LinLog

This year, we spent our son's spring break in Florida.  My parents rented an apartment down there for a few weeks and invited us to come stay with them for the week.  It was a very nice week and we enjoyed some good family time and lots of unseasonably warm weather (it was in the 80's most of the week, which I'm told is a good 10 to 15 degrees higher than normal).

One of our outings for the week was a trip to Universal Studios in Orlando.  It turned out to be a beautiful day (despite predictions of rain) and we had a good time.  My son was especially excited about the Harry Potter areas.  We got the "park hopper" tickets, so we were able to visit both their "Adventure Island" park, which had a Hogsmeade area, and then take the Hogwarts' Express to the main Universal Studios park, which had Diagon Alley.  We didn't do many rides, since he's still a little young for most of the ones they have at Universal, but we had fun shopping and doing some of the non-ride activities.

Anyway, on a vaguely geeky note, they had kind of a neat drink package at Universal.  We went to Sea World two days before and they had a similar thing, but more manual (I assume it must be common for theme parks now).  Basically, rather than spend $3 or $4 per bottle of soda or water, you can spend $16 on a souvenir cup and get unlimited refills all day.  This was actually a pretty good deal, because it was unseasonably hot and we wanted to do the park all in one day (both because we were staying an hour away and because we didn't want to pay for multiple tickets).  At Sea World, you could just take our cup to any concession stand to get it filled.  At Universal, you could take it to a concession stand, but there were also free-standing Coke Freestyle machines throughout the park that you could use.  You're allowed to refill your cup every ten minutes until 2:00am the morning after you buy it.

Of course, this immediately raised the question "how do they enforce this?"  You don't have to show a receipt or talk to anyone to use the Freestyle machines.  What's to stop you from just bringing your own cup and not paying for anything?

Well, it turns out the souvenir cups actually have a microchip in the bottom.  If you look closely, you can see it in the bottom.  You can test this by not actually fully placing the cup down on the Freestyle machine.  We know this because somebody had dumped their slushie on the cup holder of one of the machines and just tipping your cup under the dispenser didn't work, presumably because it couldn't read the cup's chip.

I found this both kinda cool and kinda weird.  It was convenient, but at the same time it seems weird to have a computerized soda cup.  It's just one of those applications that I wouldn't have thought of.  Although it does explain why the Universal drink cups cost the same as the ones at Sea World despite the Sea World ones being way nicer.

Trivia entry for the week: Yesterday this blog apparently celebrated its 15th year of existence.  It looks like the first entry was February 18th, 2005.

I say "looks like" because the publication date actually says December 14th, 2006.  But that's almost certainly an artifact of the way the first versions of LnBlog stored date metadata - they didn't.  The date at which an entry was "published" depended on the file path.  Since storage is file-based, each entry goes in a folder like entries/2005/02/18_1200/, which corresponds to the date and time that I hit the "publish" button.  That part of the system actually hasn't changed in the last 15 years, but what has changed is that the publication date is now stored in the entry metadata, along with everything else.  At some point (presumably in 2006) when I added the date to the metadata, there was apparently a bug in the code such that it didn't properly fetch the publication date from the path.  So a bunch of early entries actually show the wrong publication date.  I should probably fix that at some point.

Despite the fact that I have few to no regular readers, I'm slightly proud of myself for sticking with this blog this long.  My level of posting consistency has varied radically over the years, but I've always come back to it, for at least a few posts a year.  There's something to be said for that, though I'm not sure exactly what.

I'm also slightly proud of myself for keeping this blog more-or-less working that long.  It's powered by LnBlog, which is the first real PHP program I wrote, starting in late 2004 to early 2005.  I wrote the entire thing myself, from scratch with no framework, starting in PHP 4 and now evolving into PHP 7.  And it's actually got a fairly decent feature set, so I consider it a minor accomplishment that it's still working.

For the last couple of months, I've been trying to do the weekly post thing, taking advantage of the "scheduled publication" feature to write things in advance and automatically spread out the publication.  This week is actually the first one in a couple of months that hasn't had a Saturday post (mostly because I was getting ready for vacation and didn't get around to writing anything).  We'll see how long we can keep that up.  But hopefully I'll be able to keep some level of consistency going for another 15 years.

In my review of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd enjoyed the other new Star Wars movies, with the exception of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I hadn't seen yet.

Well, I saw it.  And...yeah.

On the up side, it was definitely better than The Rise of Skywalker.  But that doesn't make it good.  That would be like saying that Anders Breivik wasn't such a bad guy because he killed fewer people that Stalin.  It doesn't work that way.  So it was pretty bad.  I'd rank it as the second worst Star Wars movie so far.

The disappointing part was that for the first third to half of the movie, I was enjoying it.  It wasn't fantastic, but is seemed like a decent, straight-forward action/adventure movie.  I distinctly remember thinking, "I don't know what people were complaining about.  This is actually not bad." 

Then in the second half the story started going down hill.  They started throwing in plot twists and flipping the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and it just didn't really work.  Especially since a lot of the "good guys" were career criminals - are we really surprised they're not so good?  Come on.  Add in the corny dialog and some iffy acting that left the characters feeling unrelatable and that just killed it for me.

And then there were the parts that seemed like they were supposed to be some form of ham-handed social commentary.  For instance, Lando's droid that was constantly agitating for droid rights.  That could have been an interesting sub-plot.  Are droids really sentient?  What does sentience actually mean?  And if they are, why doesn't galactic civilization have a problem with basically enslaving them?  And for that matter, why don't they seem to have a problem with enslaving humans or other humanoids?  How do the characters relate to these questions?

But no - they don't even try to explore any of that.  They just have the droid assert that droids are sentient and need to be liberated and then walk around ranting about it like that friend who spends way too much time on Twitter and won't stop talking about politics.  "Yeah, we get it Bob, the patriarch is bad.  Now what do you want on your damn pizza?"  It ends up just being a punchline.

Bottom line: if you haven't seen Solo, don't bother.  My only consolation was that I was cleaning the house while I watched it, so at least the time wasn't wasted.  If you want a good Star Wars story, go watch season 1 of The Mandalorian.

You know you're getting obscure books when even Goodreads doesn't know what the heck you're reading. Or maybe it's less that it's "obscure" than that it's "old".  And French.  It's hard to tell.

In this case, the book in question is "The Nature of Hinduism" by Louis Renou.  This is a book that's been sitting on my bookshelf for literally years.  I'm not even completely sure where it came from.  It has labels from the local high school library, so it apparently originated there.  I think either I got it at the public library's book sale, or it was left in our house and I found it when we moved in.

Anyway, Goodreads had no idea about this book.  It had a handful of entries for the author, but that's it.  So I had to add it to Goodreads.

This endeavor started off poorly because I decided to do it on my phone.  It turns out that the Goodreads mobile app doesn't actually have a way to add new books.  Neither does the mobile website.  The app has a feature to scan the barcode, but this book is 50 years old - it doesn't have a barcode.

If you want to add a book, you need to use the desktop site, which is a pain when you're using a mobile device.  Of course, once you're on an actual computer, it's pretty easy.  There's a "Manually add a book" link right on the search results page and it's fairly easy from there.  Some of the fields on the add form are a bit obscure, but most of them are optional anyway, so it's not a big deal.

I must admit I'm a little curious as to how much use the "manual add" page actually gets.  I'm sure it's not the most commonly used feature by any stretch of the imagination, but I would have expected it to be common enough to merit a link on the mobile site, if not the app.  Am I the only person left who reads used books that old?  That seems depressing.  Perhaps it's just that people who read old books tend not to use Goodreads.  I can only hope.