Fantastic thriller–almost totally believable, but not so predictable that it feels thin. 4.5/5 stars.
Decent comedy, three beautiful women showing off in a PG-13 kind of way. Too silly to be great. 3/5 stars.
I didn’t have all that much fun watching the movie White Noise. Michael Keaton isn’t serious enough to play the role that he played–Mr. Mom (and even Batman) suited him far better. Every thing else about the movie just didn’t fit together very well, and the ending was completely unsatisfying. 2/5 stars.
Saw this on my walk to work today, and couldn’t resist giving them some free advertising.
Along similar lines, Jennifer’s grandpa told me a story about how he chose a port-a-potty vendor for some construction project at Jim’s Air. One of the vendors in the yellow pages claimed to be: "#1 in the #2 business."
I suppose I’m a sucker for businesses with good senses of humor…
Requesting canonical names of everyone’s favorite espresso beverages over on my technical blog.
Anyone out there know of a BNF grammar for espresso beverages? I really want to see one. If I don’t find one, I may just have to write one. I know that my drink of choice is a “double tall non-fat not-too-hot latte”, but why do the words go in that order? What options do I have for rearranging them?
Everybody: please comment with the canonical name of your espresso drink of choice. Maybe in a couple of days I’ll have a large enough corpus that I can generalize up to the complete BNF grammar for ordering espresso beverages.
I was looking for one of my common user names ("sblom") in some web query earlier today. I noticed that it sure came up a lot in Malaysian blog postings. I asked a friend of mine from Singapore what it means. He told me it’s probably a colloquial contraction of "sebelum", which means "before".
…entertaining nonetheless.
http://grnvlteach.typepad.com/buttsville_usa/2005/05/democrat_vs_rep.html
I’d, of course, love to see the "best of" from the other side of the aisle as well.
Let’s count degrees of freedom.
Trains have one degree of freedom: they can move forward or backward along their longitudinal axis (1). They’re stuck on their line.
Cars have two degrees of freedom: they can move forward or backward along their longitudinal axis like a train (1) or rotate their longitudinal axis about their vertical axis (2), but they’re still stuck in the plane that’s wrapped around Earth.
Airplanes have 2-1/2 degrees of freedom: they can rotate their longitudinal axis around their vertical axis (1) or their lateral axis (2) and they can move forward along their longitudinal axis (2-1/2). They can’t move backward like a car or a train. They also can’t stop.
Helicopters have a full three degrees of freedom: up/down (1), left/right (2), or forward/back (3). Unlike all of the others, they don’t depend on motion to turn, and they don’t even depend on which direction their longitudinal axis is pointing. There is at least one thing that a helicopter has a hard time doing that an airplane does not (flying upside down), but that’s not nearly as cool as the ability to move in an arbitrary direction in space.
Because of this, I want a helicopter! Next time, we’ll consider my options for legally flying a helicopter and what I could do with it.