Come fail away with me

I know, everyone reading this is wondering what I thought of the new Star Trek movie…well, I think it’ll be great if I even get to see it this weekend. Evan’s come down with something (yet again) that includes a really nasty hacking cough (again), so our chances of making it to the theater anytime soon just kinda dropped to roughly nil for this weekend. I’m really worried about the little guy – the cough just sounds nasty. I’m more worried about him than I am about missing the movie.

Dave recently asked what I thought of the Star Trek: Countdown comic miniseries – it’s kinda cool. It’s kinda like your last familiar exit before you enter completely unknown territory. I’ll probably do a book review later this month, though it’s been a long-standing not-quite-a-policy-but-more-of-a-tendency here at theLogBook to wait until there’s a trade paperback (a.k.a. TPB, FYI) to do a comic review. This one, though, may be worth making the exception.

Much of my day Thursday, aside from trying to entertain a sick toddler, consisted of trying to get a media center PC installed in the living room for my wife in time for Mother’s Day. Before you go rolling your eyes and saying “How romantic” with sarcasm dripping from every syllable, keep in mind that she’s a fellow geek – and one who has been without a computer to call her own since shortly before Evan was born. This machine has full DVR capabilities, and replaces the CD player, DVD player and VCR that were sitting there (though the VCR is still present as a less-complicated means of channel-surfing). By cobbling the thing together from bits and pieces, I’ve also augured this unlikely machine in for a landing for under $300. There are still a few bugs to be ironed out – namely a stubborn wireless keyboard that seems to hate me – but it may actually be online for the weekend. Considering that it’s looking like a miserably rainy weekend, maybe that’s good timing.

One thing I’ve done with the new box – and every other PC in the house – is ditch Internet Explorer. I don’t have anything against open source software, but for a few years now the smug evangelizing going on from the Firefox crowd has put me off of checking that particular browser out. I’m finding that this might just have been my loss. I’m still not crazy about the grass-roots PR – it reminds me of the South Park episode where a cloud of “smug” was generated by hybrid cars – but I’m impressed with the browser. I’ve added a handful of security add-ons, and I’m well pleased – with just a few add-ons, it’s a damned handy diagnostic tool for someone whose website is under near-constant attack. Not that I’m gonna name any names there. I wish there was a way to remap CTRL+A to open bookmarks, as I have years of deeply-ingrained hotkey sequences burned into my head that are completely thrown off by CTRL+B. Hopefully before long I’ll resume the whole punching-stuff-in-like-a-concert-pianist routine.

Hopefully Evan will be back to his happy old self soon too. He’s been learning at least a word a day, and is rapidly approaching the point where you can have a whole conversation with him about important topics like dinner, kitties, doggy, and bed (nap is a very dirty word, FYI). Once we can talk about poop…well, you know what comes after that.