I haven't seen a majority of the films up for nomination, and having been largely avoidant of the cinema as of late, I haven't managed to see a single film up for Best Picture. I am glad to see that The Incredibles is up for nominations in a number of categories.

As I was browsing the list, I noticed that some categories only have 3 nominees while others have 5. For instance, looking at the "Best animated feature film of the year" category I noticed that neither Home on the Range or Polar Express got pity nominations in that category. OF course, this may be because the movie studios don't want to split the votes between two films.

Being without the TV has freed up some time (although not much, since TV seems to be something I multitask to). TiVo (when it's working) becomes a time displacer -- rescheduling my shows so that I can watch them all in a block.

While I've missed watching some of the shows, I also realize that the turnaround time for TV shows to make it onto DVD is so fast now that I don't really feel like I am missing very much at all. There are some exceptions to this rule, but in general, TV shows come out almost immediately onto DVD before the start of the next season.

I think it's important to honor the memory of the man who started the civil rights movement in this country. Without him and the fight for racial equality, it is likely my parents would have never come here. It is likely I would be a doctor in Taiwan, rather than the techhead I am.

Being in the U.S., there's a lot that we take for granted. Our ideas of personal freedom and free speech, equality between genders and different ethnic groups. The land of opportunity, and the ability to choose how to live is something that I think gets lost in the everyday bustle of our lives.

Read the entry on I have a dream at Wikipedia, or the text of his speech, and reflect that in the last 40 years, so much has changed, and yet so much still has to be done.

Update: I decided on going to work today. The weather is kind of overcast, so I'd rather save my vacation day for another more cheerful day.

"If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened ub the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes."

I've never seen SF so empty in the daytime before. Note the MacWorld ads in the kiosks.

I only had an "exhibit hall only" badge, which meant that I could get into the expo, but I didn't get to see the keynote, so I had to go down to the exhibit hall to see what Apple's new products were.

More photos and commentary in the extended.

Ever since this camera was announced in August, I've been debating whether to buy it to replace my Sony digital camera that I purchased almost 4 years ago. The Sony was one of those purchases that was great for the time. I'm still planning on using the Sony in limited capacity, but the 20D will now be my main workhorse camera.

A few years ago, when I was reading BeggarsAndChoosers, the author, NancyKress presented an idea of a software which was basically a representation of a thought process which could be shared amongst others. At the time, I had thought that what Kress was describing was an advanced form of the WWW, but actually what she was describing was a Wiki (albeit highly advanced).

Now, we use MoinMoinWiki at work, which I wasn't terribly impressed with, but I searched around, and I found a couple of plugins for MovableType that worked with TWiki. I installed TWiki onto my server, and I've spent the last week or so trying to configure it to work properly. TWiki also has decent Plugin support (at least more so than MoinMoinWiki) It still doesn't quite work exactly the way I want (heck, I still haven't really modified the templates for TWiki yet), but it works well enough that I'm comfortable presenting it. Wikipedia is going to have way more detail in their entries than I ever will, but for me, this Wiki seems like a good idea to record and share my annotations. I'm hoping that you, the reader, will also contribute as well. A Wiki is actually more useful for something more collaborative in nature, but it was a good exercise in combining webtools.

At least in the immediate future, expect to see a lot more WikiWords in my blog entries.

List any Problems you encounter at ProblemsWithWikiBlog.

156,000 - 1.5 times the population of Berkeley.
156,000 - 1.6 times the seating capacity of the Rose Bowl.
156,000 - 2.2 times the population of Mountain View
156,000 - 3 times the population of Cerritos.
156,000 - 4.7 times the student population of UC Berkeley
156,000 - 5.4 times the population of Foster City
156,000 - 57.7 times World Trade Center-related deaths
156,000 - 117 times the number of Americans dead in Iraq
156,000 - If you said one name every second, you wouldn't finish saying the names until after 43 hours had passed.
156,000 - If you filled a olympic-size pool with the blood from the dead, It would be 80% filled.

Since returning to San Jose yesterday afternoon, I've spent most of the time unpacking and settling into the apartment. I've made good progress today, finally unpacking all the books and organizing them on the bookshelves. I've just finished a massive de-boxing, turning all the empty legal-size boxes into a foot high stack of corrugated cardboard. I'm still far from completely unpacked, but I'm making good progress.

I've been so busy with unpacking, I haven't even made any resolutions yet. Seeing today's Foxt Trot comic reminded me that I should make some before I end up forgeting about it altogether.

I definitely like the one book a week resolution. Seeing all the unpacked books made me realize just how many books I have yet to read still sitting on my bookshelf! Full list of resolutions in the extended entry.