The Treehouse Blog

The past few days were a pretty good start to the pleasant part of weather in PA. I’ve hiked more than 20 miles over the past few days – 11 with Doug on the Appalachian between Caledonia and Big Flat on Thursday, 5 with my sister around Snowy Mountain on Friday, and 7 with Chris around the Thousand Stairs on Saturday. And on top of that, I managed to get a few things done around the house, too.

After the tirade on Ark of Truth, I figured I should make up for it with some good reviews. The season premier for Battlestar Galactica was decent. And a Netflix suggestion that ended up being pretty good was The Island which was sortof a combination of Logan’s Run updated with the look and feel of Minority Report. Not spectacular, but I’d watch it again.

I wasn’t impressed with the SG1 franchise’s first direct-to-DVD endeavor. I would say The Ark of Truth easily makes the bottom third of SG1 two-parters. Instead of ratcheting up quality or plot, everything became more extreme and intense. Mitchell’s lines were more O’Neill-like than ever. Mitchell and the IOA guy were both acting way over-the-top, in a bad way. There was some of the good in SG1 as well, in that some of the issues they had on the ship were of the “let’s rethink this” variety instead of the standard Trek plot of “our first idea is great and has no problems whatsoever.” But really…

• Double-sided Asguard crystals? I’m pretty sure they’d come with a double-sided crystal reader.
• First Contact ripoff? Let’s beam back to the ship because the Repliborg are here, but leave the away team unsupported on the surface because they have the important work to do. And let’s have replicators assimilate people instead of just building them.
• Why did we spend minutes watching Teal’c walk across the Rockies? I mean, he doesn’t have much else to do, but it still seems unnecessary.

The utter destruction of the Ori makes it worthwhile, provided they don’t spend the next movie focusing on the political reconstruction of the ex-Ori universe like they did with the Jaffa. Seriously, I wouldn’t put it past them.

So, at work today we received two boxes from Vendor C shipped via Vendor U that contained identical parts. It was immediately observed that the one box was far heavier than it should have been. Perhaps they shipped both of the items in the one box, and manuals and such in the other? Stranger things have happened. And, well, had. Both boxes contained what they were meant to. The heavier one had a plastic-wrapped white object in the bottom that looked like shrink-wrapped documentation – at least, until you tried to move it. It had a Vendor U shipping label indicating a weight of 37lbs and was about a foot square and an inch thick. Apparently this piece of solid steel encountered the Vendor C box and penetrated it during shipment (judging from the correctly sized hole in the side of the box, noticed afterwards). Vendor U is sending someone to pick up the stowaway package, and the Vendor C gear looks to be undamaged. Still. Weird.

An altered detention letter brought my alma mater into the international spotlight (on the web, at least) today. An unnamed student posted this letter recently, and between Digg and Slashdot, it gained a considerable following. The letter indicates that the student was disciplined for using Firefox, an act which approaches holy war status in certain circles. The attention prompted the school to issue a response stating that the letter was altered and that the student was not disciplined for the use of Firefox. It does prompt one to question what was altered in the letter posted. I would hope they are talking about something more substantial than the blacked out names. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the Firefox promotional (“…but he told me that it was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. … he insisted that it was a better browser and that he wasn’t doing anything wrong”) was embellished. It seems to me that a teacher would call it insubordination and leave it at that. In any case, the kid caused a lot of attention, hoax or not. It’d be great to hear what the actual alterations were, and how the school handles the situation with the student, after having caused them a massive PR headache.