mysticalforest

There has been much speculation about the supposed tablet from Apple as well as from other companies as well as demos of the Archos 9 I think it was from France.

Anyway, a discussion tonight got me to thinking about PDFs verses physical copies. I shall think more upon this issue and submit a more considered post in the very near future.

You are now up to date!

Clicky to embiggen...

Girls Guild - Atlantis Secret Society of Girl Scholars

Long ago there was a princess named Sophia who lived on the island of Atlantis. Atlantis was said to be the most beautiful place in the world, but there was one problem: It was forbidden there to teach girls how to read or write. Unhappy with this, Sophia often sneaked into the Library of Atlantis, the greatest library ever built, and secretly learned how to read. Armed with her new knowledge, she soon made a terrible discovery: Atlantis was sinking. But when she told her father, King Canute, that the sea was rising, neither he nor any of his advisers believed her as she was just a girl. To find out what happened to Atlantis and Sophia and how Girls Guild came to be formed, download and print the free e-book...

There's a secret code, secret handshake, symbols, and all under Creative Commons. Delightful!

What he says in response to a study that finds married people don't suffer as poorly from Alzheimer's, or the fact that one of the co-hosts tried to stop him and had a pained "omg" look on her face as he was doing it?



Way to keep it classy, FOX News.

I take it that host is still going to be there a month from today?

Wow. This is incredible. Nothing happens at the start but stick with it. You'll be rewarded for your patience...

It's been about a month since the iPhone 3GS came out, right? Awhile back I opined on this list of features. How have they lived up to expectations?

( Reactions in the order they were initially listed... )

From @BreakingNews on Twitter:

Google Inc. says its preparing to launch Google Chrome Operating System for personal computers. The new OS, which will initially target netbooks, will be available to consumers in the second-half of 2010.

Well, well, well—isn't this interestng. Everyone but everyone has been wondering when, not if, this would come to pass.

It's probably not very much more than suped up super browser, but that's likely OK since its aim will, one presumes, act as a gateway to all the various Google apps online. I doubt you'll do much of anything on the device itself.

What's old is new again. Ages ago humans used terminals that told remote computers what to do. Termnals have come back again with cloud computing.

Michael Jackson will be buried without his brain today after doctors retained it following an autopsy to help determine the cause of death.

[...]

Removing the brain is the "only way to carry out the tests" according to a source for the Mirror. "The tissue has to be examined. I can't tell you how long that is going to take."

Full story.

In discussing the next Blizzard MMO, bigfootcountry suggested it might just be WoW2, with the Cataclysm expansion being the thing that sets us up for WoW2. Interesting idea.

But what would WoW2 be like?

In answering this question, I was wondering what the differences were between Everquest 1 and Everquest 2. I've never played either so I don't really know. If WoW did the same thing as EQ did going from 1 to 2, what would WoW2 be like?

I'm the official Games for Windows featured gamer. Hooray for me! :) Following the link below will get you pics of my cube as well as interview questions—with answers, even.

What I didn't include in the interview was an explanation for why my cube's so terribly spartan. It's 'cause I'm a contractor. I don't want to decorate and then have to carry all of that crap home. Better to just have at most a handful of things that I can throw away right there in the office. ;)

Take a peek...

"I am not a quitter. I am a fighter," Palin told CNN on Monday while on a family fishing trip, on the heels of her Friday bombshell announcement that she was resigning as Alaska's governor.

[...]

She resigned because of the tremendous pressure, time and financial burden of a litany of ethics complaints in the past several months, she said.

Full story.

Uh, no, that's exactly what being a quitter means.

...should have included D&D but, alas, did not. A caution light on the Prius came on and so I took it in to the shop,leaving work a bit early to do so.

It turns out that the yellow "maintenance required" light is just that: regular maintenance is required. In this case it was a simple oil change.

However, they did discover a tiny oil leak in the process. It's a warranty repair so that's OK. I asked if it was good to drive it as per normal until Saturday, the day of the appointment. An emphatic yes. When I got home I looked for oil on the floor of the garage and there wasn't any, so it must be as small as they say.

Anyway to all that, it didn't take as long as they threatened. I got home just about the time people would normally start to arrive for the game. I wouldn't have had enough time to prepare though. As well my tummy was giving me troubles so I didn't feel up for company, so I suppose it all worked out.

He died today, in case you hadn't heard. Everything I learned about Robert McNamara I learned from the most excellent documentary The Fog of War, which I highly recommend.

McNamara was more than the chief architect of the Vietnam War. He was also a very intelligent influential person, much more so than I'd thought prior to watching The Fog of War. His method for developing analysis of policy, particularly military policy, is fascinating.

Take a moment to download The Fog of War. It's all around probably the best documentary I've seen, with excellent, candid, revealing, and insightful discussion by McNamara who doesn't hesitate to say where he was wrong, when, and why.

Can be found here.

Excerpt:

It was a fitting end to a grotesque political career that will stumble on for a while like a mortally wounded moose. Her stated reasons for stepping down included everything from "frivolous" ethics charges to Something Awful making fun of her Down syndrome son.

The purpose of this article is to apologize to Sarah Palin for that last part, but first I feel that a bit of history is in order.

Thanks to redmondmenace for the link. :)

The weather the past couple weeks been sunny and in the mid to upper 80s. I like having everything bright as much as the next fellow but it did start to wear a bit. Yesterday, for example, I was in the car and reached for my clip on sunglasses and realized that I was already wearing them. Whoa. That's too bright. Today marks a return to the nice calming overcast and cool temps that're the most comfortable. Yay! :)

It also means I don't have to water the potted plants every day and that's what I appreciate the most, I tell you what. ;)

Our terribly late lunch was there today. It was put off our list because of the cacophonous interior which made conversation virtually impossible but the weather is warm now and so we sat outside, away from the din.

That part was successful. Very nice outside.

And! They have tex mex eggroll appetizers, which is the one thing I looked most forward to when we went to Stanford's and when they took that item off the list all interest in going there began to dwindle (and when they shut down their pizza oven that put it on the fast track).

The appetizer was very awesome, every bit as good as Stanford's used to be and is the signature item for that restaurant as far as I'm concerned.

The entrée, however, wasn't all that. I got garlic noodles with chicken and it was too greasy. Note, however, that I abhor grease to a level outside the norm. What's "greasy" to me would, I'm sure, would only be noticed on a quantum scale by you. As well, the chicken included skin. And not the crispy passable kind but the slimy (greasy) disgusting kind that makes me not want to touch it (see also my freakiness). Once I surgeried away that awfulness the chicken underneath was good. The mushrooms were kinda tasteless though. Asparagus good.

Also, it was horrifically expensive. We got appetizers as well as some cheesecake to bring home.

I think in the future what we'll do at max is just get appetizers, and only eat during summer, and only outside. Seems a harsh set of restrictions but, hey, those tex mex eggroll thingies are worth such restrictions.

Regular readers of this blog or my Twitter feed know that I'm uncomfortable around urchins and that level of dislike rises to significant unpleasantry when they're in restaurants. Well, urchins that make noise. Quiet ones are all right by me. Yesterday we were seated right next to one that was I-don't-know-years old. 2? It could talk and walk. That, I know.

Anyhoo, aside from some random banshee-like screeches (which is redundant—all urchins seem to speak in random banshee-like screeches in restaurants when they speak at all) the urchin was well behaved. What was surprising was the conduct of the parents—and the staff. The parents talked baby talk to the urchin almost non-stop and at a volume that was a touch too loud. There was a brief break in the baby talk to admonish the urchin not to eat crayons and to eat regular foot. To which the mother said: "He doesn't like food."

The wait staff were very chummy with the urchin's mother and her two companions, including playing with the urchin regularly. That's totally cool. Our service didn't suffer a bit because of that, the urchin was pleased, the mother and her companions were pleased, staffed was pleased, we were left alone—everybody won.

Now, we're regulars enough at Jay Berry's Café that we're recognized to the point that they know what drinks to bring us without being asked and since we get the same thing every time, what meals to bring. In fact, they usually ask me whether or not I'm ready for my ice cream when I'm done with my Berry Burger.

This is probably why there was a point during our visit when one of the waitresses was holding the urchin in one arm and came by to ask us if we needed anything more. Except she did it through the urchin, playing as though the urchin was asking us if we needed anything.

Geh. Expected direct interaction with the urchin was profoundly uncomfortable. I well and truly appreciate that she probably thought that since she was excited and delighted by the urchin and since we're regulars and kind of a tertiary de facto members of the larger Jay Berry's Café neighborhood community in a broad sense, that she felt comfortable enough trying to include us in something that was exciting and delightful and happy.

That is to say: Reach a level of comfort with us that she did something with us that she would not do with utter strangers. Like I say, I appreciate that gesture very much because it telegraphs our rise in status from "vaguely familiar" to "actual regulars."

But I still wanted the situation to end and for them both to go away. And I completely recognize that I'm the total freak in this scenario. Any other human would have, I'm sure, responded positively to such an interaction and played along. I think we laughed nervously or something.

What have we learned? I've learned to scope the place out for urchins and to ask to be seated away from them. I thought about doing so prior to this incident, but I valued the window seat higher than I should have, it turns out. While this runs the risk of us being a attitudinal wet blanket on things that are happy and delightful, that's fine by me if that also means a peaceful visit. They're left to cavort with urchins and put smile on everyone's faces, we're isolated and left to read in peace. Everybody wins.

Neither of us said anything a'tall during the incident and neither of us wanted to because of the aforementioned wet blanket potential, but perhaps some passive aggressive "we'll take the table farthest from the children" activities will subtilely guide everyone toward a happy nip in the bud of possible unpleasantries.