I went and saw The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers today.
Oh. My. God.
There were some deviations from the book— more so than in The Fellowship of the Ring— in order to fit the movie format, but it all worked extremely well. I couldn’t have asked for a better movie. Among other things, the Ents are simply astounding.
Now, of course, I expect The Return of the King to even surpass The Two Towers. I’m counting the days.
I’ve been merrily playing with the Sony CLIÉ that I got for my birthday, installing apps and loading it up with data, and one of my bright ideas is to start playing around with eBooks. See, the CLIÉ runs the PalmOS, for which there is a really nifty free eBook Palm Reader available from Palm Digital Media. Palm Digital Media also offers a fairly extensive catalog of eBooks for sale (and a few for free); think Amazon of Palm eBooks.
I downloaded two of the free eBooks, The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, and The Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge, and I read the Vinge work while in Las Vegas.
But the cool thing— the really cool thing— is that Palm Digital Media provides you with the software and the means to create your own eBooks for the Palm Reader.
So what I’m thinking is that there’s a real dearth of free eBooks out there—aside from the two I mention above, about the only other free books I found are texts from the Bible. Yet with the software to make books, and the wealth of content available from sites like Project Gutenburg, I don’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be a lot more free eBooks for Palm.
You can probably see where this is going.
My bright idea relating to this is to start creating Palm Reader eBooks (from works in the public domain), and offering them for download from this site. And then distributing them accordingly. For free.
Because it just seems like a neat thing to do.
The first books I plan to convert, I think, will be Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (and then Huck Finn), and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
But then, you know… the sky’s the limit. Any particular book you’d like to see? How many people out there are using Palm-compatible PDA’s, anyway? And how many would read eBooks on them? Email me with answers to these questions, or any other ideas for Palm books.
My first beer of 2003 (yes, on January 1) was Sea Otter Amber Ale, from Rogue Brewing. It’s a 22-ounce special edition beer you can only get from the brewery itself in Newport, Oregon, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
On my 30th birthday (just over a week ago, alas), I enjoyed one of the last 2 bottles of a homemade barleywine. I think I made it about 3 years ago, and it had aged nicely. Now there’s only one left.
This weekend will be either Terminator Stout from McMenamins, or Toad Spit Stout, homebrewed by my good friend Justin.
Back with the first posting of the New Year, looking back on 2002 and some of its key events for me.
2002. Had to love it.
I don’t drink much anymore. I haven’t really had the inclination to drink much since the kids were born (which is a good thing), and truth be told, I’m not really into drinking when we go out without the kids either.
Not that I’m against drinking, by any means, nor do I want to sound like I’m passing judgment a là “drinking is bad.” No. It’s more like the desire to drink has melted away, along with any sense that I actually have time to drink anymore, and as a result, my alcohol tolerance is way, way down. The other big factor deterring me from intoxication— more so than ever before— is the hangover.
That having been said, I’d like to pass on some general advice and thoughts about imbibing and hangovers, and how to avoid them.
First and most importantly, drink lots of water. I cannot stress this enough. Your body uses up a tremendous amount of water when dealing with alcohol, and this is the most important factor in hangovers: dehydration. As a rule of thumb, I try to drink a glass of water for every serving of alcohol. This saved my ass a week and a half ago: when my best friend was in town for my daughter’s birthday, we stayed up late Saturday night catching up, and ended up drinking a pint of beer (some of my homebrew), 2 shots of tequila and a shot of Canadian whiskey— all in about an hour’s worth of time. By all rights, I should have been sick as a dog the next day, but I drank 4 or 5 large pint glasses of water before going to bed, and woke up with only the vaguest hint of a headache. No other ill effects at all.
If you can, take extra vitamin B, preferably before drinking, but after will do in a pinch. You get depleted of vitamin B when alcohol is processed, and this also contributes to hangovers. Vitamin B is needed by the body to process sugars, and the lack of water and sugars getting to the brain is a large part of what causes the hangover.
I’ve noticed that back in the day, when I would wake up at 5 am with a throbbing, pounding headache from drinking, that if I took aspirin, it would help the headache go away… but if I took ibuprofen, then it wouldn’t necessarily help my headache, and I would start getting queasy. So if ibuprofen seems to kick off the nausea part of the hangover, like it did for me, stick with aspirin.
If you’re drinking beer, stick to microbrews or homebrews; the yeast content and the non-filtered nature of these beers help to replenish the nutrients you lose and lessen the ill-effects. Plus, they taste better!
If you’re drinking booze, I don’t have any good advice for you about what to drink.
Here’s an interesting link: R U Pissed? On their home page, they have a blood alcohol calculator.
Enough of this. I’m going to go home and have a beer in a bit.
Thus the season of celebrating and eating lots of fattening food commences. The “big three” holidays of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years (I always lump Christmas and New Years together, because it’s like a week-long holiday to me) are always more action-packed for my family, because of the way birthdays in my family fall around this time of year.
Start with Halloween. We always end up with lots of candy left over. Two days later, my daughter’s birthday. Big one-two punch there. She just had her third birthday two days ago, and it was lots of fun. I swear, my kids get more presents than anybody.
Short breather through the first half of November, then my Dad’s birthday falls on the third week, soon to be followed by Thanksgiving. Eat far too much, and enjoy pie afterwards.
Another short breather, though it’s not enough to fully recover from Thanksgiving. Then my Mom’s birthday the first week in December. You’d think that would be it. Wrong.
My birthday. Two days before Christmas.
Then Christmas Eve. Big family dinner.
Christmas Day. Eating rivalling (some years, surpassing) that of Thanksgiving. Again, my kids get more presents than I’ve ever seen. We then coast along on Christmas food and goodies until New Years Eve, which basically consists of a buffet-style meal of Christmas leftovers, alcohol, and noisemakers. We don’t usually stay up very late anymore, with young kids and all.
Finally, it’s all over. Everyone breathes a big sigh of relief, then hunkers down for the winter.
Don’t get me wrong. I love this time of year, I love the holidays and all the birthdays and the good food and family and giving gifts and warm fires and decorations and snow. It’s my favorite time of year.
And we’re already done with a third of it.
Winter’s coming early this year; it snowed in Bend today, about three weeks early. Ordinarily Central Oregon doesn’t get its first snow until late November, and that melts off and it doesn’t snow again until after Christmas. (When I say snow, I mean a significant amount that covers everything under a white blanket, not a light dusting that’s gone before the end of the day.)
At least that’s the pattern I’ve noticed over the past four years or so.
I hate driving in the snow, especially the first snow of the season. Traffic jams up, because everybody forgot how to drive on slick roads and panics, and cars creep along at 15 miles per hour or slower. Worse, many people living here are transplants from elsewhere that doesn’t have the snowy conditions we get here, so they don’t have a clue. Not that I’m the best winter driver, but damn.
We carved pumpkins tonight. I always get a big kick out of pumpkin carving, especially now that the kids can start appreciating it more. I outdid myself this year; I carved my pumpkin (a big one!) with the likeness of Charlie Brown.
Two of the best shows on TV are on Cartoon Network: Justice League and Samurai Jack.
I filled out a quiz on Emode today, “What’s Your Best Quality?” It tells me I am Reliable.
phpMyAdmin kicks serious ass.
In an odd moment, I realized today that vampires are violating the laws of physics by not casting reflections. This bothers me.
Of all the things I want to buy from ThinkGeek, the first thing is going to be either the WTF? coffee mug, or the beer glasses. Much to my dismay, they don’t seem to carry the “All Your Base” mugs anymore…
Here’s something to mull over. I was emailed this a few months ago, incorrectly attributed to a commencment speech Bill Gates gave at a high school graduation in California. The reality is, it’s from Charles J. Sykes (view snopes.com for the whole story and list). I think this is brilliant and well-said, and definitely needs to be said more often.
I’m paraphrasing a bit here.
Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School
Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it.
Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock.
Rule No. 3: You won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either.
Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.
Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.
Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible.
Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.
Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off.
Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs.
Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them.
Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic.
Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.
This is apparently the season where the limits break down on primetime TV.
And I’m not just talking ’bout cable.
For instance, tonight was the second week now that “NYPD Blue” has used “bullshit” out of the, er, blue. On ABC.
Bullshit.
I wasn’t as blindsided by it as I was last week, but still. Remember when “NYPD Blue” first came out, there was such an uproar over the use of “adult” language on TV? And partial nudity? Anyone?
With that in mind, I’d’ve expected to have heard something about it, somewhere, beforehand. But no, not a peep.
In general, too, this season on TV looks to be testing boundaries all around. From the… incident… on “ER” (I’d hate to spoil the surprise for those who might not have seen it yet), to the first episode of “Firefly” where the captain kicked the bad guy into the massive spaceship engine. I feel like I’ve been rubbing my eyes in disbelief.
And I hope this trend continues.
Random Web Link: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Go check out my favorite bit, titles.
