mountain, but much of the surrounding terrain. Here’s what we saw, including a couple of pics from my iPhone!

Continue reading “Mt. St. Helens Road Trip, or, Anna Visits the Splody Mountain”

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Measurements of nerds

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook will have seen this already, but I thought it was worth putting into a longer post: I have decided that, given the news that PAX has sold out completely this year, a “PAX” should clearly be the default measurement unit for any gathering of nerds.

I am given to understand that in recent years, PAX has had upwards of 30,000 attendees. It seems therefore reasonable to estimate a PAX at 30,000 nerds. Which gives us the following measurement units:

  • 1 megaPAX = 30,000,000,000 nerds, or the approximate number of nerds required to buy your book before you can outsell J.K. Rowling
  • 1 kiloPAX = 30,000,000 nerds, or the number of nerds buying tickets to the latest SF/F blockbuster
  • 1 PAX = 30,000 nerds
  • 1 deciPAX = 3,000 nerds, or the approximate annual attendance at Norwescon
  • 1 centiPAX = 300 nerds, or the approximate number of attendees at any given showing of a Harry Potter movie
  • 1 milliPAX = 30 nerds, or the approximate number of attendees at any given SF/F convention panel
  • 1 microPAX = .03 nerds

Actual attendees of PAX should let me know if this year’s PAX surpasses the estimated number of a single PAX measurement. We wouldn’t want the math to be wrong, now would we?

Also, I am willing to entertain suitable counter-theories that a PAX could also be considered the unit of “amount of force of interest required to gather 30,000 nerds in a single location”. If you would like to support this theory, show your work in the comments!

And, props to userinfokirbyk and userinfoalfvaen for unit suggestions and prefix corrections! ;)

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Attn: Mac Geeks

So oh hey, Mac OS update this week! Snow Leopard to to all reports sounds really, really shiny. But the potential bugaboo for the Murk is that with this release, OS X is dropping support for Power PCs, and one of our Macs, the older laptop we’re using as a Time Machine server, is a G4 and won’t run the new OS.

I haven’t been able to find any word yet on whether Time Machine in Snow Leopard will continue to happily talk to a Time Machine server running Leopard. Anybody know one way or another? I’d hate for this to be a dealbreaker for getting the upgrade, since we could get a nice family pack upgrade for the house Macs for fifty bucks.

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And speaking of movies

Finally also saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with userinfosolarbird and userinfospazzkat last night, at the Meridian downtown after work. That was fun.

I expect everybody and their grandmother’s already seen this one too, but I’ll keep reasonably spoiler-free anyway and simply that that for my money, this implementation of the plot was a lot tighter than the book. They did a decent job culling the big honking brick that is Book 6 down to movie-length, I think. By necessity this does mean that there’s a certain lack of depth to what’s left on screen, but that’s kind of okay for me still; we’re closing in on the big climactic end to the saga, so it feels okay to get more epic in scope and to have less focus on the day to day details of what’s going on.

Plus, I must say that this was a visually stunning movie as well. We all felt that the Obligatory Quidditch Scene(TM) made quidditch actually look like a sport, which was pretty neat. Also neat to see them playing during a snowstorm. AND… oh okay, so I’ll get at least a little spoilery…

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A Whoniverse postulation

Captain Jack Harkness is very lucky that the Doctor’s last few regenerations have been younger and hotter–or else very unlucky, depending on your point of view, because he’d have had entirely different interactions with oh, say, the First Doctor.

Discuss!

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Another book roundup post

So, um, yeah: lesson learned now that I have Stanza installed on the iPhone? I’m totally going to be buying more ebooks. And chances are good that a lot of them will be romance books.

Yes, yes, you may all make jokes about poking me in my romance section now. Well, at least those of you who were working at userinfolyricae‘s bookstore back in the day. Shut up. *^_^*;;

Ahem. Anyway, here is a roundup of recent books purchased, both in electronic form and not. First, the physical books:

  • userinfokatatomic‘s Vanished, Book 4 of the Greywalker series. In hardcover. Because I like her Just That Much.
  • userinforachelcaine‘s newly released Cape Storm, the second to the last of the Weather Wardens series. I am sadly behind on my Rachel Caine and need to have me a marathon of her stuff soon! Paperback.
  • Also in paperback, FINALLY, the third book of Kristen Britain’s Green Rider series, The High King’s Tomb.
  • Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind, just so I can see what everybody is on about. Paperback.

And now, the ebooks:

  • Rachel Caine’s Devil’s Bargain. Astute followers of this blog may note that I’ve read this one already as a library checkout. This is me now buying my own copy!
  • Also by Rachel Caine, Line of Sight, another of her romances. This was one of the Athena Force novels. Should be amusing for sekrit-agenty sorts of stuff.
  • Silent on the Moor, by Deanna Raybourn. This is the third of her Julia Grey series, bought in electronic form mostly because they dramatically changed the cover styles for this installment and I disapprove. But I do want to read it, so!
  • Comeback, by Doranna Durgin. Who I have loved greatly in the past for her fantasy novels, but she hasn’t done much in that genre lately and I miss her writing, so romance ebook it is!
  • And, because I also miss good writing by Elizabeth Lowell and she hasn’t come out with anything new lately, I’ve picked up her quartet of “Only” novels, Only Mine, Only His, Only Love, and Only You.

Grand total of books purchased for the year is now 53. Which coincidentally brings me up about even with the reviews I’ve posted so far, although I’m about to pull ahead on those. This tells me overall that my book buying tends to keep up pretty well with my book reading, even though the turnaround time between “when I purchase” and “when I read” may be huge indeed.

This also tells me that I will definitely need to ration my ebook purchasing because otherwise I could go nuts with this like whoa. No more ebooks at least until paycheck after this next one! *^_^*;;