Cool ... wait a second ... ?!?

I just finished a good book - it has a neat view of what the world could be like in 30 years. I might have blogged about it before (my Google-fu says nay), but its a really well worth reading - there are some interesting, plausible ideas about the future of society, the environment, and the net. Then I got to the end of the book, where the author is writing his notes about writing a 50-year forward projection, and talking about the end of the Cold War as a current event ... wait a second. A check of the front cover reveals that it was published in 1990 - that's right - we're nearly halfway into the future depicted there, and its still a reasonable idea of what the future will look like. I would definitely recommend reading it if you get the chance - available on Amazon or possibly your local public library (they're wonderful places, incidentally - they even have music and movies nowadays).

And did you really think I'd reccommend a book without mentioning the title or author? Earth, by David Brin, is what you're looking for.

Content for free

As some of you may know, Dilbert.com has done a major redesign, every day's comics in color, animations, all sorts of jazz. What you may not know is they're now giving away content for free - the days comic, the entire archive, on a site with no ads. Now, this is not the main Dilbert site - they are not advertising this (though Scott Adams mentioned it in his blog). But, if you go to www.dilbert.com/fast - you'll see a simple site with the comic, an archive, some nav links, and nothing else, not even ads - content for free, from a major syndicate no less - go quickly, before they figure it out :-).

Movie Review - Juno

So, I went and saw Juno a couple days back. I'd categorize it as a quirky romantic comedy about an unfunny subject, teenage pregnancy. Which, I must say, they treat well - without going into specifics, a lot of how things work out in the movie seems believable and more real-world than happy-movie-world. Also, the film is really funny. The style of humor is sarcastic, and relies heavily on odd, funny words and phrases (which is a good thing) (the sequence near the beginning where The Office's Rainn Wilson plays a convenience store cashier is especially good). The entire theatre (moderately well filled for a Friday evening) laughed out loud at multiple points. So, bottom line, the characters were quirky, but believable - you could see them inhabiting your own neighbourhood. The writing was funny, but still treated its less funny subject matter with some gravity. It was funky and funny and good. 3 1/2 stars out of 4.

Interesting post on the Dilbert blog

Scott Adams has an interesting post about evolutionary theory on his blog - its not one of the views you hear often, and worth a read. (He doesn't agree with me, but I agree with most of the stuff he says here.) He may just be pulling people's chains to get comments (and links), but its still worth seeing. I'm not going to explain what he said, I'll just leave it to him, the far superior blogger, and tell all you folks to follow this link here.

Spaghetti

I have decided that the ultimate university student food is (drum roll please) ... SPAGHETTI! Its easy to cook (even I can do it), healthy, keeps well in the fridge, forms a versatile base for other foods, is cheap, and easy to cook for one person or a whole crowd - for all these reasons, spaghetti is the ultimate university food.

Vacation

So, I haven't posted anything for a while - give me a break, I was on vacation, and needed the time for important things like sleeping in till noon and mastering Net (only the greatest flash game ever). So, summary:

Day after I got home I wanted to check out my little brother's basketball game, which was in town, a good 12 kilometres or so away from my parents' house. I had no obvious means of transportation, so I decided to walk in - that was fun, only took me 2 1/2 hours :-)

I have decided Serenity is the greatest science fiction movie ever - I bought it for my brothers for Christmas, and now must track down the DVDs for Firefly, the series which it was based on.

In other news, CBC is premiering a new series, Little Mosque on the Prairie, this Tuesday People are comparing it to Corner Gas with Muslims, so it looks quite interesting - the creator (who is Muslim) has taken some flak over it already, but I think its an awfully small person that can't laugh at themself.

To cope with the loss of daily Foxtrot (sniff) I picked myself up a one-a-day Foxtrot calendar for the new year, so at least I'll have some geeky comic goodness in 2007.

Oh yeah, and the weather is crazy - its the 7th of January, and we haven't had snow all vacation, and there's still green grass ?!? If anyone needed evidence of global warming ...

Anyway, later ... Happy New Year

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Foxtrot is going weekly ... no more daily Foxtrot, as of next year ... :'( ... I'm sad - Foxtrot is the greatest ... get it while you can at www.foxtrot.com.

Editor's note: In my grief I forgot to mention (if there are any uninitiated) that Foxtrot is only the greatest, geekiest comic strip currently published on a daily basis.

Freaky Tech Fashion

Shaw Kaake, a Chinese electronics buff, has created a strange merger between electronics and fashion. The Egokast is a video screen belt buckle, designed to play random film clips and/or loops as a conversation starter. Very strange - the designer's main caution was "Some people might be a little uncomfortable with everyone looking at their belt. It's sort of an unusual place for people to be staring at."

New Survivor season

Well, I heard a bit of news about the new Survivor season which inspired me to let off my first rant on this blog. Apparently they are planning on dividing the teams this season along racial lines. This is wrong. They are sure to play up the racial tension between teams to boost ratings. They claim it is to avoid having the standard "token two black people" but seriously - I expect them to pick contestants who are, if not racist, then liable to be - it would be good for ratings to have the blacks bashing the whites bashing the Hispanics bashing the Aisians before and after competitions. Is this what "entertainment" has come to in our culture? Centuries old pointless feuds? Consider the other times they have differentiated the teams along some clear line - men and women, young and old, for instance - there has been some negative commenting on the "other" group - and those aren't even very divisive splits. Racism, however, will be a split for as long as there are separate races, yet CBS is ecouraging this ... it just doesn't seem like a good idea. Hopefully they prove me wrong.