| Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 |
| 9:18 pm |
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| Friday, February 24th, 2006 |
| 5:48 pm |
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| Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 |
| 1:26 pm |
Judge: Don't Count Fetus for Carpool QuotaThe judges reasoning is based on a " 'common sense' definition in which an individual occupies a 'separate and distinct' space in a vehicle." There's long been something that's irritated me about carpool lanes. Well, firstly, I think carpool lanes are stupid anyway - they don't reduce traffic - they add to it by limiting one lane to a smaller number of cars, something studies have shown is not overcome by their encouragment of people to share rides. But that's a digression. What really irritates me is that children count for carpool lanes. Why should they? If the logic of carpool lanes is that they encourage people to rideshare, how could having children in a car possible qualify you? After all, the children aren't going to take their own cars to school or soccer practice or whatever. I think that the law should be limited to driving-aged occupants. Of course, I don't think there should be carpool lanes anyway. |
| Saturday, January 7th, 2006 |
| 10:25 am |
So I went to see the movie Wolf Creek the other night. I'm not sure if it was a really good movie or a really bad movie. The thing about it was that it started out as a really good movie. It was sort of a sexy road trip movie. But then it turned into this sadistic serial killer movie. The beginning was shot in sort of a cinema verete style. I'm pretty sure it took its cue from reality television though. And then there's this moment about two thirds of the way through the movie when the sexy teenagers fall asleep and everything gets all sick and twisted all the sudden. The bad guy in the movie was a really believable bad guy. The main characters were pretty believable too which I think was part of the problem with the movie. In horror movies I don't think it's a good thing to have the main characters be believable or sympathetic. You'd rather have your horror movie characters be sort of vapid and shallow so when they get their arms or legs or fingers cut off you don't feel so bad for them. Another problem I had with the movie is that it was just too sadistic. Sometimes when you're watching a horror movie you start to feel like the person that made it is almost as sick as the bad guy is and you start to feel like well maybe this guy that made this movie is just a sadistic psychopath who's found an outlet for his sadism in cinema and maybe I shouldn't support that. The real impetus for this movie review was not the movie itself but some new software that I recently got for my computer. It's speech recognition software and I wanted to see how well it worked. When brainwaster came over last night I tried to demonstrate how the software worked but I didn't have the mic plugged in correctly. This morning I realized that it was half way out of the Jack. So I plugged it in all the way, recalibrated my sound, and this morning it's working much better. Interestingly enough, I don't think that I would be able to use it to write papers for anything like that, simply because it's hard for me to remember where to put punctuation while I'm speaking. Also, when I speak, I find that my writing style is completely different. Perhaps I'll get more used to using the dictation software after a while. But it really is pretty accurate. I wrote this entire review using dictation software and had to make very few corrections. It's pretty impressive. |
| Saturday, December 17th, 2005 |
| 7:58 am |
This is sort of awesome. I sort of want it just so I can say I have it. |
| Friday, December 16th, 2005 |
| 8:56 pm |
So I saw King Kong. What a piece of crap. |
| Sunday, December 11th, 2005 |
| 6:13 pm |
So after seeing Narnia and Syriana this weekend, I'm feeling pretty underwhelmed. I am, however, looking forward to King Kong"Peter Jackson's King Kong is the most thrilling, soulful monster picture ever made." -- Jami Bernard, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS. I want to go on friday afternoon, before it gets all crowded. Who's going with me? |
| 1:31 am |
So I saw Syriana. It pretty much sucked. I couldn't follow it. I tried. Oh well. Traffic was good. |
| Thursday, November 17th, 2005 |
| 9:40 pm |
So, occasionally I like to get into a science fiction series. I was really into Quantum Leap and Star Trek: The Next Generation growing up. Then I got really into Star Trek: Voyager. I never got into the Stargate, but I caught a couple of episodes of the new Stargate: Atlantis. Then I got the first season on DVD and it's completely awesome. The episode "38 Minutes" is unbelievable. Anyway, fuck you for your snarky comments about me being a geek. |
| Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 |
| 10:30 am |
1) What got me started on trying to find the provenance of the phrase was an off-hand remark in a Penn and Teller special I saw the other night. Penn said, "A person whom I hate once said, 'the show must go on.." I couldn't tell if he was saying that he hated the person for making the statement, or if, in fact, someone that he specifically hates said it. You can be sure, though, that Penn doesn't hate PT Barnum. 2) Interesting. 3) Interesting, and seems to indicate that the quote has no specific provenance. |
| 9:53 am |
Who was the first to say "the show must go on"? Bartlett's doesn't seem to know, so it's probably unattributed, but I thought maybe one of you would know. (It's not the band Queen.) |
| Monday, November 14th, 2005 |
| 12:40 pm |
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| Thursday, November 10th, 2005 |
| 10:21 am |
So there's always been something about Livejournal that's bugged me. There's no RSS feed for your friends page. Then I found this. Fifteen minutes of mucking around in the friends page source and I made this. It doesn't support full descriptions but it's pretty handy anyway. Also: James Randi Archives RSS |
| Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 |
| 8:58 am |
Wow. That was a huge waste of $50 million. |
| Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 |
| 8:23 am |
Everybody in CA be sure to go out to the polls and vote no on all the propositions. Please, make sure you vote no on 74.California teachers don't have tenure. There's no such thing. From my perspective, I'd rather not be a probationary employee for five years. There's no way in hell, I'm going to take a difficult assignment (underperforming school, lots of ESL students in a classroom, etc) when two negative evalutations means I'm fired. |
| Sunday, November 6th, 2005 |
| 1:07 pm |
Every once in while if you download something in XP (through FTP usually) and stop it mid-download, it gets in this limbo-land state where it can't be deleted because XP mistakenly believes that it's being used by another process. There's no way to get rid of it in safe mode or at the dos command prompt. The solution is to use this: http://djlizard.net/software/ForceDel.exeIt forces the deletion of the file. Just throw it onto your desktop and drag the bad file onto it. |
| Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 |
| 12:02 am |
Harmon had a broken blood feather. Sara looked in on him and his wind was all bloody. We had to pull it out. That sucked. He seems okay now. You're supposed to put corn starch on the follacle after, but it doesn't seem to be bleeding and I don't think I could find the follacle if I tried. Anyway, that sucked. |
| Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 |
| 7:37 am |
I'm up early today because I have to go meet the teacher and classroom with whom I'll be doing my teaching assistantship this spring. I'm pretty nervous. |
| Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 |
| 2:03 am |
Saw Domino tonight with Kevin. It was either the worst or best movie I've ever seen. The rottentomatoes reviews are pretty funny. I like this one: "It's a train wreck. It's a mess of frenetic editing topped off by an over-the-top ending in which you expect Die Hard's John McClane to make a cameo. But I loved it. " -- Mike Ward, RICHMOND.COM |
| Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 |
| 9:18 am |
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topsider's journal
obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, 