I'm not sure what's up with this Amazon card. This is the second time in 18 months someone's managed to swipe the number.

I've been itching for nature, so we arranged to visit a local pond known for its frogs. Everyone was enthusiastic for the plan on Saturday, but actual execution of the half-mile walk in 80F weather on Sunday brought a constant buzz of "It's too far!" (the kid) and "It's too hot!" (the wife).

Tadpoles were secured, though, and are now resident in our garage.

I spent most of the weekend evenings fighting with TivoToGo so that I could watch this week's "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" without interrupting my wife's "Gay men tell you what to wear while flipping your house" marathon. I was almost entirely unsuccessful. On the mini, hours of fighting got me both shows with no sound. On the same mini on Windows, hours of fighting got me two files that got me two files that cause Windows Media Player to segfault.

In order to mock me, my work Windows laptop worked perfectly with the Tivo.

Sadly, while iPhoto works fine with joh3n's hack, the TivoDesktop won't show it on the TV when on an SMB drive. Oh well, not exactly an important feature.

Worse bit is that there are some for-pay systems that allege to work better, but they have no try before you buy options, and I am afraid of plunking down hard-earned cash only to have it still fail.

In the end I watched both shows after my wife went to bed.

This tiredness is dangerous as our Swedish visitors appear to have invested in an espresso machine for the office. This morning I've been trying all its modes. It's pretty good, except for the barista being big oaf of a software engineer.

This will probably cause facial twitching and argumentative behavior.

I've been reading all the Hugo nominees. I must say that I'm a bit underwhelmed. "The Last Colony" and "Halting State" are both decent enough, but neither are their author's best work, and neither are what I'd call great. I'm currently on "Brasyl", and am having troubles getting into it. I've only read one Robert Sawyer, and I detested it, so I'm not sure I'll try.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is easily better than all those, but I have a problem with calling it "Best SF". I've always felt that alternate history books just don't fit as SF. I enjoy the genre a lot, but I don't really see it as having anything much to do with SF other than it scares the normals. In this particular case, the novel doesn't even particularly seem to care about the alternate history side of the equation. This isn't a criticism, in some ways the book is better for it, but really, this is more of a noir crime novel than an alternate history novel. All of the "what if" portions are completely sidelined, and could be fully described in a couple short paragraphs.

I was considering reading all the short fiction and actually voting. Unfortunately, all the short stuff is electronic, and I'm not big on reading on the laptop. I need a good ebook solution.

On Saturday night, we watched "The Queen". I only managed about twenty minutes of it. It was well done I suppose, and Helen Mirren's performance (what I saw of it) was great. My trouble was two-fold. First, I detested the whole Diana tabloid thing when she was alive, and when she went splat, and avoided it then. My interest has hardly increased since then. Second, I am extremely uncomfortable with the way the movie fictionalizes accounts of people who are still very much alive. Seems to me that this movie would have been better made in fifty years with everyone safely dead. There's plenty of other English monarchs to create fiction around.