Stardust

Thursday, 20 December, 2007 at 11:48 pm

I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust recently, and like any good fan also went to see the movie when it came out. (Oddly enough, this is the only story of his I’ve read twice, if one doesn’t count short stories.)

First time I read the book, Stardust didn’t thrill me that much. One of my lesser-liked books of Neil’s. (Apparently, according to my 2005 book list, I read it about two and a half years ago.)

The movie on the other hand, I loved dearly and can’t wait to get the DVD and watch it again. It was so much fun, so magical.

I thought to myself, if I liked the movie so much, why didn’t I care for the book? Which is why I decided to read Stardust again. My conclusion: it must be Neil’s writing style. While reading it I would feel sort of ho hum and wonder what book I was going to read next. But when I would imagine parts of the book as the movie

[edit, January 3, 2009:] … What the heck? What happened to the rest of this entry? Did I not write it? Did WordPress or my server lose it? I probably wanted to say that the story … came alive. But I don’t remember what else I was going to say.

a memory I didn’t know I had

Thursday, 15 November, 2007 at 11:55 pm

I was reading the X-Entertainment blog tonight, and he mentioned Wuzzles. I had no idea what that was, but it intrigued me so I searched the term and found The Wuzzles TV Show on Retro Junk, through Wikipedia.

Nothing on the page really showed me anything interesting (except that Tress MacNeille was in it, hahaha!), but I hit play on the video, just to really be able to get a visual of these two-in-one animals. The Wuzzles “logo” came onscreen and I thought, hey, that looks sort of familiar, but I must be thinking of something else. But then, the characters showed up, and I realized, hey! I’d seen those things before! I remember the bear-butterfly and the moose-seal and the crocodile!

I probably didn’t watch the show though. I remember some of the characters’ designs, but I don’t remember one whit of plot or location or anything really.

It’s just weird, remembering something that you didn’t know you knew. I read the description of two animals in one, I saw the little picture of the characters, and nothing clicked, so when the video tickled my brain, it was weird.

Just thought I’d share this trippy show, and how old I really am, to somewhat remember it. *grin*

more fanlistings gripes

Thursday, 8 November, 2007 at 9:39 pm

<!--BEGIN IP TRACKER CODE 99653-->
<!--Please do NOT steal my codes.
Your IP Address has just been recorded and sent to [webmaster's e-mail].
You will be hearing from me shortly. -->
<!--END IP TRACKER CODE 99653-->

O_o Is this something new I’ve never heard of? Is the webmaster going to send a little text file to my IP? Or is it just a really different scare tactic? It’s … interesting.

I was looking at that person’s code because I saw the fan list was displayed in some way, so I wanted to see how it was done. Not that I have to justify myself, this is just a segue into a new topic. That person used a table to display the list, which I find to be the best way, personally, because it’s just so neat and tidy, but it doesn’t validate using Enthusiast. (The “Showing…” part gets stuck in the table tag.) I could, theoretically stick fans in their own little tables and style it so it looks like one big table, but … fifty tables on one page? Ouch.

I am yet again updating my joined fanlistings, because I haven’t done so for over a year and I keep meaning to join more anyway.

My recent gripe with many a fanlisting is the lack of a means of contact. There’s not even a way to contact the webmaster at her fanlisting collective site, or any other place she has control over. So what do I do when I want something on the site corrected, like MySQL errors, or even the inability to get past the splash page? Do I dare report the fanlisting to TFL? I hate it when my site gets on the troubles list, but I also don’t like the faulty site! I think I’ll just fall to my usual passive response: wait and see what happens.

no virus is gonna take me alive

Sunday, 28 October, 2007 at 7:43 pm

Agh! I keep feeling like I’m in my bedroom at home; in my mind there’s a wall directly to my right. My brain does a serious reconfiguring when it realizes there’s no wall, but a lot of space. *mind boggles*

Umm, what else can I talk about … I uninstalled Norton Antivirus 2007 from my laptop because it would seriously slow performance down during scans and during/after my computer shut down it would pop up errors of memories not being written. I’d already contacted Symantec once about that problem, and the advice I got fixed the one error, but then others popped up afterwards, and I didn’t think it was worth the hassle to get it corrected.

Instead I installed ZoneAlarm. It got second on Consumer Reports’ latest anti-virus programs reviews. It was $10 cheaper for the program and for subscription renewal than the number one program, and it also had better virus detection. It was second because it had lower ease of use and speed, and a third category that didn’t really catch my attention. So yeah. I thought the second one was better for me.

After one week of having the program, my opinion is: yeah, the scanning speed is dang slow. It took three plus hours last night. Although I’m not sure if that’s because I put the laptop to sleep (ZoneAlarm didn’t alert me to the fact it was scanning! o_o). But it’s still a bit faster than Norton, so I am quite the happy customer. I had Windows Media Player, FileZilla, Firefox, and Photoshop open, and didn’t really catch on until maybe after half an hour that my laptop was lagging a bit, and oh maybe it’s because ZoneAlarm is scanning!

But right now a complaint has popped up. I have the same programs open (and more, but those are the bigger memory hogs), and my laptop is still a bit slow to respond. That makes me a sad puppy. I am hoping that ZoneAlarm is still getting used to my computer and program usage, and that after a while this slowness will disappear. Otherwise I’m satsified with the program. :) I’ll probably give my NAV 2007 to Mickey.

(I still have NAV 2006 on my desktop. Only my laptop’s dinosaur age and speed made me choose another program. Just in case anyone thought I despised NAV. I don’t. Exactly.)

On another note, I saw a sign that the holiday season is near: there was a display of Ferrero Rocher chocolates at the end of an aisle in Staples. Of all places! Hm. Oh well.

At dinner tonight I finished reading Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. I really liked it. The plot wasn’t anything mindblowing, just following the lives of two couples. It was those two couples that made the story different from anything I’ve read. Okay, I haven’t read much, considering how many authors are out there (nevermind how many books), but these characters were still new to me. I’ve never even met anyone in real life like any of the characters. (Again, I haven’t met many people, but still…) Well, Guido is probably the most normal, and I probably have met someone similar to him. I can’t keep going on about how the characters are so interesting, so I will just say that they truly are different, without being out of what you would think of as ordinary.

And to think this book was randomly reshelved in the bookstore and what caught my attention at first was the author’s last name being out of order. haha!

tag conversion…

Sunday, 14 October, 2007 at 1:14 am

In regards to the last entry (second paragraph, not the first), I got my answer: I have to convert from Simple Tagging tags to WordPress native tags. Manually. The author of Simple Tag[ging/s] hasn’t mentioned an import feature. :( That’ll take a while for me to complete.

[Oct 18@10:47 Woohoo! I stopped being a dumbbell and read in the support forums that there’s an import available IN WordPress for Simple Tagging! Saved myself … a few hours’ worth of work. But I have now discovered that the Category Cloud plug-in cloud doesn’t validate. Ugh. That’ll be sitting on my mind.]