Month: April 2008

Gut Check: Why Doctors Say Not All Fat Is Created Equal

Okay, here’s another WSJ article. This article, on risks associated with “beer bellies,” plus sites like this one on diabetes, are motivating me to try and lose some weight. I’ve been going out for walks pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks. And I’ve been trying to keep to a (somewhat) reasonable and healthy diet. The WSJ article mentions that stress comes into play here, too. I don’t know if there’s much I can do about that, though, especially if I’m going to be drinking less beer!

read more | digg story

LaLa.com

I hadn’t used LaLa in quite a while, and I don’t recall getting any e-mail messages from them either, so it was a bit of a surprise when Donald Fagen’s “Nightfly” showed up in my mailbox yesterday, in a LaLa envelope. I guess the ship notice must have gone into my spam folder or something. I hadn’t shipped out anything myself since February, and I hadn’t received anything since May 2007, almost a whole year ago.

This got me interested in updating my lists on LaLa, and seeing if there was anything I could ship out. I wound up shipping three CDs out. A little while after I did that, I got a notice that another CD was on its way to me: Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See”. Cool.

Poking around on the site a bit, it does look like it’s still an ongoing concern, with a modest amount of trading going on. There’s talk in the forums about the impending release of LaLa 3.0, but not a lot of solid information that I can find about exactly when this will come out, or what it’ll offer. And there are indications in some forum messages that new members aren’t currently allowed to trade CDs, just use the other aspects of the site. Weird. There used to be a corporate blog where Bill Nguyen would talk about the site, but that seems to have disappeared, so I guess you have to root through the forums to figure out what’s going on.

Randy Pausch

I blogged about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture back in September. (Well, I just linked to the video. I didn’t really say anything about it.) He’s now got a book available, based on that lecture. It’s available from Amazon, in hardcover, Kindle, and audio CD versions. And the audiobook is also available from iTunes. There’s also a page up at the Carnegie Mellon site, with links to various versions of the original lecture (DVD, PDF transcript, etc) and other related links. I guess this all took off after ABC aired a special on him about a week ago.

The whole “inspirational” thing makes me kind of queasy, especially when people like Oprah and Diane Sawyer get involved. But, hey, Randy’s a computer science guy, so it’s OK for me to be interested, right? I’ll probably read a sample of the book on my Kindle, and if it doesn’t look like it’s just the lecture, padded out to fill a book, then I’ll shell out the $10 and read the whole thing. Or maybe I should buy the hardcover through the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network site, so they get a few bucks from it.

more stuff to read

I’m still loading my Kindle up with free stuff. I haven’t bought a single ebook from Amazon yet. I just re-discovered the 2007 Nebula page at Fictionwise, which lists a bunch of Nebula-nominated stories from last year that are available from them for free.
And I also just noticed that Fictionwise has a number of magazines available in Kindle-compatible formats, including Analog and a few other SF and mystery magazines. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in Amazon’s selection of magazines for the Kindle; they’ve only got 11 magazines available, and none of them are primarily fiction magazines. I may decide to try out a couple of magazines from Fictionwise and see if they work well on the Kindle.

Tribeca Film Festival

The film guide for the Tribeca Film Festival is up. I’m going to try to get into the city and catch a few films this year. I caught a few good ones last year, and I’m looking forward to finding a few interesting movies again this year. Here’s a list of some possibilities:

  • Idiots and Angels: a new Bill Plympton film. I saw some of this (in rough form) at a Plympton panel last year in San Diego (I think). It looks like a lot of fun; the usual Plympton weirdness.
  • The Caller: Frank Langella and Elliot Gould in a “neo-noir thriller.” It could be good.
  • Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon: Historical Chinese epic. Sounds like it should have some nice battle scenes. And it’s got Sammo Hung!
  • Terra: This appears to be a computer-animated SF movie. I don’t know much about it, but it looks interesting.

And that’s all just from a quick look. I’m going to have to get organized, figure out what’s showing when and where, and then see about getting tickets and getting into the city.