Amaze your friends with the Jenga pistol.
This seems rather strange. I’m not sure what I could compare it with as a similar misuse (?) of advanced tools.
Something I’m finding to be a useful reference these days.
Another reference, this time to bit-twiddling hacks. I’ve got a book that covers this and more, but more than one source of info isn’t a problem.
And finally, a little humor that I found at Bits and Pieces:
Well, I will, for one.
Yesterday, Cheryl and I had lunch with Zombyboy. After that, we went to see Watchmen on the giant screen, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I thought casting and makeup were quite good; the major characters looked like I remembered them from the book (although it has been a few years since I’ve read it). I knew going into it that the ending was changed from the book, but it worked as well, if not better, than the original ending would have. The original ending would have required more setup to make it work, and the movie was long enough already.
One other change from what I remembered was the riot scene – I was hoping to see Dr. Manhattan explain that it was not a request when he told the rioters, “You will all go home.” I also didn’t remember the flamethrower scene (you’ll know which one). Those are minor changes, though.
I’m not a purist; I understand that movies can’t always follow the story they’re developed from faithfully. This one did fairly well. It didn’t match the book as closely as The Maltese Falcon matched its book, but neither was it as poor a rendition as was Starship Troopers.
Overall, a good movie. Even if I won’t be waiting for the DVD release with bated breath, I still would enjoy seeing it again.
By the way, I suppose I should mention that I’ve lusted after Rorschach’s mask since I first saw the book.
A bit more than a week ago, Futility Closet had a post concerning a phrasebook from the Borneo Literature Bureau containing phrases considered useful when traveling in Borneo.
It put me in mind of two things: first, the phrasebook English as She is Spoke, famous (infamous? notorious?) for its ineptitude. You can view excerpts from it on Google Books.
The second is a book in my personal library, the Handbook of Japanese Conversations, by Morio Takahashi. It contains sample conversations on a number of topics, such as:
And many more.
This book was published in 1951, but appears to have been written much earlier, or perhaps developed over a number of years with an upper-class Englishman as the reference for the English language. I say that because of some of the references, as well as the style of speech:
It also has some interesting vocabulary words that aren’t used in sample conversations, such as assassin, cutpurse, poaching, contraband, smuggler, and poison. Not to mention this sentence, which is part of a dialogue:
Let us hope that a visit to Japan will occasion no incident requiring the use of such vocabulary.
Try here. It’s interesting to see the move possibilities, but I don’t play chess well enough anymore to want to do much with it.
Via Bifurcated Rivets.
There are many interesting stories to be found related to the naming of things. I had not known that Julian Street in Denver had one of them.
If, like me, you’re currently out of work, you may want to think about improving your prospects through education. Perhaps Klingon Night School is for you?
I was going through some boxes the other day, and ran across this item ticket from a few years ago. It was from one of the office supply chains, I think. In any case, I suspect the item was marked up to a higher-than-normal price, just so they could claim that it was on sale.
So, Marion and I went up to Frisco yesterday to do some X-C skiing. It was beautiful up there, even if the weather wasn’t the best. Most of the time, it was snowing, quite heavily at times. A couple of times, I stopped on the trail, just to watch the snow come down. The temperature was right at freezing, and all the snow was powder. Unfortunately.
Powder is great if you’ve got enough speed going. I have neither the knees nor the money for downhill skiing anymore. The problem was that the snow would clump under our skis and stick to them and the trail beneath them, which meant that we didn’t get much “glide” as we went along. Often, we’d push a ski and have it jolt our leg to a stop, which started to cause me problems later on.
The roughly 7km “Frisco Bay” trail normally takes us a little over an hour. Yesterday, it took just over two. We haven’t gone on the “RJ’s Vista” trail for the past few years, so I can’t say how long I would have expected it to take. I can say that it took us an hour. Well, it took me an hour. My skis were letting me do a bit better than Marion’s let her do; I suspect it’s the fact that I weigh almost twice what she does that let me strip the snow from the bottoms of my skis more easily.
That, and the fact that she missed the turnoff for the lodge and ended up on a black trail.
In any case, we normally try to leave by about 2:30pm to try and miss the Sunday evening traffic going back to Denver. Yesterday, we left around 4pm, so we hit the traffic. Big time.
I think it’s about 8 miles from Silverthorne to the Johnson Tunnel (the westbound tunnel is the Eisenhower, the eastbound is the Johnson). Yesterday, it took us about an hour and a quarter to cover that distance. Once we got to the tunnel, traffic sped up … until we got to Silver Plume. By the time we got to Georgetown, we figured it was best to get off the highway for awhile, so we went looking for a restaurant for dinner. We found the Euro Cafe before we got to the main drag, and decided to give it a try.
It was a good choice. We both had the Hungarian Goulash, and it was wonderful, as was the sweet-and-sour red cabbage. I tried the apple strudel for dessert (I’d just done 3 hours of cardio, remember?), and it was tasty enough, but I don’t think I’d have it again. I’d definitely go back for the goulash, though. Maybe try some of their other dishes. They also had a nice touch in the restrooms that I haven’t seen before… disposable cups and a bottle of Scope. I like that.
After spending almost an hour at dinner, we got back onto the highway. Traffic was moving about 20 mph. We finally got home at 8:30pm, for a trip that normally takes between about 90 and 150 minutes. Bleah. We’ll remember that next time, I’m sure.
While on the Galapagos portion of the trip, we came across dolphins twice. The first time, they were near the shore as we were leaving Floreana Island. Several of the tour members tried to swim with them, but they were largely unsuccessful at getting close to them.
The second time was somewhat later, as we were between Floreana and Isabella. Tim, our tour guide, estimated that there were about 400 dolphins in the pod. I took a number of photos and movies, and I’ll include the best ones. This first photo shows Tim on the bow, with the pod in the distance as we approached them. As always, click on the photo for the full-sized image. I’ve uploaded these at what should be the full 6MP resolution.
We spent about 10-15 minutes following the pod. It may have been more; it may have been less. I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying attention to my watch. Also visible in this first photo are the back of Marion’s head, Pat on the bow, and Natalie in the near foreground at the right.
The people visible in this shot are, from left to right, Evette, Tim, Pat, and Erika.
The people visible in this shot are Pat, Erika, and Rosemarie.
I’ve seen dolphins at sea before, when I was in the Navy, but I’d never seen so many at once. Nor had I seen them leaping – they’d been surfing the bow wave. It was wonderful. Here’s the best movie I took. If you watch closely towards the end (about the 1:10 and 1:24 marks), you can see dolphins swimming past the boat just under the surface.