Emily's quiz/meme challenge

My friend Emily posted on her blog the following:

The rules for this meme are:
(1) Link to the person that tagged you.
(2) Post the rules on your blog.
(3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
(4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
(5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

She also said at the bottom:

I am now suppose to tag six people by linking to their blogs. However, I do not know how to do that and my husband is too busy at the moment to show me. Therefore, I shall just LIST their names - oh the horror!

Christie www.christieleejohnson.blogspot.com
Courtney www.steedlyboys.blogspot.com
Wes www.wesleyt.net (I know he will never do it though)
Chris www.holvathegaboink.blogspot.com (he probably won't do it either)

Okay, that's all the people I know.

That third one is me, and she is partially right. I'm not going to follow all of the rules, as I occasionally feel contrarian that way.

Let's see, I've completed items one and two already. I shan't complete items four and five, so that leaves item three, six non-important things/habits/quirks about me. And I'm going to bend it, as they may be important depending on the perspective of the reader.

1. I love my cats.
2. I'm easily distracted by various and sundry different things (hmm, so are my cats).
3. I have an iPhone, and I stay on top of my email with it.
4. I love tea, hate coffee, and drink lots of water.
5. I love books, have a large and growing collection, and I love to read.
6. I'm studying Genesis with a number of friends right now.
7. This was written in Google Docs and posted directly to my web log.

Ha! seven instead of six. I'm such a rebel.

PS: I actually hand-edited this in Blogger after the initial post from Google Docs. It didn't look very good at first.

Useful art...

I made some userful art yesterday. It turned out fairly well.

I wish I spent more time with my pencils.

Finally, some new photos

I took and published some new photos yesterday.

a tale of two movies

Actually, two tales, each about a movie. I went to see two movies last week. Thursday, I went to see the Great Debaters with Esin. It was an excellent movie, and I highly recommend it. End of tale one. Yep, short and sweet. The other is a bit more involved.

Friday night, I went to see Cloverfield with Shane and my brother Ryan. I think it's a good movie, but I only got to see half an hour of it, at which point I was so sick I had to leave the theater. No, it wasn't food poisoning, and no, the movie didn't gross me out.

I got motion-sick, or some variant thereof. At first I wondered what was going on, and then I remembered my experiences with the Blair Witch Project and Castle Wolfenstein from my youth.

Blair Witch and Cloverfield are shot hand-held. Wolfenstein (and its contemporaries, Doom and Quake), as a first-person shooter (FPS), simulates a hand-held camera. With that hand-held perspective comes a lot of camera motion caught on film.

I left my theater viewing of Blair Witch at one half hour, and I never could play a FPS for more than a half hour. I've not played a FPS in a very long time now.

When that motion consumes my field of vision but my inner does not detect the motion, I get very sick. As I think about the experience, I'm getting a bit queasy. It must take a while to completely wear off.

Anyway, as soon as I left the theater, the symptoms started subsiding. It's truly a bizarre experience -- I cannot control it at all, and it's very frustrating.

I did eventually watch Blair Witch on DVD, and I'll do the same with Cloverfield. I also must because Shane wouldn't tell me anything else about the movie. Since my TV doesn't consume my field of vision, I don't get motion sick watching handheld films there.

No, I've never gotten sick on a boat. Yes, I've been a bunch of times: small boats, big boats. Lots of motion, and a little. Never a problem.

I've gotten motion sick on an airplane only once: it was a 15-passenger twin prop, and we were flying over the Rockies from Denver to Cortez (or was it Durango?). It was svery cold, and we were in clouds -- I couldn't see any point of reference outside. I remember watching ice form on the center of the propeller and then fly off. It was a very bumpy ride. I figured out that my body was feeling motion but not seeing it. I coped by starting out the window, looking for non-moving definite cloud shapes that contrasted with the airplane's motion in which I was strapped. It was the same feeling I got watching Cloverfield; very frustrating.

Cool web tools that are new to me

I just evaluated and signed up for a pro account on Toodledo. It's an excellent web-based to do list manager. It's got all of the features I need, is quite powerful, and is very easy to use. It's got a really nice iPhone version, and is quite extensible.

I found out about it when I was checking the Jott Links -- built-in Jott targets. I've now got 30Boxes (my public calendar), Twitter (But I usually SMS it when on the run), and Toodledo.

The other thing I worked on tonight was my Google Calendar, which I've never really used before. I'm using it to aggregate all of my online calendars: 30Boxes, my Backpack reminders, and my Toodledo due dates. It's an incredibly powerful calendar.

This has allowed me to clean up my Backpack a bit. I previously had a number of random lists scattered through my Backpack pages; I'm now able to consolidate them into one filterable list: so nice. I can also assign due dates and priorities so I can view the list in various orders, including a very nice default order of "importance", which is based on both due date and priority.

Seriously, I feel I can't sing Toodledo's praises highly enough; have a look.

three happy tidbits

My brother and I rode our bikes today; it's the first time in seven weeks. It was so nice to be back. We had a good ride.

I watched Friday's new episode of Moonlight tonight. It was so good to see it.

Tonight, I confirmed that Moonlight won the People's Choice Award for favorite new drama. I hope this means it'll be renewed after the writer's strike is resolved.

About that strike; anyone heard anything about it? I haven't in a while now. I was hoping that because Dave's Worldwide Pants production company got the waiver and settled with their writers, the rest of the companies would take the lead and settle. It's been a couple weeks now, and no news. Bummer.

C'mon, guys, let's get with it. There's a lot of good TV to be made.

Good day...

Wow, I had a good day today. I felt like I was really productive. It
was an important start to a good year. Nice.

Crazy new way to start the new year

Hm. I hope this is a sign of things to come (the not putting stuff off 'til later part). Earlier today, I started some software maintenance. I didn't finish it when it was time to leave for our New Year's Eve gathering, so I set it aside. When we got home, I finished it. What was it? upgrading iTunes and the OS on my iPhone.

I'm glad I didn't leave it 'til later, so that's a good thing. But I hope I didn't break stuff. This system seems so fragile: there are so many quirks since it syncs with the incredibly evil (IMHO) MS Outlook.

We shall see. It's time to get to bed. I've got a day off to observe tomorrow; hooray!