Thursday, August 30, 2007

Text Talk

No profanity in this post, but I can't vouch for the comments.

While working at Astronomy, I had Yahoo! Radio playing on the computer. One of the commercials was sponsored by Chevy and was a "translation" guide for text messages. The first example was LOL; the second and third were gobbledy-gook that "translated" into features about some truck. The last one was WTF which they said stood for "Wow! That's fantastic!"

That's certainly not what I thought WTF stood for. How about you?

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Feeling Old

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2011 lists some interesting facts about most of the students entering college this fall.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Stardust... and Bourne

The Bourne Ultimatum was a great movie: an edge-of-your-seat, almost non-stop action wild ride. If you liked the first two, you won't be disappointed.

I can't say enough good things about Stardust. It's wonderful, fantastic, amazing, insert other !!! adjectives here. It's a fantasy story about a young man who offers to retrieve a fallen star for his lady-love in exchange for her hand in marriage; he has one week or she will marry his rival. Of course, finding the star turns out to be the easy part...

Really, you need to stop reading this and whatever else you're doing and go see this movie.

Guaranteed Smile

...probably also at least giggles, if not downright laughter. If not, seek professional help. How can you not feel better after seeing these four kittens attacking a box...and each other, of course.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Hawai'i Weather

It's actually been a really good week: the earthquake was scary, but not as bad as last October; Hurricane Flossie petered out (we had no winds and not much rain); and the tsunami from the earthquake in Peru never materialized. Due to "projected weather-related hazards" schools were closed on Tuesday and Wednesday, and wow! did I get a lot done at home.

And, of course, Friday is a state holiday -- hooray for the two-day workweek!

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Bye-Bye Bookshelf

I have officially canceled the amysbookshelf.com domain. I wasn't doing anything with it and my life is only going to get busier.

I will keep this blog and my flickr account (which only has three pix at the moment, but behind the scenes, I'm organizing my digital photos, so soon eventually it will have more) and maybe some other communication tools in the future (Twitter intrigues me a bit, although right now mostly just to read what others are writing).

But for now, good-bye amysbookshelf.com -- I'm sorry I didn't make better use of you. My intentions were good.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

NASA TV

I don't know how anyone could watch the coverage of the shuttle launch and not be awed and impressed and proud of what has been accomplished. I'm sitting here watching the shuttle go into orbit courtesy of a camera on the main fuel tank. I just saw the shuttle detach and (seemingly) drift away from "my" position.

Sometimes technology is amazing.

Thanks to NASA for the goosebumps!

Shuttle Launches

Godspeed, Endeavour!

btw, the NASA TV Public Channel is fantastic!! I watched the launch via my computer and saw all kinds of nifty closeups and heard lots of chatter.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Harry Potter: The End

Spoiler-free post, but I can't vouch for the comments.

I finished the seventh Harry Potter book, an as I previously noted, it's difficult to put down once you pick it up. This was even truer with the second half.

In the interest of not saying too much, I'll settle for observing that I think it was a worthy end to the series.

And now, back to Book One...

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Spoiler-free post, but I can't vouch for the comments.

My pre-ordered copy of Harry Potter 7 finally appeared in my mailbox yesterday, a mere 12 days after the release date. I'm gonna go easy on Amazon 'cause every other order I've ever placed has arrived much more quickly than expected and I can't be sure it's Amazon's fault (USPS, I'm thinkin' of you).

Anyway, I'm barely able to keep my eyes open after being at the theatre until midnight on Tuesday and reading until almost 3 a.m. last night. I'm just past halfway and while I would like to finish it tonight, I think a good night's sleep is probably the wiser choice.

I don't want to give anything away, but I really hadn't planned on reading that long last night. I was just going to start it, read a little, read a little more tonight, and then finish it in a Friday-night marathon. The spell JKR weaves still has lots of power left.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Movie Reviews

I recently saw both Ratatouille and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Ratatouille is the usual Pixar perfection: everything is very detailed and very lifelike -- the views of Paris will take your breath away and if you don't like rats, you will be creeped out. Despite this, it's probably last on my list of Pixar flix -- hey, somebody has to be at the bottom!

HP5 was good -- it's been some time since I read the story, so I can't speak to how closely the movie sticks to the book, but as a movie, it rocked.

I read somewhere that this might be the last HP movie they do because someone thinks the actors are getting too old to play teenagers. I don't agree; I had no trouble believing that Daniel, Emma, Rupert and the others were 15. I would very much like to see them film the last two books (but that could just be my completion fixation).