December

In my daily agenda book, there are three or four little post-its with ideas I've been hashing around and other things I'd like to blog about. Unfortunately, November and December visited me with a certain vengeance--too many work projects and final schoolwork projects only begin to tell the story.

Today begins three glorious weeks off, weeks away from both both and school. I would love to think that I'd use this time to catch up on this blog... but eh, let's not push me. ;)

Today I also get on a plane to meet my husband in Kharkov, Ukraine. He's been there for the past month (also visited for a week in September and another week in October). We plan to let him wrap up work there and then spend a few days vacationing in Kiev, then spend the night in London on the way back, and arrive back in town the evening of Christmas Eve. (I will try to periodically check my personal email a bit while we're gone.)

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hannukah, a great New Year, and any other holidays you're celebrating... like No School for a Month, that's one of my personal favorites.

Officially a Mac

And it's done! I went with the 13" MacBook, will be upgrading to 4GB RAM in the next week or so, Adobe CS4 will be shipped to me after release (yay!), and Alex couldn't resist getting us a family MobileMe account.



Last night, we charged and started up the MacBook, which is dubbed, like my previous two laptops, Interceptor. Um... yeah, there actually is a crazy story behind that. Our computer naming scheme is... sigh... Star Wars vehicles. You can't blame one of us more than the other for that; Alex and I really are that equally geeky.

Our machines, old and new:

• Alex's desktop: Executor (Darth Vader's flagship, a Super Star Destroyer)
• my old desktop: Jadesfire (um... it's from a Star Wars book, let's leave it at that embarrassing revelation)
• our Wii (yeah, it counts!): Tiiderian (after the shuttle Tiderian, and Wii's two-i-name... yeah)
• my laptop(s): Interceptor (after the TIE Interceptor--because it's small and maneuverable, get it?)
• our router: TieBomber (mostly because it's small)
  
• the printer machine: PrintBoy (okay well it had to fall down somewhere)
• Alex's hoped-for MacPro: he's currently debating names, but my favorite option is Death Star

And now, having completed my Statistics midterm and updated the blogosphere on my current computery-ness, I shall depart for work and some presentations that need brushing up for next week.

I'm a PC... No Wait, I'm a Mac!

I've done a lot of research and thinking and pro-con-ing over the last two weeks, and now that Apple has finally shown its hand, I'm close to a decision. Yes, I'm joining the Apple Cult, after many years of wistful envy. Alex getting a MacBook Pro for his work machine, which often comes home with him, pretty much sealed the deal. For years, we've been trying to decide on some kind of primary media server and content backup system, and about all we ended up with were a few small external hard drives that I remember to backup to about once every six months. But with Time Machine on his MBP, as soon as Alex boots up, his machine is auto-synched and backed up to our external hard drive.

Um... sign me up.

And add to that:

• If I use a non-Mac laptop and mp3 player, we have to rip all our content in more than one format. Or we rip it all through iTunes as mp3s--which I started doing, and now my non-Mac laptop is putting music in three different places: iTunes, Vista's "Music" folder, and the old-style Windows "My Music" folder, which I have unsuccesfully tried to nuke several times. This makes me crazy.
• iPhoto, and Cover Flow, and everything else about Macs that is so darned gorgeous. Gimme.
• Adobe CS4 is available for ridiculously dirt cheap both through my educational discount, and another $300 off for buying it with a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Again: Gimme.
• LED screen.
• Huge trackpad.
• Illuminated keyboard.
• Alex and I compared file-loading on both our machines last night. Yeah. Wow.
• And lastly: the things automatically hibernate when you close them! This may seem a silly kind of a feature, but if you knew the amount of time I spend every evening booting my laptop up, waiting for everything to load, then waiting for Firefox to show up... yeah. And then I have to wait again, whether I hibernate it or shut it down. And hibernating it screws up my machine after about a day.

Alex has hibernated his Mac, without shutting down, for at least a month. GIMME.

All that to say: tonight at the Apple store, I hope to make my final decision. It's come down to this:

13" MacBook, 2.4GHz, +4GB memory, 250 GB hardrive
vs.
15" MacBook Pro, 2.4GHz, +4GB memory, 250 GB hardrive

The only real differences between these two machines are: screen size/resolution, weight (the 13" is a full pound lighter), better graphics card option, and the 15" has an ExpressCard slot that I could put a SD card reader into. But for the $400 price difference, I'm leaning toward that 13"! I can always hook it up to a monitor or two at home/work if I find I'm needing more screen real estate.

But any final Mac-user advice would be appreciated!

Confession

Yes, when I received this message from LexisNexis this afternoon, what immediately drew my eye was not the message about the Congressional Record*, but those amazing shoes and how on earth I could get a pair.


Sigh. Bad librarian!

*NOTE: I am neither endorsing nor slamming the LexisNexis product. This is purely an admission of guilt, not an advertisement, review, critique, or other value judgement about anything beyond how awesome those shoes are.

Librarian Fangirliness

I'm not saying I was obsessively bit by the Twilight bug or anything (yeah yeah, we can discuss the last book later).... but here's a little something from libraryland to further the girlish shrieks of delight.

Of course, it can't beat the Yoda or Batgirl READ posters... or the other DC ones, or all the LOTR ones, or Neil Gaiman and Sandman. But still.

I can see I need to add quite a few items to my Christmas wishlist... furthering my family's evidence of my intense geekery and nerdishness.

Thursday Meanderings

Want to help NPR fact-check the VP debate tonight, using Twitter? Sounds like a cool project. Yet another fascinating use for Twitter--this application is not only addictive, but surprisingly useful. It's become my first web-based source for news, since I can glance at my page at any time of day and see headlines from CNN, NPR, stock analysis, NASA, State Dept., etc. etc.

My guest-blogging month is complete now at FGI; here are all the posts:

starr's blog

• Missed Econ 101?
• September BOTM Wrap-Up
• Core Reference Tools Survey
• VP Records to be Preserved
• Hurricane Resources
• "To Form a More Perfect Union..." (Constitution Day)
• New WMD Report Card Released
• We Want YOU... To Help With the Dot Gov Harvest!

Now I've got to get on two PowerPoints for DC, plus finish getting an OPAL ready for next week. Oh, and there's that matter of getting the new nodes published on the ALA GODORT website. And and and... yeah. Deep breaths, one item at a time, eh?

And don't forget, fellow Texans, Monday Oct. 6th is the deadline for voter registration!

Book Review: Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is a dreamy, jeweled treat of a graphic novel. It provides two stories interwoven throughout the book, alternately sad, romantic, momentous and light-hearted. The storyline does not strictly follow the video game series on which it is rather loosely based, but captures the flavor of that world filled with princes, adventure, and sand dunes.

• read an excerpt
• watch the trailer

It would be a mistake to dismiss this as another comic rip-off marketing scheme. Don’t think of this as a video-game adaptation, regardless of how much you may have loved the 1989 video game. This is a work of art unto itself.

First Second Books once again shows off their high production quality here. The pages are thick and glossy, with brilliant color. The softcover is attractive and sturdy with glittery gold foil detail; First Second produces the best-bound paperbacks I’ve seen. The endpaper is decorated with a lovely map. The more books I see from this publisher, the more I purchase, as much for the production quality as for their unusual art and narratives.

The script, developed by original the game developer Jordan Mechner and written by A. B. Sina, is lyrical and surprisingly funny by turns. At times, the shift between stories is difficult to detect—but this is part of the point. The dialog in a few scenes sounded a bit modern for the setting, but in its defense, the characters that spoke in this style were the ones I connected with most.

The art is simple and expressive, and is best displayed in the many sequences that are completely wordless. These read like poetry, and nontraditional panel shapes are used to great effect. LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland create memorable characters, and even produce a flicker of empathy for the villains. I love the loose, fluid feel of the line; it’s balanced with strong color that evokes various moods with alternating cool and warm palettes.

The violence is fittingly graphic and a few well-placed moments of horror give the story serious resonance. My favorite sequences were those that told portions of the backstory in a flat style that recalls medieval Persian illuminated manuscripts. These scenes conveyed the feeling of an ancient legend, while lending authenticity to the setting.

My only complaint is that the narrative runs a fine line between poetically ambiguous and frustratingly vague. The story feels pleasantly dreamlike, but on the last page I feel slightly dissatisfied, as if nothing has actually happened. The plot is circular rather than traditionally resolved… but in the end this is a good thing, as it encourages me to immediately pick it up for another reading.

If you’re looking for a fairy tale that has gravity enough for an adult, I highly recommend this novel. And do yourself a favor and buy a copy, because it’s a tale you’ll be returning to sooner than you think.

Note to parents: There are scenes with violence, including numerous beheadings, and some suggested nudity. Most of this is tamer in execution than I’ve seen in most graphic novels today, but the context of the action—killing infants, beheading women and the elderly, cutting out tongues and eyes—is such that it may be disturbing for young ones. No profanity here, but I’d still say this merits a PG-13 rating.