You're Kidding Me, Right?

It's now an act of terrorism to write a short story about zombies -- zombies, for cryin' out loud -- taking over a high school.

Now, being extremely generous, I can see that the fact that the kid who wrote it is a student there might -- maybe -- make it a little more suspicious.

However.

You tell people to write about what they know.

I know that if you look through my old writings...I set stories in high schools when I was in high school; in college when I was in college, and so forth.

So, if your writing bent happens towards the zombies, and you're in high school, you will probably write a story about zombies at a high school.

Ridiculous....

In nerd news, former Screen Savers guy Dan Huard has joined with Roger Chang (of Call For Help and The Screensavers) has started a technology website called Scopetech. Yay.

In other nerd news, thanks to ffmpegX, I am currently ripping some of my DVDs to my laptop's hard drive to take along when I go with my mom and Patrick to Disneyland for the weekend in 2 weeks for Patrick's 18th (gulp!) birthday.

It's something of an experiment; if it results in longer battery life (since it won't be spinning the actual DVD, it should take less battery power to play an avi file than the DVD) I will probably rip most of them so that my DVD case can stay safely home when travelling, since my whole DVD collection (mostly) fits in there.

In more nerd news, since this is from an English/Irish online store, I wonder if thinkgeek has one of these?

Finally, since my grandpa now has a lot of time on his hands, he wants to buy a computer. This is a scary prospect. He wants broadband, but doesn't know what spyware, viruses, or popups are, let alone that they're bad and that they happen a lot with broadband.

So I'm advocating a Mac.

My cousin keeps saying that the differences in user interface (?!) will confuse him, but as far as I'm concerned, the main differences are the one-button mouse (so we'll buy him a two-button mouse, so he can learn about right-clicking) and having option and command keys instead of Alt and Command, but he won't be using those anyway. When you come down to it, File | Save is the same in both OSs.

And, if he does have trouble translating the computer skills to the computers at work, he can buy Virtual PC to install whatever he needs to install, and run it when not connected to the Internet.

Meanwhile my Pepsi/iTunes winning streak seems to be over...but since I won about 6 in a row over last week, a few "please play agains" will not bug me too much.

Now to find my Annual Pass so I can get to Disneyland and buy Patrick's birthday present next weekend....