Author: Andrew Huey

His Dark Materials

I just finished reading the last book in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Just for yuks, I did a Google search on “cheerful instead of surly”, part of a key line at the end of the book. I found a few interesting pages, including this one, along with some odder stuff.

The line, in part, is: “…showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious.” I particularly like the cheerful/surly part, partially because it’s just a nice turn of phrase, and in part because it’s something I seem to be having trouble with lately.

new Gmail account

I just got myself a Gmail account! I spent the last hour or so changing my e-mail address at various web sites so that all the newsletters that used to go to my yahoo account will now go to Gmail. I really like the interface, and the absence of obnoxious, blinking Flash ads. The gigabyte of space is nice too. It’ll be interesting to see how the spam filtering works out. I’m getting about 50 spams a day to my Yahoo account. It files most of the them correctly, but I have to fish 2 or 3 good e-mails a week out of the spam folder, and I usually get 3 or 4 spam e-mails a day that wind up in my inbox instead of the spam folder.

Fire

A power line came down on our front lawn today at work. It made a nice little fire, and scorched the heck out of a good size patch of grass. And of course it left us mostly without power for about half the day. I had a lot of fun trying to hook up computers to the AC outlets that were still working, so we could get some critical payroll stuff done.

The best part, though, was when one of the PSE&G guys had to take a leak, and decided to do that right on the side of his truck, in full view of anyone who might have been looking in his direction. And a lot of people were, since they were looking out the windows gawking at the fire.

Grave of the Fireflies

In honor of Memorial Day, I decided to watch Grave of the Fireflies. This is an animated film about two kids who lose their mother and their home in a firebombing during World War II. I’ve had this DVD sitting on my shelf for about six months. I really hadn’t been in the mood to watch it until today. It’s a very sad, elegiac film. Aside from just giving you a different perspective on WW2 that you won’t usually see, it also makes you think about pride, responsibility, perseverance, and the difference between children and adults.

There are a lot of extras on a second disc that help put everything in perspective — an overview of the movie by Roger Ebert, an interview with the director, and a historical overview. There are a few interesting comments on the movie over at IMDB, although there are also a lot of bone-headed ones.