Glenn McDavid

I was doing a database task for someone in another department, and I had to ask him a question. I have known him for years, but did not recall his phone number. I found it in the official online phone book, with the title:

Jedi Knight Programmer

(He really is very good).

Expelled!. Also see the follow-up.

Via Bad Astronomy.

As my mother used to nag us: Don't do a half-way job!

I just discovered Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex is on the web!

We visited the local video store yesterday. Wandering through it, in search of nothing in particular, I noticed The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was in the "Classics" section, not "Science Fiction".

Round one (so far) goes to Narnia

Our firstborn has been a Transformers fan for a long time, so this caught my attention. See BA Transformers review now online, then Review: Transformers. There was a good comment about automobiles, although others have made the same observation, and possibly before Douglas Adams (L. Sprague deCamp comes to mind).

I spent much of the morning working on colgaffneyis newsletter. The hard copy is printed and almost ready to mail. All I have to do tomorrow is buy stamps and mail it.

After finishing that I went by the graves of my grandparents. I took the wrong exit from the expressway and corrected myself, to my surprise, by reconstructing the directions from their old house, rather than from our home in Roseville. I cleared the grass and debris from the grave stones, and afterwards I drove by their house in NE Minneapolis, not far away. The house is being well kept up. Sometime in the past decades one of the owners repainted the trim brown. The contrast with the stucco looks good. Two houses on the block had For Sale signs. I hope that does not mean there is a problem with the neighborhood. Everything I could see looked OK.

I came home and had a sandwich for lunch. Then mia_mcdavid, our son James, and I went to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. I carefully avoided every temptation to make sense of the plot and just sat back to enjoy the action and the scenes. Of course, I noticed the gear and clothing ranged from c. 1600 (e.g. a helmet similar to the one I am wearing in this userpic) to the mid 1700's (the infantry uniforms). Some of the wigs were typical of the latter period, but others were more suited to 1690. One of the firearms was quite similar to colgaffneyis grenade launcher (if you imagine it being upgraded to a flintlock) and there was a boarding axe quite similar to one I own. So it actually was rather amusing :-)>

Slept long and well last night. Between camping in Chas. City, my cold, and work, it was the best sleep in over a week.

colgaffneyis quarterly membership meeting was today. This went quickly and smoothly under the circumstances. Several concerns about money, other resources, and personalities are very much with us, but the organization is coping so far this year. Despite limited publicity, quite a few members showed.

I rebuilt my main home computer this afternoon after Thursday's hard disk failure. I had some hassles with hardware issues but none with the software (Slackware Linux) itself. I have a little configuration still to do but the system is usable now. Much easier than the last few times I have done a Windows install.

Watched The Producers (the original 1960's version) on TV after dinner. It has been a favorite of mine for nearly 40 years, but I had not seen it in a while and had forgotten just how funny it really is.

Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?. Via Debunking 911 and rillaspins.

Somehow this reminded me of the mock trial of Prince Igor in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle.

They are to be launched into space, but what then? Celestis, the company that arranges for handling the cremation ashes, suggests that they are going into orbit. However, the firm that is providing the rocket clearly states that their vehicles are only capable of suborbital flights. More at Bad Astronomy.

Orbital or suborbital? James Doohan and Gordon Cooper certainly understood the difference, and I think it would matter to them.

Lord of the Fireflies. Reported at Serenity named top sci-fi movie and Serenity Trounces Star Wars.

From Small World via the Moderate Voice.