Any Darn way to read Ayn Rand

Denro points out that comic book artist Joe Staton has illustrated a graphic novel adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. I’ve read The Fountainhead, and every single page of Atlas Shrugged too (well, maybe I skipped a few in John Galt’s redundant 60-page diatribe), but I have never read Anthem. Amazon has it for only $8.44 — less than the Kindle version.

Joe’s a busy guy, because he’s taking over the art chores for the classic comic strip Dick Tracy, although I’m sure for Joe it won’t be a chore, but a labor of love. I’m loving the revamped look. Bring back the Moon Maid and the flying garbage cans!

TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar

Turner Classic Movies — the #1 reason to keep cable TV — has started a 31 days of Oscar series. Here’s the schedule. Tonight they had a nice profile of film historian Kevin Brownlow, who has won an honorary Oscar. Knowing there’s been some contact between TCM and Brownlow gives me hope that Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film will someday be released on DVD.

Taxes and snow

Tax time is here. Argh. Yesterday, I downloaded TurboTax and installed it, after clicking on a promotion for returning customers that promised a free copy of Quicken. Microsoft has discontinued its Money program, so I figured I’d go for it. But when I got to Intuit’s site there was no mention of my free copy of Quicken, and after completing the purchase there was still nothing, so I’ll have to bug them about that. Argh.

Follow-up: I logged back onto Intuit’s site, and now there’s a redeem link.

We already have a lot of snow, over five feet of it, with not much melting. I got out and did some cross-country skiing, and I wanted to do more, but with the promise of another 20+ inches coming tomorrow and Wednesday, I’m not very enthused about anything to do with snow.

I’m worried about the weight of the snow on the front and back porches, where the roofs aren’t supported as well as on the house itself. So I borrowed a snow rake from my friend across the street and got to work. In back of the house, on one side of the porch, I couldn’t reach very far up, but I was able to clear the other side completely because I could stand on the deck. In front the roof is much lower, and I needed to be up high and far back to get a good angle. To do that I got clever and used a couple of pieces of plywood so I could climb onto the pile of snow next to the front walk.

We’re getting low on rock salt, and there’s no de-icer of any sort to be found, but other than that I’m as ready as I can be. I’ll get up extra early in the morning to see how things look.

Old and fresh!

Oh boy! I’ve done a factory-restore of Windows XP on my desktop system. Windows is all the way back to SP2, and IE is at version 6. A zillion updates are downloading, and they’ll probably take an hour to run. I’m planning to update to Windows 7, so I figured it would be nice to start off with a nice, clean installation.

Follow-up: Well, this is fun. I’m entering this using Firefox, installed on Ubuntu Linux, within a VMware Player virtual machine, running on Windows XP.

Further follow-up: I am very impressed with how this all works. Windows has locked up a couple of times while I was mucking around with the virtual machine settings, but that doesn’t phase me, and I’m tempted to go virtual underneath the covers with this setup.