Shutting down and cleaning out

No, it’s not because of a layoff. It’s because of a poweroff.

Twice a year, on a three-day weekend, IBM powers down the whole Almaden site for major maintenance, and this year, Memorial Day weekend is one of those weekends. So I have to shut down my computer so it doesn’t have problems when power bounces; I also had to shut down and clean out my refrigerator so my office won’t stink on Tuesday morning.

In previous years, I also lost Internet connectivity on these weekends, because IBM was my ISP. But now I have my own Internet service at home, so I don’t necessarily have to disconnect for the weekend. But we’ve got lots of other plans which don’t involve sitting in front of a keyboard, so I hope to be mostly disconnected anyway.

One of the firmer plans is a return trip to Battlebots, which is filming their Season 5.0 this weekend at Treasure Island. We’ve bought the tickets, so we’re committed.

And other than that, we’ll see.

Shabbat Shalom!

Thank you, Mercury News!

So I lept up from the seat, washed my hands, and went to the computer to check Sci-Fi’s schedule. Sure enough, there’s a showing of The Star Wars Fan Film Awards at midnight tonight, so I zipped to my TiVo to program it to record the showing, and I’m looking forward to watching it this weekend.

Technology is wonderful, but sometimes, there’s no substitute for paper.

Speaking of TV

We watched the season finales of both Smallville and Enterprise last night. At one point in one of the shows (I won’t say which one), I was afraid they were going to pull a Dallas by declaring the whole season to have been a dream, but fortunately, they didn’t. Both did follow the Dallas tradition of ending with a cliffhanger, though! Next season should be fun on both shows.

I'm going to miss Wednesdays

Jeffrey’s school doesn’t start until 9:30am on Wednesdays (giving the teachers a chance to work and plan together, I guess). So whenever I can, I work from home on Wednesday mornings and then walk with him to school — it gives us a little time together. But the school year is coming to an end soon, which will mean an end to those walks. *sigh*

And speaking of Wednesdays, tonight’s the season finale of Enterprise. We’re looking forward to it — we won’t watch it live, of course…that would require seeing the commercials…but we’ll probably start watching it by 8:15 or so. I’ve even set up the VCR to capture it as a backup — boy, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to program the VCR! Did I mention I like my TiVo?

Links…getcha hot links….

Pepsi Blue news and updates: just one of the strange weblogs I’ve found by browsing through Recently Updated Weblogs!

Paul Graham: Revenge of the Nerds. “The disadvantage of believing that all programming languages are equivalent is that it’s not true. But the advantage is that it makes your life a lot simpler. And I think that’s the main reason the idea is so widespread. It is a comfortable idea.” [via Hack the Planet]

The Illustrated Guide to Acme Products” [via X-Ray Net]

News I don't want my child to read

Scary news in today’s online NYTimes:

Nintendo Cuts Its GameCube Price: Nintendo of America announced Monday it will cut the price of its GameCube video game system by $50 to $149, the latest shot in the ongoing console war that includes Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox.

South Bay Triviots News

I got the results of our CultureQuest adventure; we scored 145 (of a possible 400!). The top 20 teams have scores of 151 and up, so I don’t feel too bad, but it would have been nice to have finished in the money.

Wait till next year!