Blackmoor Vituperative

PointClickHome has a slideshow of unusual architectural projects that is pretty fun to look at.

My nephew Spencer has been selected in this year’s “Who’s who in band”. He plays the cornet, “a brass instrument very similar to the trumpet”. I have been trying to find out more about “Who’s who in band”, but a Google search surprisingly turns up nothing at all about it.

Even so, it’s pretty cool. I always wished I could play an instrument, but apparently you need to do more than wish. Spencer has accomplished something I never did. That’s pretty nifty.

My niece Makayla being interviewed on television.

She earned third place in a school-wide spelling bee. 🙂

A quick list of what books I am reading right now, or intend to read in the near future:

• Characters & Viewpoint
• Description & Setting
• Dialogue
• How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Learning Nagios 3.0
• Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore
• Plot & Structure
• Practical Subversion
• Warriors & Warlocks: A Mutants & Masterminds Sourcebook

I need to read more fiction. I will start looking at novels or short story compilations after I finish with this stack.

From YouTube, we have more evidence that smoking is cool.

Any excuse to play with fire in public is cool in my book.

You may have heard about “Proposition 8“, the California ballot to enshrine “marriage = one man and one woman” in their state constitution, and how the citizens of California ratified it in November 2008. By itself, I do not find this so surprising. People are really quite stupid, by and large, and California is no exception. Still, it makes me a little sad.

The New Yorker has an interesting article which examines some of the social trends behind efforts like Proposition 8. You might enjoy reading it.

I really enjoyed these animated French “safe sex” advertisements.

There is a reason that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 servers are struggling to keep up with demand. OO.org 3.0 really is a serious upgrade over version 2.4 and makes NeoOffice irrelevant for Mac OS X users (previously, OpenOffice only worked within X11; While NeoOffice did a great job porting OO.org to native OS X, OO.org 3.0 works out of the box in OS X as a native Aqua application).

[…]

I had never liked the OpenOffice equation editor; this version brings a very nice graphical and text-based hybrid editor to us math teachers. Mail merge was clunky in OO.org; this version brings a mail merge wizard and improved label templates. Outline numbering tended to be a bit kludgy for notetaking in OO; this version improves the stability and interface of outlining.

Annotations are now incredibly easy to add (Insert, Note) and Office 2007/2008 formats are supported across the board. While Microsoft has dumped VBA support in Office 2008, OO.org users can run Visual Basic scripting, as well as Python and Javascript.

(from ZDNet, OK, now OpenOffice is definitely good enough)

Are people still debating whether to switch to OpenOffice? Seriously? Are these same people still debating whether to switch from dial-up to broadband? Are they still debating the merits of aspartame over saccharine?

Seriously?

OpenOffice was “good enough” to replace MS Office at least five years ago. Any individual or company that is still using MS Office is just… sad.

See also:

• Gallery: Enhancements for OpenOffice 3
• Paula Rooney: OpenOffice 3 launch timed perfectly but will Sun, IBM exploit opportunity?
• Paul Murphy: OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office

We got two free bottles of Gatorade G2 when we ordered a pizza the other night. According to the label, this is a “low calorie electrolyte beverage”. As anyone who has seen Idiocracy knows that “electrolytes” is marketing-speak for salt. As for being “low calorie”, keep in mind that all things are relative. Compared to a sugar-laden bottle of Pepsi, G2 is indeed “low calorie”. Compared to anything remotely good for you, G2 is sugar water — which is, in fact, what it is. Here’s a quick look at the ingredients:

Ingredients: Water, sucrose syrup, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, natural and artificial flavors, sodium citrate, salt, monopotassium phosphate, sucralose, acesulfame potassium, red 40.

Do not drink this crap.

A fun look at the cruise ship of tomorrow!