As I sit here writing this at 7:15 pm Eastern Standard Time, less than two hours remain until the start of the Battlestar Galactica series finale. It promises to be eventful, with so many loose ends waiting to be tied up. After all, the remnants of the human race are still adrift in space, running out of food and basic necessities, and no closer to finding a permanent home than when they started; the vast majority of the Cylons are still actively seeking to destroy them; the Galactica is falling apart at the seams; the child Hera, who holds the key to their salvation, is in enemy hands; and we still don’t know whether Kara Thrace is a human, Cylon, half-Cylon, or some other species as yet undetermined.

Plus, lots of people are a-gonna die. Here are my best guesses, which will no doubt be proven wildly wrong:

Will Die:

Laura Roslyn. Yeah, I know this is an easy one, because she’s dying of cancer already.
Bill Adama. He has seemed old and tired this entire season, and he wouldn’t want to go on living without Laura, anyway.
Lee Adama. I think the scene with the bird in last week’s episode was a foreshadow. Doves (and a pigeon is a type of dove) are often associated with death. Besides, every fan of the show wants he and Kara to finally end up together, which is more than enough reason for this show’s fiendish writers to do precisely the opposite.
Galen Tyrol. He will sacrifice himself to save Hera and atone for his part in letting her get captured by the Cylons.
Sharon Valeri (aka “Boomer.”) She’s switched sides in this conflict so many times that pretty much everybody on either side wants her dead, anyway. Hopefully she goes out heroically, saving Hera.

Won’t Die

Gaius Baltar. If there is one thing I am positively certain of, it’s this: Gaius will live. His one defining character trait over the past four years has been his selfishness and ability to survive anything. He always looks out for #1, right up until last week, when he desperately wanted to do the right thing and join the rescue mission, but just…couldn’t…force himself to do it. No one needs redemption more than Gaius, and that redemption will be earned by leading the remnants of humanity to safety after most of the other main characters die.
Kara Thrace. C’mon, she’s already died once! That’s enough.
Karl Agathon. He’s the most morally incorruptible character in the entire show, and he’ll need to be around to take care of his daughter after Athena dies. Unless she lives, in which case he dies.
Saul Tighe. Someone has to lead the military after both Adamas perish.

No Frakkin’ Idea if They WIll Die

Umm…all the other major characters.

Your thoughts? Theories?

Do you know what actuaries do? The predict when you’ll die, right? Ha! Not really. My elevator speech goes something like “actuaries use historical data to create risk models for insurance companies, so those companies know what to charge their customers.” In my mind that makes sense, though any actuary would tell that that’s only part of it, and the field is far more diverse and complex than my oversimplification.

Anyway, Dina got here ASA earlier this year, meaning she is an Associate of the Society of Actuaries–officially an actuary, with the ability to have professional opinions and officially consult, and all that. It wasn’t easy coming: about three years and five or six professional examinations and literally thousands of hours of studying.

Today we found out that Dina passed her first test on her to FSA designation–a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, which is the equivalent of a Ph.D in actuarial science. These tests get more and more difficult the more and more you pass, so this is no small feat. Dina is elated, and we’re going to celebrate tonight. So give her a shout out, if you’re privvy to the proper communications channels.

(Disclaimer: as much as I would like to take credit for this magnificent pumpkin, it was actually carved by my buddy Stephen, not me.)

While doing my nightly ritual of reading the DailyKos I came across this gem of a website Things Younger than McCain.

It is genius! I can’t wait to read this daily. I’m sure there are tons of things older than McCain. A few of my favorites the slinky, spam and AARP.

Happy reading!

As a white person, I love wearing shorts. From now until October, I’m gonna be rocking the cargo shorts like Peter Jackson, y’all.

Who wouldn’t want to show off (or ogle) those hairy, beefy calves, huh? :-]

At long last, the final present of Christmas 2007 has finally arrived: I hold in my hot little hands none other than an XO laptop. In fact, I wrote this post on it!

No, my hand is not in the foreground. It really is that tiny.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the One Laptop Per Child program, the rather ambitious aim of which is to put $100 $200 laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations worldwide. For a short time last year, they ran a special “Give One Get One” promotion, wherein you could purchase one XO for yourself if you also purchased one for donation to a child in the developing world. On the very last day of the G1G1 program, yours truly, deciding he needed to both repair his fractured karma and purchase a new toy, plunked down the mad scrilla.

Last night, it finally arrived.

All the crazy stories you’ve heard about this machine are true: the screen really is visible outdoors in direct sunlight, the twin wifi antennas really can pull in a signal from a ridiculously long distance, the touchpad really can be used as a writing tablet with a stylus, it really is impervious to dust and heat, and it really does have no hard drive (all internal storage is handled by a combination of ROM and flash memory.) This is an amazingly well-designed piece of hardware.

The software, however, is another story. It’s a special, stripped-down version of Fedora Linux called Sugar, and it’s designed to be very simple for kids to use. I think it’s a little too simple, personally: installing new software is very difficult. The visual look of the GUI is like no operating system you’ve ever seen, so different in fact that it’s quite jarring. And the included web browser is just hideous: it’s slow, breaks formatting, and forget about playing embedded audio or video content.

However, all of these things are fixable. The good folks at Opera have already created a version of their browser specially modified for use on the XO, which I was able to install in just a few quick steps. And lo and behold, there are already several hacks for installing Ubuntu as an alternative operating system, to give the laptop a much more grown-up feel. (There are even rumors that the Redmond Borg Collective will attempt to shoehorn XP onto the XO, but I prefer to pretend that’s just a horrible, horrible nightmare.)

So, yeah: a qualified thumbs up. It’s not a mobile workstation, but it ain’t a toy, either. And it was cheap and it helps out kids in need. I heartily approve of both the concept and the execution of this program.

I’d say run out and buy one immediately, but you can’t. The Give One Get One ended on December 31st, and there are no plans to revive it. I am, and will always continue to be, the only person you know who has one of these babies. Ha ha!

You can still give one to a kid in a Third World country, however. So go do it, you stingy bastard! Now! What are you waiting for?

Best. Blog. EVER.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.

Some of my personal favorites:

(link via Tannhauser, aka Grand Poobah Barabas Maximus)

Also, Stuff White People Like (link via MaxLibris) and Monk-e-Mail (link via…um…shit, I forgot. Wicked sorreh.)

Kuiper Sophie Smith was born on 1/13 weighing 7 lbs. 4 oz. and standing 20 inches tall. She’s perfect and we’re all on a babymoon.

And for inquiring minds and their wanting to know…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

Dear Sweet Mother of All that is Holy and Pure, our long national nightmare is nearly over. The next presidential election is now less than a year away:

It is now safe to imagine. It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year’s time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a “Mission Accomplished!” sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history.

Obviously, the natural reaction of any sane, rational human being to such news would be to spend about a week getting rip-roaring drunk and celebrating the imminent departure of this vainglorious intellectual pygmy and his handpicked cabal of liars, thieves and killers. However, we don’t have the luxury of partying, because there’s way too much work to be done:

It will take every month and every week and every single day from the moment you read this until November 2008 to compile, to gather, to list all the names and all the horrors and all the deeply entrenched policies that are still clawing at the face of America as a result of Bush’s reign, to fully get your mind around just how deep is the disease and how widely it has spread, so we may begin to excise the policies one by one like the malignant tumors they so very much are.

While George W. Bush will soon be headed to the ash heap of history, the political party that rubberstamped his decade-long rape of the American Dream remains largely in place. They are now in the Congressional minority, but by razor-thin margins, and could easily regain both the Congress and White House if we, for even one second, make the mistake of forgetting what an unmitigated disaster their reign has been for this country on every conceivable level.

This must not be allowed.

Now is the time. The coming year will slide by rather quickly and the feeling of urgent change and upheaval will only build and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hillary or Obama or Edwards leading the shift, because no matter who gets the nod, they will require — from me, from you, from anyone who professes to care — a roiling tidal wave of progressive momentum behind them to help them cleanse and haul away the overwhelming mountain of moral fecal matter Bush has left behind.

Mark your calendar. Set your ringtone. Take a deep breath, feel the wave build, and then dive the hell in. Right now, it’s the only option that really matters.

I love looking at new inventions or improvements to crap we already have.  So here are my two favorites of this week.

The first one is semi-serious in terms of something I would LOVE to have in my basement room that is billed as a bedroom but has no space for an actual bed if you expect humans to be able to walk around it.  So check this cool shit out.  Damn.  If I were made of money…well I guess I wouldn’t have such a fracking joke of a third bedroom.

Next.  Totally cool for a lazy person like me.  I don’t love talking to people on the phone especially if I don’t know them, but add to that the room for error when ordering a food and I just found my wet dream.  Trouble is, I don’t like pizza or Domino’s (fucking commies).  But if you do like those two things or have no problem supporting the Christian Right, then know you can now order pizza online and you can get really detailed about it.  Check out this review from one of my favorite sites, The Sneeze.  Funny shit.