Monday, December 05, 2005

Posting in Pieces

My writing energy has only been coming in small doses this week. So instead of a nice, coherent post on some subject or other, we have here a random grab bag of miscellaneous recent things. Your transitions are the blank spaces between paragraphs.

I bought an external hard drive this weekend to go along with Phileas Fogg, my laptop. So I named it Passepartout and felt extremely clever. (I know, it doesn't take much.)

Overheard in the plane to Portland:
(There's a kid in the seat ahead of me, studying a Star Wars catalog of some sort.)
Kid, very seriously: Mom, if I could just have Annakin Skywalker's lightsaber, I would really be very happy.
Mom: It's only a replica.

(Same kid, trying to tell his dad about Narnia.)
Kid: ...and Edmund has this bad... a bad... what's the word?
Dad: For what?
Kid: For like when I'm always picking my nose.
Dad: Gross?
Kid: No! A bad...
Dad: Habit?
Kid: Yes!

Lacey took me to a toy store in Portland called Big Finnegan's (Little Finnegan's is around the corner) where I got some fun stuff to pile around my cubicle at work, including Percy the Purple Dragon, and Olive, the Other Dragon. Another naming that amused me (though only one reader of this blog may actually get the full extent of the joke).

A coworker visiting from the Dublin office wanted to teach Irish dancing to some other folks here, so I went along after work last Thursday to play fiddle for them. It actually went surprisingly well, plus it was nice to play after a month without it.

James was kind enough to play Iris for me at the last FNW. So I got to dance the pivots that I finally figured out (and wrote about) last month. Yay!

Last.fm has some cool personalized radio things you can listen to and get good music recommendations from. I signed up a year and a half ago and then forgot about it, but in the meantime it's recorded 18,000 songs that I've listened to, so it's getting a pretty good idea of my preferences. So I've been having fun playing with it recently. I haven't tried Pandora.com yet, but that sounds neat, too. (Now, if they could just import my Last.fm profile and then do Pandora stuff with it, that would be awesome.)

I've seen Harry Potter IV twice since it came out. It was fun, of course, but more heavily and obviously edited than any of the previous ones (understandably). Also, I was rather annoyed by both Dumbledore and the waltz choreography. Fred and George, though, just stole the show. They were great.

The End

3 comments:

AdamTest said...

Would that be related to Olive, the other reindeer?

Tandava said...

Yes! Well done. Though now that I actually google the phrase, I realize we may not be thinking about exactly the same thing. But oh well. It's funny anyway. :-)

Tandava said...

Well, yes, but over the course of a year and a half, so it's not really that crazy. And that's not 18,000 unique songs, either. Some I've listened to 40 or 50 times, so they count more.