Oh iMac My precious......

Will I get to look a lot like Golum if I keep drooling over the new iMac and wanting to touch and feel? This day has brought yet another addition to a line of superbly beautiful Mac designs. I do wonder about the heat of the CPU right flattened on the display though...somehow it seems like a laptop with the display half melding to the bottom, keyboard removed to wireless. Today's best comment was: "Oh, look a laptop on a stick!" Excellent!

And what the heck is wrong with GMail?! I went to sign in while using Opera's newest and got told "Oh we here at GMail don't support Opera 'yet'." They were friendly enough...offering download links to Mozilla, Netscape, and probably IE. Sigh. You can log in in Opera but nothing works. Get on the stick, GMail. Oh, and on that subject, several people have taken my invitation, which is great. Perhaps if enough people flock over to GMail they will eventually add POP. I mean POPing mail into GMail. It is so large it would make a convenient catch-all for various newsletters etc.

Shall we build an ark?

I asked my family the above question last night, as the waters poured down for the third day in succession. Roads have washed out here, basements have flooded and given way, and the earth has moved downstream in mud slides. This is not typical, especially for this time of year. On the larger scene, the hurricane season has been bad already with devastating effects on Florida and other Southern areas. North Carolina has come in for a heavy dose of storms and wetness. Maybe a trip to the lumber yard is in order!

Movies and books...

Skip "The Big Bounce." Oh my. The plot doesn't even begin to form before it's all done, and the cheesecake on the beach cannot make up for the general lameness of the whole thing. Even with Morgan Freeman, Owen Wilson, Charlie Sheen et. al., it just doesn't ever come together. I wasn't even expecting much, just a funny, relaxing escapist flick, but this one wasn't it.

I have moved on through three of Dan Brown's books, and am into "The DaVinci Code." So far the formula is the same. And I do mean formula....plug in one "able smart female", one "academic serious yet hunky man", one hideous plot, and go from there through several plot twists that see our heros through unbelievable escapes from doom, until finally they save the day, overcoming all the weird odds. And they are odd. Frankly, Brown's writing makes Len Deighton, John Le Carre and even Robert Ludlum (his REAL books) look like Hemingway, Conrad and Doyle, but the books are entertaining enough. Fast reading and not hard on the brain.

That next Season...

It is easy to tell the next season will be upon us soon. Each night as I drive home from work I pass the high school. The football team has been out practicing in the evening sun for about the last week and a half. The boys lined up in their blue and white, scrimmaging on the field of green with the sun glinting down from the West, and gold spreading over the hills. Truly an eternal moment, every year repeating, flowing one year into the next. Ten years ago it was my son's team, and now he and his classmates are far away from the football field through time and space.

Changes on Monday...

Template change here. I want a clean look and one that does not encourage any idea that the blog is a silly waste of time. There are so many blogs that are a silly waste of time, and indeed many that make me sad. So much of blogspace is written in the lowest common denominator, both linguistically and culturally. Knowing that my own blog is no great advance in terms of human intellect, I usually try to maintain a certain humility, but when I go blog reading, it is just sad. I have fallen over one or two very interesting blogs out there, but the drek one has to wade through to find these gems is waist high and rising.