Nitpick

There's no such thing as "another words."

You mean in other words.

As in, "I'm putting this comment into other, different words.

Don't know why that bugs me so much, but it does.

A random comment, though -- I think Gary Graham is finally figuring out how to play a Vulcan. Well, either that, or the Enterprise folks are finally figuring out how to write Vulcans.

Oh, and, see? I knew there was a reason I like Good Eats -- it's officially a nerd show if Wired covers it. :-)

It's Orange

So, Titan has a methane sea complete with mists and islands.

Cool.

How about some methane-breathing fish?

Seriously, I always thought that it was, at best, shortsighted, if not outright arrogant, to assume that life must only exist on earthlike planets. Just because we evolved breathing oxygen doesn't mean another ecology might not have produced organisms that breathe in methane gas and breathe out ethane, or something.

Or, as Jeff Goldblum's character said in Jurassic Park, "Life finds a way."

Battlestar Galactica

I'm not certain the Battlestar Galactica miniseries on Sci Fi was necessarily better than the original, as some reviews said -- after all, it was a different time, and a different focus, with different production values and different aims in telling the story -- but it was quite good.

I don't think you can necessarily compare the two, actually, for just those reasons. They were telling sort of the same story, set in sort of the same universe, but they took those familiar beginnings and went another way with them.

I suppose I should clarify that -- I tend to prefer remakes where they do that. Patrick was really into the remake of The Parent Trap a few years ago, with Lindsay Lohan before she was all famous and, you know, singing, like the rest of the teenyboppers, and that was exactly what I liked about it. It's one thing to take the old script and refilm it...it's entirely another to tell a similar story with the same base premise.

Anyway, I just finished watching the first episode of the actual series, "33," and I have to say -- it was very well done. I especially like the way they film it...I don't know the official term, but it seems raw...kind of gritty. The space battles especially (I noticed this in the miniseries too) are intentionally jerky, as though we're seeing through the lens of a newscamera as they struggle to keep up wtih unpredictable action. I think it adds a lot to the tone of the overall series. Whether they keep up with that, of course, remains to be seen.

However, I must say, I don't think humans can actually reasonably go that long without sleep without starting to hallucinate and do other bad things. 131 hours is something like 6 days or so, right? Yow....

Cool!

Boy, first Spirit and Opportunity live 9 months longer than expected, then a probe lands on Titan. Is this a good year for space nerds or what? :-)

Whew!

Thank goodness for long weekends....

I'm not sure whether it was a delayed reaction to coming back to school after a vacation or what, but it's been a crazy week. I think every kid had at least one meltdown, and one adult had two or three. Eesh.

So, I'm gonna curl up and try to make my stomach ache go away, and go to sleep.

Gasp!

Oh, my goodness....

I knew there was a reason I haven't bought a thumb drive yet....

(And, yes, I have a 40G iPod already, but...this is just cool...and it's not like I don't always have it on random unless I'm listening to an audiobook or a story.)

I'm Back

So, I'm back from CES, which was fun. Driving actually wasn't too bad; there was some fog in the Cajon pass both ways, and a heck of a lot of rain in Pasadena on the way back, but nothing like everyone was saying was going to happen. Apparently, all the rain dumped itself on the valley while I wasn't here.

It took about an hour extra to drive back, but I'm really tired, and it felt like it took 20 hours. Unfortunately, I have an IEP to write tonight (and to hold tomorrow) but then I can zone, watch my TiVo, and go to bed.

I will post more about CES tomorrow, including some of the cool things I saw, but I think my favorite part was the free sample copies of more or less all of the tech magazines in the world.

Oh, and the LV monorail is very useful, especially when it costs $20 to park at the convention center. For $10, I got unlimited rides on it for 24 hours, which got me to the MGM Grand from the Aladdin for lunch, then back to CES, then back to the Aladdin, then back this morning to CES, and then back to the car -- all while the car was parked for free. :-)