GetGlue Logo
For a while now I’ve enjoyed using the GetGlue website. For those of you who never tried it, it’s a site where you can check-in to shows etc you’re watching and some provide stickers that get mailed to you at intervals for achieving certain goals.
One of the fun parts about GetGlue was how eclectic a selection of things to check-in to it had. You could check in to movies or TV shows, but also topics, actors, and books.
So it’s been a hectic month, with a crash coding project for darling @Hell_On_Wheelz hubby’s work. Been a while since I was that deeply into a code project, so it was kind of scary to realize just how far behind SotA I’ve become spending so much time on art projects.
Now it’s all over bar trying to clean up the fragment code into one cohesive application, making a pretty (and absolutely kick-ass Section 508 compliant) front end, before The Worst Part Of The Job: Commenting the damned thing so I can run a *Doc generator through it so lesser mortals can read the code.
So it’s all big space news this weekend, with MSL Curiosity making her much-anticipated landing on Mars. It’s got the entire Interwebs abuzz, and NASA’s got an entire set of @NASASocial events lined up spanning 7 different facilities.
But … with all the new fangled tech and social media and everything else, I want to also remember a somewhat older, and less-remembered NASA robotic explorer – The Voyager probes, 1 and 2.
One of the things this weekend has driven home to me is how much @Comic_Con has turned into the US version of Cannes – it’s all media now.
You really just have to look at the panels and previews and GetGlue stickers, and the attention by tech people like Harry McCracken from CNN to see what I mean.
I think the same thing has happened to @DragonCon … they’ve become “super conventions”, where there’s so much programmed into them it’s a race sometimes to make it to all the panels, all the contests available – and let’s not even go into the signings!
I caught a tweet a little while ago, retweeted by @WolfsonLiterary
So I go check out the website, and given how many times there have been scam email campaigns trying to fool people into thinking their Facebook username etc have been changed to get you to visit a fake site, check Google.
Before I begin, I’d just like to mention that you’re not going to find any spoilers in this post.
I suppose I could claim that this is because of some outdated sense of honor, and that I just want you all to be able to wait with baited breath for as long as possible in the lead-up to tonight’s Season 2 premiere of Falling Skies on TNT – but to be perfectly honest, if I tried to pick out parts of the 2 hours of television you’re going to see, I’d still be trying to put together a list by the time we get a “To Be Continued” S2E10 season finale.
Private First Class Bowe Robert Bergdahl, United States Army. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So we’re a week away from Rolling Thunder XXV, and I’m reminder by recent news articles just how important it still remains that every year we highlight the issue of MIA/POWs. Whilst the Vietnam War is still a big presence hovering over the event, the MIA/POW situation is still important because there is at least one live soldier who is not yet home - Bowe Bergdahl.
One of the problems with trying to promote disability awareness is getting people to see things from a disability perspective. It can be hard for people to understand issues without the same frame of reference used raising them.
Oh, I know there are plenty of “simulator” methods out there used to try and show people how disabilities themselves “feel”, but that’s only part of the story – how we interact with our environment as people with disabilities also needs to be explained.
Every year around this time we tend to reach the same place when it comes to network TV news – announcements of those shows that have been renewed for another season, and those that have been cancelled.
This year, we got hit with a whammy and a half when it comes to science fiction shows – Terra Nova has been cancelled, and Fringe, according to many, is on life-support, with no definite answer due until the end of the current season.
The reasons follow a similar refrain we’ve heard before – the production costs are too high. This makes sense, when you consider the amount of FX work that science-fiction shows tend to use these days.
It’s been a stressful few weeks when it comes to issues surrounding Metro, the mass-transit system operated in the Washington DC area by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).
We’re coming off the back of a series of public meetings discussing the proposed fare hikes on the system, as well as continued disruptions, both planned and unplanned.
So people’s tempers have been getting short. Understandable really, given the historical trends on these matters.
Escalator issues, elevators, trains going out of service, unidentified track problems causing trains to be emptied at stations – it’s a long list that, viewed sequentially, gives the impression of a system in operational crisis.
