Firefly: Back in the ‘verse

Great article in Wired: "Firefly Reborn as Online Universe".

I’m such a fanboi!

The company staging the Firefly universe as an online game is Multiverse, who signed a deal with Fox. Multiverse posts about the project in a press release: "Firefly is coming to the Multiverse!"

Firefly enjoyed only a single season in 2002 before being canceled after only 11 episodes. Fans, known as the Browncoats lobbied incessantly on sites like FireflyFans.net for the show’s return.

In 2005, a feature movie that takes place shortly after the timeline in the series "Serenity" was released to $25 million domestic gross, according to BoxOfficeMojo.

Granted, I’d love to see the show back on the air, but reality bites 😦

I get the Warhol Treatment

Take a peek at the Warholizer, and turn yourself into a pop icon!

007 by day, Darth Vader by Night

Or is it the other way around?

This is a picture of my grandson, Christian Michael from a recent wedding (no, not his own, and no: he wasn’t really playing James Bond) and his Halloween costume:

Lego Thriller .. Thriller Night

Given Hunter’s Joy of Lego: here’s a YouTube video of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, all done in Legos: ‘"Thriller"… with Legos‘.

Telemarketer Repellent

We’ve all had those calls; usually right around dinner time, or when you’re up on a ladder or in the restroom or playing with your kids or thinking through a document or something.

The phone rings. "Is this the person in the household who .. "?

LifeHack posts "Top 10 Telemarketer Repellant".

There’s some good ones therein. My repellent is to declare that I’m in the business of whatever they’re selling and give them this:

I’ll have you know I’m a professional xyzzy. You guys blow through town, taking the food out of the mouths of my children. You blow out of town, leaving dissatisfied customers in your wake which makes it all the harder for me to earn a living at what I do best. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Depending on my mood, I’ll either play weepy or angry.

Gets ’em every time.

Halloween 2006

Dude, where’s my car?

Seriously.

Fortunately, a rental car, rented from Avis (as always) at LAX.

This time, it was a shiny, red, Pontiac Monte Carlo, exactly like the shiny, red Pontiac Monte Carlo (also rented from Avis) by another guest of the hotel.

While I know the other guest and I didn’t swap valet claim checks, I can only assume the valet grabbed the wrong keys while reaching for a shiny, red, Pontiac Monte Carlo.

We looked at when we picked it up, and in the dark, it looked like our car. Imagine our surprise when we got to the return lot.

The Avis manager checked us out and called the hotel to notify the other guest of the mix-up and all is well.

Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate

Just the mention of the word makes my mouth water.

Good chocolate, btw; a bit more difficult to find, but well worth the effort. I’m savoring the last of my Father’s Day gift (no, not Cassandra’s Caprese), this was box of truffles from Dan’s Chocolates. Yummy!

Others have taken chocolate to new heights; chocolate pizza, syringes from which to sample molton chocolate, entire restaurants devoted to chocolate (you’re getting the theme here).

Max Brenner opened a chocolate bar near Union Square in NYC last month called Chocolate By The Bald Man and sounds to be the place to visit for chocoholics.

• The Daily Candy: "The Chocolate Manifesto"
• New York Magazine: "Milking It"

Max: I’ll be by next time I visit NYC; likely in November. Please save me some fondue.

Rainy Day Saturday

I’m hanging out with the fam in our Great Room (coincidentally, where six nodes of our internal network reside) in ‘parallel play’ with the kidlings. It’s cool enough we may just light a fire.

• Connor is doing homework. He’s on the hook for a paper on the A-bomb attack on Nagasaki.
• Hunter is busily constructing a Sim City 3000 city. His secondary goal? To modify all the resource cost settings and pollution counters so he’ll be able to build faster. His primary goal? He wants to nuke the city with a planned series of disasters. Hey, it’s tidier than his latest Lego city destruction (I’m still finding arms everywhere).
• Cassie appropriated my notebook from the my last EBay Developer Conference (where I was a booth babe, showing off Microsoft Small Business Accounting and our Visual Studio Express Editions to a positively RABID developer community). She’s drawing the alphabet, complete with pictographs with each letter. We had to settle on ‘vulture’ for V and ‘yo-yo’ for Y.

I don’t need a SPOT watch to tell me it’s raining outside. It’s (nearly) October in Seattle.

Why would there be a daisy in my toilet?

I traveled a fair bit for my job as the Microsoft Pragmatic Evangelist, and I’ve seen a lot of this country, and even the world.

Mostly from the inside of hotel and conference rooms, however.

Regular readers remember various posts about palatial hotel rooms I’ve been assigned as I was the ‘last one in’ for the night, and / or ‘the first one out’ in the morning.

Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I’ve posted these; I’ll start doing that again. Not that I get to use the rooms; it’s kind of cool just to see how the other 3/4 lives.

I digress. Occupational hazard.

One of the oddest things I’ve seen lately (especially being that we’re well out of Spring and starting to look Fall in the eye) was this: a daisy in my toilet.

Why would there be a daisy in my toilet?

For fun, let me paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson: "I am sick of these #*! daisies in my #*! toilet".