point5b

( No books of note. )

   Dave Van Domelen, "Don't I resent you for some reason?" "Probably, but who can keep track?" "Good point." - Monet and Dani, Nation X: X-Factor #1

Doctor Who: Adventures In Time and Space

It was supposed to be just another gig for Wild Times, a band of renegade Time Lord musicians (and their human manager). But something's rotten in the 32nd century, and the band must solve a mystery and save the world or their tour will be canceled ... permanently.

(Note - I would totally run a Wild Times campaign. Of course, I'd love to play it even more.... "You're the Doctor huh? Well I'm The King, baby. Thankyouverymuch."

Certain moments remind you of the utter absurdity of modern life.

The moment tonight when I found myself at the bottom of my sister's driveway in the middle of the night, toting (among other things) two live frogs, a container of pasta bolognese, and a survey history of the influence of the occult in politics written by a guy who played guitar for Blondie? Definitely one of them.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. But I'm not sure a moment like that can ever actually be planned. And if it is, you need help. And more frogs.

If Gettysburg and Return of the King decided to spend an afternoon eating pizza, drinking beer, and playing Dynasty Warriors V co-op mode, then you'd have Red Cliff.

Or, as I said to Melinda midway through one of the many lavish, gorgeously shot, hideously violent and yet positively balletic battle scenes, "This film has just achieved dangerous levels of awesomeness."

Am now running under Snow Leopard, also known as Mac OSX version 10.6. There is really very little that's outwardly different from regular Leopard (10.5), other than a better interface for fooling with folder stacks in the Dock. You can also play movies inside Cover Flow view, which I never use and neither does anyone else I know, so who cares. However, it's also supposed to have plenty of bug fixes and general efficiency improvements, and that's something I support (my favorite Adobe Photoshop upgrade ever was, I think, 5.0, when they did very little beyond making the whole thing much faster.) So there we go.

It's probably worth mentioning that installing Snow Leopard doesn't automatically upgrade your development environment, for those of you using Xcode. You need to install Xcode 3.2; I'm given to understand it's on the Snow Leopard disk, but you can also download it from the Apple Developer Connection if you want to be sure you have the absolute latest version. After I did so, I was able to load, compile, and run my old game engine project without trouble -- beyond, that is, the awkward fact that a few things I was using, such as functions needed by my .WAV file loader, are seemingly deprecated and nonfunctional under Snow Leopard. Ah well, who needs sound, right?

...Apparently not OSX game developers, given how much of a pain in the butt it is to work with sounds if you're programming in straight-up C++. Well, anyway.

Also saw Sherlock Holmes today. I'm not sure I'd say it's a classic of the modern cinema -- you know, like Die Hard or Con Air -- but it was a good time. Longstanding Sherlock Holmes fans, in particular, should relax, as the movie does a pretty good job of being faithful to the characters. I did have to laugh, though, at the presence of Irene Adler, turning up once again like a bad penny. (For those not aware, Irene Adler is the only woman to ever get the best of Holmes, and in the course of the original stories the only woman he ever seemed to have even the remotest interest in beyond that of a detective-client relationship. Given the dearth otherwise of important female characters in the canon, she perforce appears in just about every modern Sherlock Holmes story.)

We finally got in to see the doctor, at about 1:15. At least, that's when we got into the examination room. It took another half an hour for the doctor to get in to see us. What he had to say was basically about what we expected: "You're doing great. Keep on doing that."

At about 2:00 we got on the road to the Chinese restaurant where we met my Mom's sister Robbie for lunch. We split two entrees between the four of us, plus soup and crab rangoon or egg roll. We didn't leave hungry.

It was about 3:00 before we got on the road out of town. Mom & Dad decided to take a different route back than our usual, heading west (where I got some great photos of ice floes in the Missouri River at Booneville) and then south, passing through Sedalia where, Dad told me, he and Mom spent their first married night at a Holiday Inn, paying just under $6 for the stay. They talked about various places that they remembered from driving through there in the past. "That house didn't have any trees by it last time we were here, remember? We thought it looked funny?" (The house in question now had several rather large trees next to it.)

( Shunpiking for fun and scenery )

Anyway, here I am, relaxing and listening to music on my computer while I sit on the couch with my laptop finishing this up. Boy am I tired. Time to add the pics and post it.

"Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun / If the sun don't come you get your tan by standing in the English rain" —The Beatles, "I Am the Walrus"

Well, my parents and I are sitting in a hospital waiting room, waiting for our appointment. If our appointment don't come, we get…hungry and impatient.

The trip started out all right. I went to bed at about 11 last night, trusting in a double dose of melatonin to kick my sleeping schedule three or four hours earlier in one go. By and large it worked; I woke up at 5:45, beating the alarm I had set by 15 minutes, and went about the business of getting ready to head up to Columbia for my final doctor's appointment. I removed some video files from my iPod Touch and loaded Jonathan Coulton and the Beatles on; I packed my laptop and my cell phone adapter, and so on and so forth.

( Fire alarm leads to Chinese fire drill )

Here.

In conclusion, I give you the most adorable Burly Brawl ever.