Cool short movie: Mac vs. PC – Transformers style!
Month: December 2008
Christmas: Day 1
Somehow managed to get through last-minute Christmas shopping. I’d like to thank the following people for helping: Starbuck, Kelly, Peet, and the Bean sisters (Coffee and Lost). Read and reviewed the final issue of The Flash (the third time it’s been canceled for a relaunch in as many years) while alenxa baked cookies, and on to a “relaxing” evening yesterday of laundry, dishes, and wrapping gifts, with a break for Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
Today, went over to my parents’ for breakfast, meeting up with them and with my brother and his fiancee, who flew down Wednesday and are staying at their place. Then carpooled off to my grandparents’ house for the big family get-together. Follow-up with alenxa’s family on Saturday, originally scheduled around SIL and her boyfriend driving down from Oregon. With all the snow earlier this week, they decided it wasn’t a good idea to try the drive, so it looks like we’ll be hitting the post office sometime in the next few days.
Meds! (aka the Joy of Food Allergies)
Irvine & Snow
The whole Santa Ana Mountain range seems to have gotten snow yesterday. I took a detour on the way to work to take some pictures, and ended up on Barranca, where I remembered to stop and take some photos out by the lake at Woodbridge.
Eventually I made it up to a cul-de-sac up on Quail Hill where I took a panoramic photo of the whole area, but I probably won’t be able to stitch it together until evening. I’ve posted a few segments, though.
I’ve been posting the pictures, along with the ones I took of the San Gabriels on Tuesday, in a Flickr photoset.
Writer’s Block: Prophecy or Fallacy?
Happy birthday, Nostradamus. Many people consider the prophecies of Nostradamus to be uncannily accurate, while others remain skeptical. Do you think it’s possible to predict the future?
It’s absolutely possible to extrapolate certain aspects of the future from current and past events. The sun has risen and set every day for the entire length of human history, so we can say with certainty that it will do so tomorrow, even if it’s hidden behind clouds. We can predict large-scale weather and climate patterns, though not details like where next year’s hurricanes will make landfall. We can predict that major earthquakes will hit California over the next few decades, though we don’t know for sure where or when they will strike.
As far as human activity and society, we can predict some things, particularly in the short term, again by looking at what’s happened up to this point and extrapolating. But there’s always the chance that something unexpected will completely derail it. I suspect sociologists and science fiction writers have about as equal potential for accuracy.
As for prophecy and Nostradamus? Say something vague and cryptic enough, and there will always be someone happy to go throught he contortions needed to make it fit something they consider important.
Overnight in San Diego
My company will sometimes do its Christmas party as a destination event. It was in Las Vegas one year, and one year it was even a 3-day cruise. I think it’s a holdover from the dot-com days during which we’d always have an annual ski trip and an annual summer trip. Then it was cut down to one trip. And now it’s combined with the Christmas party.
This year it was held in San Diego, at the Omni Hotel. Since it’s relatively close, we were all on our own for transportation, so alenxa and I took it at our own pace, spending Saturday afternoon in Old Town, hitting a farmer’s market, and so forth. Unfortunately it was casino-themed, and I’m not really big on gambling (though Katie made a killing at blackjack), but the food was really good (it was the in-hotel McCormick and Schmick’s, and while I couldn’t eat the seafood, the steak was quite good, and the chocolate cake was excellent), and I think I have gained at least a rudimentary understanding of craps beyond “you roll the dice and bet on how they land.”
( K2R: Old Town, the Omni, and just how big is that space by the convention center, anyway? )
Now if I could just figure out what to do with this wireless keyboard and mouse…
Writer’s Block: Set Sail
Spike and Angel, President Roslin and Gaius Baltar, Harry and Hermione—shippers often find pairings that the original author might have overlooked. What coupling of fictional characters would you most like to see?
I’m just hoping Desmond and Penny will survive Lost.
What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation
My brother and his fiancée drove down from San Francisco to visit last weekend, and we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with them at my parents’ house. And playing Munchkin. Which was fun, except for the interminable turns when someone needed to discard a bunch of cards and, because most of us were new at the game, agonized over which cards to toss.
Family gathering on Thursday at my grandparents’ house. In the old days we’d drive to my parents’ house, then pile into their minivan and carpool the rest of the way, but since my mom traded it in for a Camry, we had to split 6 people across two cars. I’d planned on driving since I knew neither Brion nor Marti was going to want to spend ~2 hours driving in holiday traffic after spending the entire previous day on the road.
Other than visiting family, I mostly stayed at home. No Black Friday sales. I did order tickets to a play (The School of Night, about the death of Christopher Marlowe), and tried to order tickets to Man of La Mancha only to discover it was in presale, and I didn’t have the code. (Subsequently signed up for Reprise’s newsletter. Next time…)
Did a lot of reading. I’m about 100 pages into George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and decided I needed a break. I picked up Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward the day before ABC announced the first casting for the TV pilot. Jack Davenport — yes, Steve from Coupling and Norrington from Pirates of the Caribbean — is playing the lead , and Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is playing a character who is either new to the adaptation or shows up at least halfway through the book. I get the impression from earlier articles that they’re not adapting the plot so much as they’re taking the concept and using it as the basis for an ongoing series. I also reread Girl Genius from the beginning, which is much easier to do in book form than on the computer.
alenxa completed Nanowrimo over the weekend, having written 50,000 words during November, though she’s pretty sure the full novel is going to be more than twice that.
Also, on Tuesday we went out to Huntington Beach’s street fair to see Gigi Edgley, Farscape’s Chiana, do fire twirling (write-up w/ photos at K2R).
Today, I’m tired. 9 days of antihistamines plus 3 days of getting to bed late and getting up early plus a couple of weeks of not sleeping well. Okay, back to work.