Quick Tech Hint

For Amie, and whoever else would need it.

To reply to a tweet on the web, hover over the tweet with your mouse.  On the right, you will see a star (to favorite, I think, a tweet?) and a curvy arrow thingie (just above the "reply to Amie31 -- when I took the screenshot, it ignored my mouse cursor).

Click the curvy arrow thingie, and the box at the top that normally looks like this:

will change to this:

Et voila, an @reply.  :-)

In semi-related news, if you've been following my tweets, you know that I'm looking for my wayward karma.  I'd say today trends to neutral, but I haven't tried to burn my News-2-You video yet (since I left my phone and iPod at school...I rock 8-/).

What the Heck?????

(How often do I resort to multiple punctuation marks to emphasize my point?)

CNN is shutting down its science-tech unit.

No, really.

No, really.

I just...there are no words.

Yes there are.

WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING?

I am spluttering in incoherent rage over here; I'm sorry.  Maybe someday I'll have a more eloquent post on the subject.

I'm gonna go listen to "Hope Eyrie" and "The Ballad of Apollo 13" now, and remember when science-type stuff united the whole world, even for a few minutes.

Unintentional Hilarity

So, I was watching the 720p Star Trek trailer (yeah, I'd only seen it on my iPhone), and the brief -- very brief -- scene with Sarek and Amanda made my eyes pop out of my head.

Why?

Could it be that Ben Cross bears an uncanny resemblance to Mark Lenard?

Nope.

It was, rather, that the profile of Ben Cross as Sarek bore an uncanny resemblance to Andreas Katsulas.

Bwahahahaha.  Sarek as previously violent then enlightened and passionate religious leader.  Bwahahahahaha.

Disneyland Halloween Time Photos

Once I made the momentous discovery (Tripods rock!  And my dad had two!  And you can attach them to a wheelchair with a bungee cord for easy carrying!) a few months ago, I've been enamored of night time photography

A couple of years ago, I went to Disneyland and took lots of photos of Disneyland's Halloween decorations.  I regretfully noticed that they looked gorgeous at night time but knew I'd never be able to hand-hold my camera well enough to get good shots.

Enter the tripod and my other new best friend: my remote shutter release.  ('Cause, really, do you want to put it on countdown mode and wait 10 seconds for every shot?  I thought not.)

It took some time to cull the best of the best out.  For one thing, though I'm having lots of fun, I'm still not certain of my ability to expose correctly, so I took about three exposures of each shot.  For another, I did mess up on the exposure quite a bit (all the lighting on Main Street threw off the metering, I think) so I had to spend some quality time with Aperture.

The full-quality gallery is here, but to my knowledge, you must have a current version of Internet Explorer or a relatively current version of Firefox.  If you don't, here are the low-quality versions.

Also included are some wanderings around California Adventure, and some night time shots of Paradise Pier, because going on Midway Mania before going to Disneyland is Patrick's new Routine.

(And, yes, a Routine carries enough importance to Patrick that it must be capitalized.)

For the Candy Corn Acres pictures, I was on a mission not to take normal "snapshot" touristy shots.  I was actively seeking out unusual compositions.  I hope I succeeded.

The one pumpkin head I missed last time around, in daylight:

My camera did not like the reds here, but I included it because I haven't seen many photos of these decorations out and about on the Internet.

The beginning of trip number two: the soon-to-be-gone Sun Wheel.  While the new entry plaza looks cool, I'll miss it.

Still working on how to expose sunset shots, but good for me:

The gondolas are missing! :-o  Actually, I just liked the pattern of all the steel supports.

When hinges creak in doorless chambers....

Oh, look.  It's light pollution.  I saw a magazine in the store the other day (Time? Newsweek?  Something reputable, at any rate.) that had an article titled something like "The Loss of Night."

Is it sad that I stood in line to take a picture of Mickey and not to take a picture of family or friends in front of Mickey, like everyone else did?

Hmm...what to do while Patrick rides the train?  Oh, yes.  Take pictures of the station.

This might, just might, be my favorite of the bunch.

Interestingly enough, its daytime-equivalent from a couple of years ago was my favorite of that bunch.

Yeah, so I actually stood in line twice to take pictures of nobody.

 
Christmas pics will be coming...well, if the Halloween ones are any example...probably sometime in January.

Respect

When recently researching the various side effects I've had from having mono as a kid, I came across something that surprised me: that mono is in the Epstein Barr family (which I kinda knew) and that it's believed that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is as well.

Well, let me tell you, after two flare ups in six months or so, I have enormous, everlasting respect for someone who has CFS.  I don't know if I can explain how tired you actually feel, but let me try:

1.  Every morning -- every morning -- during a flare up or when really sick, I wake up and immediately list in my head the things that *must* be done that day.  Not "really should."  Not "ought to."  Not "oh, I'd love to write a little tonight."  Nuh uh.  It's: "Wake up, get dressed, work at school, type next week's journal, dinner, SLEEP."

2.  My ability to multitask is utterly shot.  A couple of weeks ago, I successfully ran a group consisting of Elastigirl, Bart, Bulldozer, and, I think, Smiley.  Today, it was all I could do to keep track of PH and Bulldozer this morning.

3.  My attention span is nil.  I accidentally wrote "November" on four or five of Elastigirl's labels (she matches the name of the month) for next week.  I counted wrong when making labels for M to do math with.

I lived through about six months of this in eighth grade.  A week of it is driving me insane now.

So if any of my readers are diagnosed with CFS, I bow down to you in abject humility that you manage to function in the long term at all.

It Begins Again

For the uninitiated (ha!), the Harry Potter series consists of seven books slowly but inexorably building to a final showdown between the eponymous (I love that word) hero and the most evil wizard ever (tm).

Before each book came out, there was speculation that it would be OMG DARKER AND SCARIER THAN THE PREVIOUS ONE!  MAYBE OUR LITTLE BOYS AND GIRLS SHOULDN'T READ IT.

Um.

Remember that "slowly but inexorably" thing?

Remember how Lord of the Rings started with a relatively innocuous thing (Bilbo disappearing at his birthday party) and ended with "The End of All Things?"

When things slowly but inexorably built towards BAD THINGS, they slowly but inexorably get...

...badder.

This should not be rocket science, folks.

The same thing, of course, happens as trailers trickle out for each subsequent movie, to my continual irritation.

(Surely, if you're going to see the sixth Harry Potter film, you've read the books?  I could forgive, perhaps, having not read the book before seeing the first, but wouldn't that pique your interest?  More to the point, in a (ahem) post-Harry-Potter world, you surely know that....  Oh, never mind.  I give up.)

Anyhow, imagine my reaction when I saw this:

Sinister twist.

A 'darker' Harry Potter.

I just -- I just --

Okay, let me try to be rational.

Kids who grew up on Harry Potter grew with the books.  If they were 11 when they read the first, they were adults when Deathly Hallows came out.  I think adults could handle Deathly Hallows, don't you?

A kid that read Sorcerer's Stone for the first time (yep, I'm American...sorry) at 11 two months ago is in a different spot.

But here's the thing.

YOU'RE THE PARENT.

IF YOU ARE WORRIED ABOUT WHAT YOUR KID IS READING OR WATCHING THEN WATCH IT YOURSELF.

I mean, for crying out loud, people.

On another similar but related note, a couple of weeks ago, our News-2-You topic was the Country Music Awards.  Because the paper had a bit on the history of country music, I hopped onto YouTube, violated several copyrights, and made a video showing the growth of country music over time, with 30 second-ish clips from each decade of country music.

Johnny Cash being Johnny Cash showed up in two of them.

Three of my students -- including my youngest, Bart (fourth grade boy P), who just turned nine a month ago -- said, "Oh, that's that guy from the movie with the drugs!"

So we let an eight year old boy (with special needs, but even so) watch Walk the Line, but we angst that the sixth movie in a series of...well, eight, really...movies that are building to a giant confrontation with a REALLY EVIL BAD GUY...is...darker?

Walk the frelling Line.

I weep for society.

Ouch

We all slip.  I know that.  I often type "withing" when I mean "within" because I type really, really fast (80-90 wpm when I really get going...around 50ish in general) and my fingers are so used to the -ing pattern that they just add it without my brain's conscious permission.

(And, yes, typing is an unconscious thing for me; I don't spell words as I type, but I do hear them in my head -- I know there's an educational term for that, but I don't recall it at the moment.)

Anyway, I know we all slip, but slips gall me more when they are made by teachers or other school-related folks.

So this just boggles the mind.