So I went on Sunday – Ann decided that it wasn’t a movie she wanted to see (graphic decapitations are not quite her cup of tea =) This was not a traditional movie. It did not have the feel of conventional story. Its hard to describe (I failed to convey it Ann, so I’m not high on my chances of explaining it here). It felt like a Homer-like story (something like the Odyssey) – a story told around the campfire in ancient times....
The trailer is finally out (there was a very crude Russian version floating around the web) and it looks great! Just check out the cast! – Robert De Niro, Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Evertt, Ian McKellen, Peter O’Toole… I mean… WOW! It’s apparently based on a novel by Neil Gaiman, though I’ve never heard of either. It looks like a wonderful fantasy in the vein of Alice in Wonderland crossed with a Grimm fairy tale and cured with a good pirate story....
If you haven’t seen these, then take a few minutes to catch up. First off, Al Gore testified before the House and Senate committees on his views on global warming and energy usage (this clip is from the Senate Environment & Public Works (EPW) committee. When you watch this, remember, Inhofe was the former chairperson of the committee (Boxer replaced him after the election). The man who believes global warming and the persecution of the environment are the greatest hoaxes ever played on the American public… and he was the one in charge for 6 years of “protecting” the environment!...
This is ambitious! Enjoy a trip back to the good old college days. Note – Just FYI, you don’t play beer pong with paddles… for some reason I have heard that certain places on the west coast (that shall go unnamed) call beer pong without paddles ‘Beirut’ (thank’s for the catch Jeff). Let me put that to rest. Beer pong is beer pong… If you’re playing with paddles, there is no beer involved....
Let me just say that developing cross-platform software is one of the more royal pains out there. Java, built from the ground up with cross-platform in mind does a better job than most to maintain a level of abstraction for the developer. However, a universal sticking point is what character the directory separator is. Unix, the Web, and the rest of the sane world use ‘/’ to separate directories. This makes sense, since in most modern (hell, nearly all) programming languages, the ‘' is used as a prefix to an escape character....
To anyone who watched Firefly & Serenity, you understand how I feel about the actors. I loved the characters they portrayed, and once it went riding off into the sunset on the silver screen (well before its time), I want the actors to at least go on to bigger projects… hoping to see them once again on screen. I thought I would gather up some information on what they’ve been up to (mostly via imdb, albeit)....
There is of little doubt in my mind that Wikipedia is the living incarnation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects....
Wordpress has (or rather had) an annoying habit – When you used it as a CMS, the built in editor graciously removed all div tags from your post. I really can’t see why anyone in their right mind would wish this. After digging through the support forums, came upon the following: 2.1 version tinyMCE will replace <div> by <p> when saving post, you may change this by hacking file: wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php about 24th line, find:...
It really was an exhausting, intimidating, and fun weekend (bookended by two days). A couple of points to get across before some highlights. In GSB terms, I am Ann's "SO" and Ann is "my Student" Stanford apparently loves their acronyms... more so that most colleges Each GSB class is only ~360 students (as opposed to Harvard who has ~900) -- Granted this was round one admit weekend (only about 120 students there), it feels very intimate....
Check this out too… There really is something awe inspiring about something this simple. I hope in my lifetime I have a chance to see the Earth from a distance where it looks like an IMAX projection. I hope that I get to see the moon so that the surface from horizon to horizon spans what the eye can see. Realistically, I think my grand children will get that chance. I know we can do a lot in 40 or 60 years, but I believe we will have other pressing issues on our hands such that space travel will be still be relegated to the Air Force elite....