I’ve worked the last couple of weeks at Engineering Services, helping survey different things, the most time-consuming being a canal in the mountains nearby. It’s not bad work, but rather redundant. You sit there and hold a rod (thus the title rodman) and the surveyor takes down the data.
It’s been quite easy, and it’s not at all a bad job, even when you have four-wheelers jumping on top of you (it just adds excitement to the day to have a large object pinning you to the ground).
Well, I don’t really have much more to say about it. It’s work.
End.
Review for ‘War of the Worlds’
Score: 4.6π out of 900º
War of the Worlds is a classic tale of aliens coming down and kicking some human butt yet still being beaten in the end. Just once I’d like to see the more realistic occurrence in which all the humans end up losing and dying to technology millions of years more advanced… but that’s beside the point.
I thoroughly enjoyed this show. I never read the book so I didn’t have to stress over whether it followed along well or not. The graphics were pretty dang good. The aliens and their machines were very well done.
As far as the acting goes, everyone played their parts well enough. I didn’t suspect the father to be so uncaring at the beginning, but Tom Cruise played the part very well. None of the battle scenes felt a little strange or scripted as some movies do.
All in all, a great movie. I highly recommend it.
Happy July 4th everybody! This holiday is a great time to sit back and relax. In keeping with the holiday spirit, I figured I’d try my hand at making a few backgrounds for your computer to spread the joy of July 4th. You can download them if you’d like. I’ve just been playing around with some new styles of graphics in Photoshop and thought I’d piece something together for the holidays.
Obtain your super cool, limited edition, David Haslem commemorative July 4th backgrounds here! They come in three great flavors and a one size fits most 1600×1200. Download them today!
Recently I had the opportunity to work with a survey team. It’s just an opportunity for some extra cash, but it’s also an interesting learning experience.
Being a rod man on a survey team can be defined very easily in two steps. Hold a ruler straight up for the surveyor to measure with. Then move forward and repeat. That’s all there is to it. It can be hot and exhausting work, if you’re surveying six miles of winding canal in the mountains; but, if you like hiking, it can also be sort of fun.
All in all, I’d have to say that it’s not that bad of a job, but it is really fairly boring. Story of my life.
Reviewing the book-
Everything Bad Is Good For You
by: Steven Johnson
Score: 4.9π out of 900º
Everything Bad Is Good For You is a book about our new popular culture (TV, the Internet, video games, and movies) and how, contrary to popular belief, it’s not making us dumber. In fact, all the video games, Internet surfing, and TV we’re doing is actually serving as more and more of a cognitive challenge. These things are not getting dumber and dumber, they’re getting smarter and smarter.
Everything Bad Is Good For You denies the notion that children are being made dumber as they rot out their brain in front of TV. It throws out the idea that video games are killing brain cells. It even goes so far as to say that we’re actually learning something from all these things.
Everything Bad Is Good For You goes and details something that seems rather common sense: everything is getting more complex. TV shows that used to just have a single plot now have a multitude of subplots hidden within them. Video games are beyond the simple days of pong. The Internet has us reading more and more, as well as forming and posting our own opinions to the rest of the world.
This trend in increasingly harder to deal with media shows that for some reason, the more complex it is, the more likely we are to be drawn to it. This doesn’t seem to be the rotting of the brain predicted by doomsdayers. It’s not a race to the bottom of the intellectual barrel; in fact, it seems that if the media is too simple, our culture calls it stupid.
This is the premise of the book Everything Bad Is Good For You. I highly recommend it for reading. It’s quite interesting and very well written. It gets 4.9π out of 900º.