"It" being Serenity, of course. It’s very good. I’ll see it again. I am slightly disappointed in two things, one of which I will discuss here: during the Captain’s stirring speech (you know there’s going to be a stirring speech from the Captain, so don’t go whining about spoilers), it’s all back-lit and smoky, positively Spielbergian. All in all, a very creditable first-time directing effort. I found the story worthy of the big screen, and the performances were outstanding. I was pleased to see Joss’s calm Wash ("I am a leaf on the wind; watch how I soar"), rather than Tim’s hyper Wash, though I think the DVD commentaries indicated Alan Tudyk was more comfortable with hyper.
In other notes, Jewel Staite said somewhere (maybe her blog) that she was happy Joss hadn’t made her gain weight for the movie, but, frankly, I think both she and Adam Baldwin were too skinny to be Kaylee and Jayne.

Needcoffee.com is posting their photos and other memories from Dragon*Con.

Want to know the latest on tropical cyclones? Sure, we all do! Visit the National Hurricane Center / Tropical Prediction Center for all kinds of useful info and graphics (including the lists of names—I hadn’t known there are only six lists).

There’s apparently a 14-month cycle of increasing tension and slippage in the neighborhood, where the Juan de Fuca and North American plates are colliding. Some geologists think the next megathrust quake will occur during a slippage event, one of which is happening right now.

What most caught my eye about this widely linked piece was its reference to Kohlberg ‘s work about the development of a moral sense. The author cites criticisms that Kohlberg’s structure is gender- and culture-biased, with some evidence to support those criticisms. I found the article to be very interesting, and especially enjoyed this bit:

Similarly, children growing up in deeply religious Mennonite communities distinguish between rules that apply because they are written in the Bible (e.g., that Sunday is the day of Sabbath, or that a man must uncover his head to pray) and rules that would still apply even if they weren’t actually written in the Bible (including rules against personal and material harm).

What I like best is that it clearly indicates that morality is unrelated to religious edict, and even children can detect the difference.

I think the fact that we kept coming up in searches for "forced" plus some other innocent word was causing a number of nefarious folk to include our content in their link-spam pages, which I suspect was causing Google to hate us. So while we continue to love the Forced Perspective, we’re now extra-trendy with mid-cap and all, to try to restore our sparkling reputation.

Or maybe not. At lunch today, some folks at a nearby table were going through a presentation packet whose cover sheet said "Magazine Program Launch". There were no visible "confidential" or "proprietary" markings, just the Costco and Ingram logos. I wasn’t able to see any details of the pitch (other than seeing that a US map was on one page), nor hear any of the discussion, but I can only infer from the evidence I did gather that your local Costco will be getting a newsstand.

Ushering in a whole new era of exploitation of living organisms, scientists working at Harvard have coerced algae cells to carry tiny polystyrene beads around. When will the enslavement end?

I’m considering getting a Powerbook, in part because of its NeXT heritage, and for some reason that got me thinking about the old Sprint word processor, which is what Borland called Mark of the Unicorn’s Final Word product. I loved FW so much that I bought Sprint during the brief window when it was available. It never made the transition to Windows (as far as I know) — not that that makes me love it any less, but it did hasten the product’s demise.
Thanks, Bill Spitzak, for a fine word processor (and thanks especially for the Emacs mode in Sprint, and providing the means to hack it up to be even more Emacs-like)
Update: I ended up just getting another Dell Inspiron. It’s not as lovely as an Apple product would have been, but I have all this infrastructure in place, and I’m just too lazy to change.

Blockbuster’s late-fee gambit seems not to have paid off. It seemed unlikely that they’d be able to make up in volume the $250-300 million they were losing by discontinuing the fees.