Serenity
It's been nearly a month since I've written here. Time really flies. Maybe it has something to do with keeping away from computers once I get home from work. I think I will get back into it once the current (and absolutely insane -- by that I mean fast) product cycle at work is over. That should happen in the next couple of weeks.

I just finished watching Serenity. It has a much better storyline than I anticipated. Back in the fall I borrowed the complete Firefly series, watched the whole thing while sick; came to really like it. It's uncanny, fun science fiction. It's real "cowboys in space". Had I known about the show while it was still on, they would have had another viewer. The movie really wraps the storyline up very nicely. There are spectacular practical and computer shots, sad parts and funny parts. It's far more than just an extended episode. Summary: excellent flick.

Elsewhere in my life, I've finally installed Ubuntu on my laptop. There was nothing specifically wrong with Gentoo, except that with my recent "keep away from computers" attitude Gentoo was too high-maintenance. Portage has also become unbearably slow on anything short of a SATA drive. Gentoo is still on my desktop. Congratulations to the Ubuntu folk for making a very decent distribution.

Regarding keeping away from computers, I'm still managing to stick to the gym three times per week. I have some muscle to show for it. There is no appreciable weight loss, but there is no gain either, and I feel strong. Back pain is a thing of the past.

The rest of my time these days is spent building models. Before messing up the precious Enterprise-D, I was hoping to try some of the techniques out on a simpler model. I started building something I thought would take just a couple of weeks. Turns out it's a very rare and valuable piece of styrene, significantly more so than the Enterprise, so I'm going to take my time on it. I still entered it into Starship Modeler's Model-in-a-Month contest, but I don't know how well that will work out. As a vacuformed kit, this thing has its own set of challenges! Such is life.