atomicthoughts.com

We had some documentation in a Movable Type instance that I’m moving into our Wiki. I came across this. Snarkiness was in the documentation, not added by me later. :)

Changed “pubic health” to “public health” in the chart of math requirements. Yes, 25 people proofread this stuff, and 25 people missed that.

When I push the play/pause button on my keyboard, itunes, open pandora, and realplayer all fire up at once. Unless I’m already listening to something in one of them, then that’ll stop and and the others will start. At least the mute button works as advertised.

Yesterday afternoon, Flickr announced the release of a new feature that hard core Flickr users have been clamoring for for a while now: subsets or sets of sets. Or, as Flickr calls them, collections.

Wooohoooo!

Things I’ve watched or read in the last week:

Borat – Funniest movie of the year? Not! My little joke there was
funnier than almost anything in the movie. I felt like I did when I was
watching Napolean Dynamite, another wildly popular movie that I totally
didn’t get. Maybe this is my lot now that I’ve aged out of the core
demographic. Somehow I’ll survive.

Half Nelson – I’ve been excited to see this since it was so exuberantly
reviewed over the summer. It was pretty good, but didn’t entirely live
up to expectations. One big reason is that I still generally prefer
movies that come to some sort of conclusion, and this didn’t.

Gilmore Girls, season 1, disc 6 – We picked up GG a season ago and have
been catching up through Netflix. Actually we’re watching Season 1 on
dvd, season 3 or 4 on ABC family, and the new ones on the CW. Anyway,
disc 6 had what pitiful extras there were for the whole season. I hope
they have more in later seasons.

V is for Vendetta – I was extremely impressed with this one. The
trailers led me to think it was a pure action fest, but it wasn’t that
at all. The plot was intriguing and I dug the larger themes it was
talking about.

The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett – Cassandra has been telling me
to read this book as long as we’ve ben together. I should have listened
to her back then so I could have read it 3 or 4 times again. Really
outstanding book about the building of gothic cathedrals. Wonderful
characters and good writing. one of the quickest reading thousand page
books I’ve ever read.

Because you enjoyed:

• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
• Children of Heaven
• Akeelah and the Bee

We think you’ll enjoy:

• Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

Since I enjoyed a documentary, an Iranian foreign language film about kids, and a movie about a spelling bee, I’ll enjoy a documentary about war? I’m sure the recommendations are based heavily on what people who watched those movies rated them, and what they like, but this juxtaposition of those 3 movies is just weird.

I couldn’t even remember what “Children of Heaven” was, but once I read the description I quickly remembered. It’s a really wonderful film, you should give it a try.

I just went on a major programmers rathole, tracking down something that probably didn’t matter but really bugged me. Fortunately this one, unlike many others I’ve been on, ended with resolution. There are lots of other times I’ll waste hours on something before finally giving up.

Baby Got Back, by Gilbert & Sullivan

I love my son, but he’s one of the least photogenic kids I know, when he’s trying. Candid shots are fine, but when he tries to pose for something he looks like Chandler Bing.

But as a birthday present for Cassandra, my mother in law took the kids to Sears today. She works there, and they gave her a lot of extra time in the studio. And, apparently, she has magical powers that we don’t possess, because they came home with the best pictures of the kids ever.

So I present you to the cutest kids ever. Our scanner really stunk it up on these but I didn’t want to wait until the final prints, and the photos on disk, come in.

I’m in the zone lately at work. I’m finally getting into custom coding for the middleware we bought a while ago. It’s in REXX. Woohoo! Anyway, I’m loving it. I like learning new stuff, no matter how antiquated it may be.

Anyway, it was on my mind at the gym today. Then it was really on my mind in the shower, where I had a big breakthrough about assigning a thing to a thing. When I started to dry off I snapped out of my coding daze and thought, “Did I remember to use soap in there?”. Rubbed my head. Damn, I forgot to use soap. Back into the shower…

Received recently on a campus listserv:

Open the attached for details about this week’s theme, Valentine’ Celebration,  and a special event, “Sexual Responsibility Week,”  at the Farmers’ Market this Friday.