Running with the Pack Podcast

The title says it all.  I’m only admitting that I went in the hopes that I’ll save someone else from seeing it.  I just got back and it was embarrassing just watching that film.  Let’s see: bad CG, bad fake contacts, cheesy dialog, BAD dance sequence at Mr. Fantastic’s bachelor’s party — as bad as my dad dancing at a club if he had stretchy limbs — gratuitous product placement, gratuitous scenes of the Great Wall and the London Eye.  Bad physics — apparently rivers run completely dry (upstream and downstream) when you put a big hole in them.

Even the people in the theater were bad — there was a woman with an infant sitting behind us who laughed at things that weren’t even remotely funny.  I think she was the person that the director used to screen the movie — BAD CHOICE.  She’s the kind of person who would laugh at tax forms.

Good parts:
The Torch is still a hottie
The popcorn was good

Seriously, I nearly walked out of the theater.  WHY are there so few good superhero movies?  The genre needs a Battlestar Galactica treatment so grown-up nerds like me can take normal people to them and not have to apologize. 

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After weeks of thinking it over, I got a Vista box.  I really can’t say why.  I don’t especially like Microsoft products. 

I suppose it has a lot to do with the types of questions that my family and friends ask.  I’m the computer guy, so if they migrate to Vista and I can’t answer their questions anymore, I lose that status.  It’s not vanity…they need my help just like I ask for their advice on car and house stuff.

So I got a low-end machine that I’ll be upgrading right away.  It’s cheaper to do it that way (via pricewatch.com) than going with the manufacturer’s upgrades.  I have to say though, for a 3.5 GHz computer, I expected it to run faster than my 2 GHz on Windows XP, but that’s not the case.  Maybe the memory upgrade will help. 

So far, it took 40 minutes to start up and install all of the upgrades (most of which were security patches — so much for the most secure Windows ever).  Now I’m copying everything from my old hard drive to the new one. 
Wish me luck.

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I thought I wanted to get a machine that runs Vista so I could learn it, but after watching this comparison of Vista Aero to Ubuntu (Linux) with the Beryl Desktop, I might have to switch back to being a Mac/Linux person.

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I’m at NMC in a session on Zotero, which is a Firefox add-on that lets you grab information about pages and search results.  It’s a bit different than del.icio.us because it recognizes the search results and catalogs the citation information, lets you write notes about tools, attach related files, capture snapshots, etc… 

Example, install the plug-in and then go to amazon.com and search for books.  In the location bar, a folder icon should appear.  It can recognize the search results from Amazon and batch import each entry as a separate item so you can go back to them later.  You can tag them, create folders, drag and drop their citation into documents, etc…  It might be a very nice tool for digital research.

If you use a service that doesn’t work with Zotero now, you can let them know and they will work on creating a translator to understand search results and know what to do with the information.

It seems to work well with Penn State’s library databases, BUT you need to access a little icon in the location bar to pull in a batch of results.  Since the location bar is hidden in some databases, I had to go into Firefox and change some deep settings.  Namely:

1. Type about:config in the location bar
2. Find the setting for “dom.disable_window_open_feature.location”
3. Set the value to “false”

I asked whether there is a way of grabbing search results without using the location bar.  The session presenter wasn’t sure if there was a shortcut or not.

Future direction: server edition with anonymous cataloging, APIs, recommendations, backups, Del.icio.us integration, shared collections, location mash-ups, Library Thing integration (with recommendations), scholarly groups, etc… My graduate advisor (Dr. Michael Moore) has a bibliography of resources related to Distance Education, that could be managed online with his official collection and additions from graduate students and colleagues. That way, his collection is searchable, discoverable, editable, feed-able, etc…

Today was week three of our Village Acres farm share.  We got three pints of strawberries and a bunch of rhubarb in addition to some other veggies.  That has pie written all over it, so I used a fairly simple pie recipe that I found on cooks.com, replacing half of the sugar with Splenda.  We paired the pie with some vanilla ice cream and it was heavenly. 

My Windows machine at home is fairly old and my parents are still on a Pentium III, so I’ve been thinking of getting a new Windows computer.  Something cheap would do.  I’d get a speed increase, give my current computer to my parents, and I’d have a good opportunity to learn Vista.  But do I really want a Windows machine when I’m in love with Apple these days? 

I could get a Mac of some kind, but I have a Mac laptop for work.  It’s running out of space and I don’t want to load personal software on it, so a personal Mac would be nice.  I could eventually load Vista on it as well. But where I could get a fairly cheap Windows machine, I would feel guilty getting a cheap Mac, especially if I want to dual-boot it at some point.

Money is an issue because it’s June and June 2007 = iPhone month.  I’m still not 100% sure that I want an iPhone, but considering the use I’ve gotten out of other PDAs in the past, it’s an Apple product, and the fact that I really need a new phone, it seems likely that I’ll enjoy it.  I’m already using Cingular as my carrier.  I was thinking the other day that I could blog from anywhere if I had an iPhone.  I love the other innovative things that they’ve included, such as the voicemail interface and the proximity sensor.  So would I love it, or am I being seduced by another interesting gadget?  I think I need to see one before I can decide on any of this.

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