The "summer movie season" starts in a couple of days, when Thor hits theaters. And even though I've pretty strictly limited my movie consumption the past couple of years, I was thinking of kicking it up a notch this summer, because there's a number of things that appeal to me. I'm a Marvel junkie, so Thor and Captain America are no-brainers -- but ( Read more... )

I'm cruising steadily through my re-read of The Wheel of Time, just finished The Fires of Heaven and started Lord of Chaos today. I don't think there's any point in trying to review any of them, since they've been out for so long. I am finding, though, that events that I remember happen much earlier in the series than I thought they do. Which ( Read more... )

The Nittany Lions are playing #1 Alabama this Saturday night, and I'm looking forward to it. I was reading an article about the game that started "It's been two decades since the Nittany Lions last faced the Crimson Tide..." which immediately caused me to think "Well, that can't be right, because I remember us playing 'Bama my freshman year, and ( Read more... )

Geeks of a Certain Age (like me) frequently have fond memories of typing on an IBM 101 keyboard. The keys were tall and chunky, were quite springy (until you wore it out), and had a really satisfying click to them, which was probably terribly comforting to those of us (also like me) who learned to type on actual typewriters with the paper and the ( Read more... )

This one's going to be somewhat depressing, but I keep thinking about it. When you have a kid -- particularly a kid who's old enough to ask questions about history, but young enough not to have a solid grip on the scale of time ("Was that when you were a kid, Dad?" "No, the events I'm talking about took place in 1902, so a little before me.") -- ( Read more... )

...that somehow never occurred to me before:

If I lived in the universe of Logan's Run, I'd be dead already.

Last week, I went over to my mother's house to do a tune-up on her computer. Mom's getting to be a power-user in her own right, but I go over there every once in a while to check out her system and answer her questions. (This time, the main question was "Why's it running so slow?" to which the answer seemed to be, "It's six years old, Mom ( Read more... )

piratelemur, over on laddical's blog, mentioned that her niece is currently a high school freshman. Leems, you need to remember that some of us in the target audience can remember when your niece was born, and since we are now old, we have fragile constitutions, you need to give us warning, like this:

Attention Old People: The next sentence will make you feel Old! ( Read more... )

I make it a point not to blog about my son or my cat, but I'm breaking that rule today. My son got a bike this week. A two-wheeled bike. It's tiny, and it has training wheels, but it's definitely a bike. I feel very old.