Today is Lucky and Hanna’s (presumed) seven-month birthday. While Hanna still looks and acts like a kitten, Lucky looks like a full-grown cat to the uninitiated, so we weighed them.
Hanna is a petite 7.5 pounds.
Lucky is 11.5 pounds of solid muscle.
This explains why when Hanna wants to wrestle, Lucky has to be in the mood, or he can just walk away, dragging her futilely behind him.
Although they’re both from the same litter, only their identical round yellow eyes really show that at this stage. The pet adoption service had Lucky listed as a Bombay, and as he ages, it’s clear that those genes are indeed dominant. Almost every aspect of his personality matches up with the “standard” Bombay’s: If you’ve never had an 11-pound kitten jump on your shoulder while you’re typing at your computer, it’s an experience you’re OK with missing.
As you may have read in today’s Daily Press, the Daily Press family of papers (naturally including the Hesperia Star) has a new ad director, Angie Callahan. Not only is she a real professional, she might just be the nicest person working for the company.
Star readers may have met her over the past two summers, when she was one of the folks (along with me) manning the Daily Press/Hesperia Star booth at the Hesperia expo.
I’d say MySpace argues against the notion, myself.
But Wired has a more at-length column along those same lines:
As a mere stripling, I was advised that if I hoped to become a good writer, I should write every day. More than that, I should read good writing every day. This can be accomplished on the internet as easily as it can by reading a book or magazine. But if you’re the sort who prefers People to The New Yorker, well, again, what’s the point?
So my riposte to Topsy was, while the internet may be a nifty vehicle for delivering one’s polished prose and penetrating insights to an impatiently waiting world, it can’t help you become a better writer if you, pardon my French, suck.
Moreover, the internet leads to all sorts of unsavory writing practices, like blogging. You know, the journal of the 21st century.
Keeping a diary or journal (“journaling” they now call it, thanks to the modern world’s habit of turning perfectly good nouns into verbs) was common among the literate before television came along and hooked us up to the communal drool bucket.
A journal exists for its author to reflect on, well, anything. A fading love, political turmoil, a spat with a friend, the weather in Buffalo, New York, on June 10, 1946. The writer is free to express the most intimate thoughts, because the nature of keeping a journal is to keep it private.
Occasionally, if the journal belongs to a writer or an artist or a statesman, the writing is so compelling that it finds its way into print after the author dies. In the best of those, we are invited into the mind behind the creative process and we emerge with a deeper understanding of a masterwork, say, or the thinking behind a crucial political decision.
Most journals go unread, though, and that’s the way it should be. The contents were only intended for the writer’s eyes, after all.
A lot of people will tell you that blogging is merely journaling online. It is not. Blogging is not private, but very public. And very few blogs involve the kind of introspection that characterizes a serious journal. Most blogging is sheer exhibitionism, either the self-absorbed ramblings of an individual blogger or the corporate site that exists for the sole purpose of making money. (If anyone sees a disturbing parallel between blogging and column writing, kindly keep it to yourself.)
This doesn’t mean blogs have to be badly written. It just means that most are.
This blog, incidentally, began as a somewhat private affair, intending to keep family, friends and voyeurs up to date on my health. The Internet being what it is, and my job being what it is, that didn’t really end up lasting terribly long, so now it’s written with the knowledge that it’s a public blog.
Good thing I never talked about killing that man in Reno, just to watch him die.
Well, we’ve loved our TiVo for about 18 months now, but it looks like it’s time to retire the old girl and give her ever-spinning hard drive a well-deserved rest.
There’s a new TiVo in town, and it’s a reason to upgrade.
Available at retail beginning May 1, the TiVo Series2 DT is the first standalone dual tuner DVR with the award-winning TiVo® service and features.
The TiVo Series2 DT DVR is optimized for cable households, allowing you to record two shows at once, so now you never have to miss any of your favorite shows — even if they’re on at the same time. The TiVo Series2 DT DVR also incorporates built-in Ethernet and USB ports, making it easier than ever to add the TiVo box to the home network.
The official press release is estimating a price of $99 after rebate and service activation for an 80 hour model (double our current model’s capacity).
No more having to choose between CSI and My Name is Earl.
(If you don’t own a TiVo, it’s hard to describe how awesome they are. It’s a lot more liberating than just having a VCR automagically recording shows for you. Like high-speed Internet, once you get TiVo, or any other digital video recorder, it’s hard to imagine life without one.)
(Source.)
Memoirs of a Geisha
is a pretty movie. Gorgeous, even.
But that’s really all it is. The plot isn’t terribly engaging, the characters who aren’t loathsome are fairly uninteresting and the movie feels two or three times as long as it really is.
This is a rental, nothing more.
