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Oct. 28th, 2009 @ 09:58 pm Quiet day at home.
I stayed home today with the vague cold-like sensation of having no energy at all.  (This, after coming home early from work yesterday, after having spent the morning making sure that whatever I worked on could be easily fixed/recovered if I did something appallingly stupid - which meant I mostly did sequence analysis and figure-building.)  I went back to bed for about an hour after dropping Huz off at the train station, and spent the remainder of the day largely hanging out at the computer.  I designed a few different itineraries to NZ and Australia to see what dates and order did to prices.  I watched Season Two Episode One of Dollhouse over on hulu, which was overall not bad TV but I made sure to visit Wikipedia afterwards to find out more of who exactly these people were.  And I played a fair amount of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, which, some 70+ battles in, continues to be extremely engaging.  Didn't play any Scribblenauts today, though I did last night.  I continue to find the lexicon impressive, though aspects of control are less intuitive than might be desired.  Also, there's a HUGE difference in difficulty between the Puzzle levels (e.g. Reunite the girl with her kitten on the roof) and the Action levels (Starite is shown, need to overcome various difficult and/or dangerous obstacles to acquire it) within the same relative set. 

More energetic tonight than last night.  I cleaned the bathroom, at least partly, and swept the floor while getting an education on flavors of Linux.  Me, I like chocolate.  Does anyone make a chocolate-flavored Unix?



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tazz
Jun. 29th, 2009 @ 09:21 pm Firefly: Objects In Space
Current Mood: amazed
Tags:
Just watched.  *sigh*  Very amazing.  Crime against humanity that that was the LAST ONE.

Anyone around here own the graphic novels, and can we borrow them?
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tazz
Jan. 31st, 2009 @ 08:19 pm Firefly, "War Games"
Tags:
• It's kind of wrong for a torture scene to be screamingly funny.  Brilliant, brilliant writing.

• Jeez, what kind of insane high Constitution does Malcolm have??!?  Between this and "Out of Gas," Huz and I figure it's around 30 or so.

• Book can shoot!  Somewhat more surprisingly, so can River!

• Angst yet again that there were so few episodes of this fine, fine show.
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tazz
Dec. 25th, 2008 @ 09:10 pm Christmas in California, 2008
Certain of my friends (most notably [info]hoshikage) have been posting pictures of the snow they've received this year for Christmas. I thought I'd post a few pictures of my own in return. The pictures were all taken today - yes, all of them! )
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tazz
Nov. 8th, 2008 @ 09:53 pm Late to the party as usual, but...
Current Mood: besotted
Tags:
Just watched the pilot episode of Firefly over on hulu.

Wow. Total awesomeness. Much more our style than Buffy.  Can't wait to watch more!

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tazz
Apr. 25th, 2008 @ 08:22 pm Hey, I might be able to catch up here...
Tags:
Reposted from kayray

I haven't actually tried anything on the site, but it seems that watchsitcoms has full episodes (and seasons?  somebody check me on this) of several TV shows - including Lost!  Whee, I can has polar bear now.  :)  And movies and stuff too.  Looking forward to checking it out.

(Yes, it's likely easier and nicer watching DVDs, but hey.  Free is free, especially if you don't feel like going to the library.)
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tazz
Feb. 29th, 2008 @ 11:58 am A nice evening
Last night was both productive and pleasant!  It started with my submitting my first job application of the current hunt season.  It's a posting at Stanford that's been up since December, so it may well have been filled already (some professors are very poor at notifying the HR office when they should take down postings).  Anyway, we'll see.

I  cooked another winner of a recipe from the 30-Minute Meals cookbook.  It's a super-easy kung pao style shrimp with ramen noodles.  It took only about 45 minutes, including me noodling around trying to decide when to start the actual cooking part (as with many of the recipes in the book, once you start cooking, there's not really a stopping point, and I knew that the huz would be some late getting home) and being a little tentative cooking raw shrimp for the first time ever.  Any recipe where most of the prep time involves rinsing shrimp, cutting up a bell pepper, and peeling some garlic and ginger which is then thrown in the mini-food processor is probably going to be a winner timewise.  And it was tasty too!  Definitely will do again.

We watched the first episode ("Hans My Hedgehog") of Jim Henson's The Storyteller, a program that lasted all of one season.  John Hurt in a set of gnomish prosthetics is The Storyteller, providing narration of classic fairy tales which are acted out onscreen (with dialogue) by human and puppet actors.  The narration is usually wonderfully poetic: there was a lovely description of a melancholy bagpipe air "that began with what sounded like hello, and ended with what sounded like goodbye."  The visual style is strongly reminiscent of Labyrinth - one neat bit saw a king having dinner with the hedgehog in a castle in front of what looks like a tremendous fireplace... except there's a waterfall rather than flames.  Like a good so-called children's book, this was TV for adults that kids could also enjoy. 

Finally, we played a stage of Zack & Wiki that (1) didn't have the threat of death every 10-30 seconds like the last two stages had, and (2) was an interesting - though hardly impossible - puzzle.  We could have made it unsolvable early on, but didn't.  Lots of fun.

Have a good Leap Day and weekend, everyone!
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tazz
Feb. 18th, 2008 @ 10:12 am Rose of Versailles
Current Location: home
Tags:
One of the things that's been helping me get through this dratted cold (which I'm guessing at this point may well the 10-day Cold Of Doom that folks on my friendslist have mentioned in passing) is finding the anime The Rose of Versailles on YouTube.  I first discovered the series through BitTorrent some years back, but failed to get more than about the first four episodes due to lack of reseeding.  Anyway. 

Rose of Versailles follows the adventures of the Lady Oscar, the captain of the royal guard in the court of Versailles.  (Her dad always wanted a boy, and was irritated enough when his youngest daughter was born to declare that she wold be raised as a man, learning horsemanship, swordsmanship, and other manly arts.)  I gather the thrust of the story follows the court from approximately the time of the marriage of Antoinette to Louis XVI through the taking of the Bastille.  While Oscar is wholly fictional, I gather from reading this Wikipedia article on Marie Antoinette that many of the characters ancillary to the royal family (e.g. Comtesse du Barry, Axel von Fersen) are caricatures of real people and their actions are based on real historical events. 

Much of the story so far (I've watched the first seven episodes) consist of royalty-wannabes scheming to kill, kidnap, or deeply embarrass the crown prince and princess, apparently in the hope that the pair will be passed over by the king in the succession (yeah, as if!).  Most of the more extreme actions have little to do with reality, of course.  But the general idea makes sense when you consider how in Japanese culture, face or honor can be an strong indicator of the amount of power an individual wields.  If an individual is caused to lose face, he or she loses influence with those around them - and in a royal court, influence is power.

The show makes for slightly silly watching thus far.  The (generally unsuccessful) plotting of embarrassments is mixed with a solid portion of action and swordplay.  It's a good thing to distract myself with around 5 or 5:30 PM in the evening, when the dratted illness symptoms are making me most unhappy.  You can watch the first segment of episode 1 of a total of 40 here.
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Aug. 28th, 2007 @ 06:43 pm OMG Mathnet on YouTube!!!!!!!!!!
Current Location: home (with beer in system!)
Current Mood: drunk + fangirly
Current Music: Duhn-da-dunh-dunh!
Tags:
Home this evening while waiting for an update on family-related stuff, I went to YouTube.  Soon decided that I just couldn't stand the stupidity of the MST3K of a documentary short Spring Fever, and did a search for a term that had turned up essentially no hits a few months ago: Mathnet, that parody of Dragnet where "The story you're about to see is a fake, but the problems are real."

There aren't very many (I count approximately 1.5 cases total), but I'm currently enjoying The Treasure of Monterey Bay, a case I didn't see 'cuz I went off to college before Pat Tuesday was ever a character.  Writing and acting are still pretty amusing.  And hey, it's even kind of local!

Note to self: Probably shouldn't consume most of a beer on a mostly-empty stomach.  Drinking lots of water, but feeling dizzy and silly.
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tazz
May. 19th, 2007 @ 06:28 pm Amusing videos post
Current Location: home
Current Mood: sleepy
Tags: ,
I'll post something with something vaguely resembling substance sometime next week, I hope!  But here's some things to keep you enteretained in the mean time..

The story of Oedipus, performed in 8 minutes.  By vegetables.

A few blasts from the past... Anyone remember the public TV show Square One?  It started airing in 1987, when I was in seventh or eighth grade and was a pretty clever ensemble show with all sorts of Useful Math Stuff.  I can't find full-length videos of any of the Mathnet episodes, but there are several YouTube captures of a number of music videos from the show. 

8% Of My Love

Ghost of a Chance

The Mathematics of Love
   (question: Why are they Roman numerals in the lyrics, but Phoenician numerals in the chord names (e.g. E7)?)

Well, I liked 'em back in middle and high school... Enjoy!
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tazz

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