It’s a wild weekend night here high above Ylig Bay. Let me throw down a bunch of cool links:

• Bookpedia is pretty cool software. This is almost a must have for the bibliophile Macintosh user. Stores tons more information that Reader2 or other online book cataloging software. I’m definitely thinking about ponying up the $18 shareware fee for Bookpedia.
• Must-Have Firefox extensions for the serious Firefox user. SessionSaver is a must-have, as so is Viamatic foXpose. StumbleUpon is a great time waster; there’s even a variation of Tetris available called Blockfall.
• Let us all sing the praises of Expose, application switching on steroids for the Mac. This was the inspiration for the Firefox extension Viamatic foxPose.
• All you ever needed to know about apt-get, the package management system for Debian Linux. All about Linux is a pretty cool blog too.
• Robot fixes radiation leak at White Sands. The radiation fried some electronics, but a couple trips to Home Depot kept the robotic repairman functioning.
• Jimmy Carter is worried about America, and I think it’s saying something when a former president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient says it. Speaking of Nobel Prize winners, check out Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture from a few weeks ago. It’s available in Real video format, about 45 minutes long.
• VMware now supports Ubuntu Linux for its virtualization technology. Cool, I think I’ll be getting my hands all over this technology in the coming year.
• Moon Shot I – Last night’s full moon was a doozy. This December full moon rises the furthest north and highest in the sky it’s been in a long time. Something to do with all these lunar cycles that confuse the hell out of me. Here’s a photo I took of the moon rising over Guam tonight. Looks pretty good to me.
• Moon Shot II – speaking of the moon and photos of the moon, here’s a tasty photo of the moon rising over Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, and the story of how a couple physicists were able to pinpoint the location, date and time of the original Ansel Adams photo and recreate the photograph almost 60 years later.
• The new Yahoo Mail beta is really fantastic. It’s just like Oddpost, which makes sense, since Yahoo bought up Oddpost a couple years ago. I like it much more than Gmail, which is saying a great deal.

And just because I can, here’s another photo that I took tonight.

That’s just tasty. I like that photo.

Via 3 Quarks Daily (which appears to be down right now – in a TypePad related server outage), here are four amazing lectures by Richard Feynman, recorded at the University of Auckland in 1979. In the lectures, the Nobel Prize winning physicist elucidated the audience on theories of light, electron behavior and quantum mechanics.

So my recent bitch session about the lack of movies on Guam set me off on a movie watching jag. Since Thursday night I watched Aeon Flux, Walk the Line and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. A veritable movie marathon. Since I’ve already discussed Aeon Flux, let me restrict my comments here to Walk the Line and Harry Potter.

• Walk the Line – I watched this Johnny Cash biopic on Thursday night since I was certain that was the last night it would play on Guam. I was right, and I was glad that I caught this picture. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon do a bang up job as Johnny Cash and June Carter, and the movie documents there rocky courtship and romance with a great deal of respect. I enjoyed this picture immensely, and what really impressed me was the singing. Phoenix and Witherspoon sang all their own songs, and did an excellent job. They both got a set of pipes on ’em, and kudos for not relying on overdubbing to mask their voices. My one complaint is that Phoenix’s default acting style can be described as ‘simpering ass,’ and he drifts into this mode several times during the movie. I’m sorry, nothing about Johnny Cash can be described as simpering. Otherwise, the picture was rock solid and very enjoyable.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – Much like the Potter series of books, the movie adaptations keep getting better and better. The action is better, the tone is darker and the world of Hogwarts keep getting more complex. It’s been several years since I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but the movie seemed to follow all the major plot points very well. All the kids are getting older, and those teenage hormones are throbbing. Harry confronts his greatest challenge yet, and it isn’t dragons or mermen of even Voldemort; it’s the tribulations of dating and asking somebody to the big dance. And the climax was quite scary, as You-Know-Who was resurrected from the dead to confront Harry. I’m looking forward to watching then next couple movies, as the books keep getting darker and darker.

What’s next? Probably King Kong or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. But those will have to wait until my free Supersaver movie pass tickets can be used, which isn’t until next week.

I notice that I keep slapping up portraiture on my little art marathon. Hmmm, I never realized I was so partial to portraits.

American Gothic by American artist Grant Wood. This painting of his dentist and the artist’s sister as a farmer and his daughter in front of a farmhouse celebrated the culture of the American Midwest with the artistic traditions of the Northern Renaissance.

Lot’s of stuff about Grant Wood and American Regionalism can be found here.

I heard this great live session on WorldCafe a few months ago featuring David Dye chatting with the members of West Indian Girl and I knew right away I needed to get my hands on that album. Thankfully iTunes was happy to oblige and I had West Indian Girl’s album on my hard drive and burnt to a disk in no time flat.

Check out some videos and music at West Indian Girl’s website, where they also keep fans updated with a blog about their shows.

I remember when this photographic essay was published in National Geographic, it was really cool back then, and it is just as cool now. The Photography of Jim Brandenburg website has the entire series, Chased By The Light, 90 photos taken between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice in the backwoods of northern Minnesota. Brandenburg limited himself to taking only one photo everyday. Instead of firing off rolls of film and picking the best results, he had to make that one photograph count. The results are spectacular.

The website is flash based, but I can hotlink directly to the gallery. Or navigate from the home page, select ‘Gallery’ and then ‘Chased By The Light’ from the sub-menu. And prepare to be dazzled by the march from fall into the icy depths of winter in the Boundary Waters Wilderness.