Five Things I Learned...
Five things I learned this year during my July 4th vacation:
Thing 1 is learning that Bolt is my new favorite movie, taking the solid place of Wall-E, which tenuously took the place of The Black Hole. I found myself wanting to watch it this weekend and, not being able to, I was a very sad puppy. I figured there was no use denying the fact that I've seen Bolt more times in 3 months than I have my old favorite movies over the course of my entire life. I was so distraught, as a matter of fact, that I completely forgot my personal tradition of watching Independence Day... Well, okay, that's not the reason, but still. Pretty close. (You know, I should make a list of my favorite movies.)
The reason I couldn't play Bolt is Thing 2. I learned that my old laptop can't play HD movies. Whether it's because the video file for an hour-and-a-half movie in 1080p weighs in at 7GB and there was a hard drive bandwidth issue or because 1080p at 30 frames per second is too much for the video card bandwidth to handle, the end result was the same on 3 different video players and 2 sets of codecs: A split second of clear video immediately followed by either insane garble or lots and lots of audio/video skipping. The laptop is a 2.0GHz Pentium M with 2GB RAM and a 256MB nVidia GeForce 6800 Go. My Dell Mini 9 played the thing better than that laptop. (Although we're talking maybe two seconds of legible footage compared to merely one second.)
Thing 3 was learning that even a certain board-controlled privately-owned lake can get caught up in such a power struggle that they can't install tornado sirens without ruining everything. It is sad, though comforting, to know that it's not just a certain community based around a certain adventure game that can't seem to get along from one group to another, but the whole of humanity itself! In the immortal words of the last poor sap who was utterly destroyed because of the words themselves: "Can't we all just get along?"
Thing 4 was learning that I haven't blogged in such a very, very long time. Why? No idea. Not a whole lot to say and not a whole lot to say that I want to tell the whole wide world. I figured I would make Capella happy and post a list of things I learned over the weekend! Which leads me to Thing 5 that I learned:
It is entirely possible to get sunburn by driving for 3 hours in a convertable with the top down on a cloudless day. I'm not saying I did, but I certainly came close. I think it was the combined effort of yesterday's standing outside all day and today's 3 hour drive home in bright, bright sunlight. Either way, convertables are fun, and I didn't even lose my World of Warcraft hat in the wind tunnel of a car!