Another try at an icon

Still working on getting the speed of the animation correct. I may redo this one slower, if I can figure out how to edit it - every time I try to use the edit feature, I get only one frame, as if it weren't an animated GIF, and no way to adjust the time on that one frame. Still a work in progress. More to come.

ETA: slowed the icon down a bit (using another icon shareware package...)

Recent reading

Tall, Dark & Dead by Tate Hallaway. I wanted to hate this one, I really did, because it's a cheap quick knockoff of several popular themes, trying to cater theme-wise to the largest mass-market denominator - but you know what? I didn't hate it. It's a vampire romance, in a contemporary setting, but it also throws in, let's see, witch-hunting killer nuns from the "Order of Eustace" (can you say "let's cater to the Dan Brown junkies"? I knew you could.) and sulking adolescent teenage half-vampire angst. But it's still not bad. Several of the characters are genuinely likeable, particularly William, the shop assistant who tries on another religion every week. And though the plot ends in a flurry of gimmicks, sex, and all-but-deus-ex-machina, there are some nice plot points; it's not totally predictable. And the writing's halfway decent, and - here's a real nice feature - it's got no glaring spelling or grammar or word-misusage errors!! It is *extremely* well edited compared to many current paperbacks (and even, alas, hardcovers). So all in all, while I wouldn't pay money to go out and buy it for my permanent collection, I wouldn't hesitate to say that if you like lightweight romance, with some lightweight supernatural stuff thrown in, then when you run across this one in the library, go ahead and take it out. It's not a complete waste of time.

Chances Are . . .: Adventures in Probability by Michael Kaplan, Ellen Kaplan. I am finding this entertaining, but I have the feeling that most of the people on my flist or among my regular readers wouldn't be interested. You've gotta like math, be interested in probability, and be interested in risk and insurance. A faint idea of what the authors are referring to when they mention "Swiss Re" is useful, for example. And the idea of discussing Galileo's use of the Weak Law of Large Numbers to get around some of the ethical problems of noticing variations in the sky - well, if that idea puts you to sleep, don't read this. On the other hand, some of you may (Chas?) also find this trivia interesting, especially since it's quite possible to skip the actual math (I certainly am) that gets explicated in a few points, and just go with the ideas. A book that jumps from shipping in the Medieval era to breaking the bank at Las Vegas with stops in between for the entire Bernoulli family can't be all bad, right? Really, if you're at all interested in math, this is fun, and if you're not really that math-oriented but like history and especially historical trivia, you would also find lots to enjoy here.

How geeky are we?

We were at supper at Shirley's Diner, around the block from us. And as usual, we both had books, and as usual we read bits out loud to each other. What made this evening particularly ridiculous was that here I was with Chances Are... (see previous post) and there squirrel_magnet was with his current reading: Prime Obsession, a book about prime numbers in general and the Riemann Hypothesis in particular. So what we were reading about was math. And doing things like comparing which book had more Bernoullis mentioned in the index, and more times. (They both had the same four Bernoullis, but my book had more about them. And my book has Francis Galton, too!) So we have to face the truth: we are geeks. We are well and truly geeks.

After supper, we went to check out another supermarket - we're still exploring the various chains around here. This one was Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, regional to Baltimore, DC, and Northern VA - and, apparently, trying to cater to the ethnic market in the area, because they had way more Hispanic-oriented products than any of the other markets we've been to so far up here. In fact, it looked more like good old HEB in Texas than anyplace we've been recently! A lot of brands I hadn't seen since leaving Texas. And more other ethnic stuff too - large Chinese food section, for example.

( does anyone care about Baltimore-area supermarket chains? )