we regret the downtime

sorry it's been such a long time. (this is dumb, i'm feeling guilty towards an imaginary hypothetical audience of the 2 people who've ever been to this page!)

anyway, andy and adeline are officially married, both by law and ceremoniously and everything. i've got to get pictures. we went to the children's museum which had this seriously awesome dinosphere thingy. it was just a bunch of dinosaur skeletons, basically. typical museum stuff. but it was presented in such a cool way.

see, the children's museum built in 1996 a CineDome (like this one), which is a big imax-like movie theater, only with a hemispherical dome-shaped screen that you sat underneath for a full 2-pi-of-solid-angle (is that right? whatever half a sphere is) viewing experience. like a planetarium, only a movie.

kate and i went to a show there once, about the climbers who were stranded on everest. at least, some climbers who were stranded on everest, because it seems like people get stranded on everest more often than they do on the 401. it was cool, but not amazing or anything. i think ultimately attendance was low enough that the children's museum had to shut it down.

anyway, the children's museum is now stuck with this big liability, this damned theater thing that cost a lot to build and took up a lot of space. so they transformed it into a dinosaur exhibit. but it's an awesome dinosaur exhibit.

what was the screen now makes the sky, with clouds and stars and sun projected onto it. below that are trees, and dinosaur skeletons all around in a natural sort of environment. the cinedome had a fantastic-and-i-mean-awesome sound system behind the screen, which immerses you in this torrent of noise - bug noises, wind, rain, dinosaur roars and toots - it's awesome. when the rain comes it feels like you're in the rainforest. there must be like 100 speakers in this place and it's totally immersive. very very cool, and just fantastic the way they turned this big thing that could've been a disaster into a really interesting and cool thing.

(all this stuff about the cinedome and their motivations is purely speculation on my part, by the way.)

we did a lot of other stuff too, but it'll have to wait for another day. right now i'm TIRED because i stayed up ALL NIGHT playing damnedEVE like an IDIOT so now i have to sleep.

so, so long, universe, and thanks for all the fish!