I just went with my daughter (18) to see Pirates of the Caribbean. It is, as everyone has been saying, a lot of fun. It's pretty long for a movie these days (2 hours 24 minutes), but it sure speeds by. Johnny Depp is superb as Captain Jack Sparrow, and the rest of the cast is excellent as well. I admit, the notion of a movie based on a theme-park ride is a bit much (hey - it's just like a movie based on a novel, except simpler), but I always liked the ride - frequently my first stop on visits to Disneyland.
It's certainly not necessary to have been on the ride to enjoy the movie, but every now and then you'll catch a faithfully rendered visual seamlessly worked into the "plot". It's fun, it's mindless, and it's definitely recommended. Caroline and I give it two thumbs up.
The Internet is a wonderful thing. Then we all get dependent on it, for our latest email, news, IM, or coding fix - and something goes strange. Right now, Cornell University appears to be mostly disconnected. The university's main web page is up, but almost no internal pages are accessible, including the CS department page and NSDL.org.
Connectivity was lost at 2:00PM yesterday, and then restored (at least for a while) last night starting at around 9:00PM. This morning, it is off again. Makes me wonder if the CS department shouldn't have a web presence outside Cornell that we can use to get out announcements when either Cornell or CS is down.
Now I'm waiting for a call back from the Network Operations center and twiddling my thumbs at my computer.
[A quick update - it came back up, hopefully for good, by around noon. Router problems, brought on by yesterday's commodity Internet connection problems.]
OK - I admit it. I've been doing some programming. But I swear that most of it is just cut and paste!
I've plugged together some PHP, Javascript, Perl, Sqlplus, MySQL and XSLT to create a nice bookmarklet (to which idea I was first introduced by MovableType). What it does is takes an arbitrary webpage, submits it to a PHP script, and displays the result, with the URLs that represent resources in the NSDL decorated with little NSDL logos. If you click on the logo, you can find out the NSDL metadata about the resource. Check it out at my NSDL Experimental Tools site.