Congratulations, and celebrations etc. etc.

Alison got the job! She is going to start a GTP teacher training course at Beauchamp School in Septempter. It's like a years on the job training which ends up with her qualifying as a teacher. She's going to be teaching secondary school and A-Level biology. Excellent!

In other news, I finished a book the other day. It was a big anthology of Isaac Asimov stories, called "The Complete Robot". I'd link to it at Amazon, only I can't find it there. It must be some weird edition of it or something. Anyway. It was 682 pages of small print that made up about 30 short stories about robots, surprisingly enough. I'd been inspired to read it, after seeing I, Robot for the second time and reading quotes like this about it, and wondering what the original stories were like.

The book was a long read... It took me two renewals from the library to finish it. It was good though. It was an interesting read, and it was - admittedly - much more in depth than the aforementioned film. The stories in the book played much more with the 3 rules, whereas the film kinda copped out and just abused them. The film was similar to a couple of the stories, but the originals were a bit more subtle. The film also took some artistic license, like Susan Calvin (the smartarse lady in the film) being young enough to provide some kind of vague sexual chemistry for Will Smith, as opposed to being about 60 in the books. Hmm.

It was worth reading, though I guess I might not persuade too many of you, as I am something of a sci fi geek.

Speaking of which... I played some more Half Life 2 last night. (For those few of you who have played it, I'm up to the city levels, towards the end, after Alyx and I teleported back to the lab.) I'm leading a little squad of guys round the city, who help me in the firefights we get into, which is kind of cool. I'm mostly fighting regular soldiers at the moment, but I keep seeing these bigass monsters called striders which look like they'll be a problem when I get round to fighting them. I'm also really getting the hang of the gravity gun now. The city levels have these little crazy mines called hoppers which jump in the air when you get near them and then explode when they hit the ground. The trick is to catch them in the air when they spring up, then throw them. It's kinda neat to walk up to a mine, have it spring up in the air, catch it with the gravity gun, then launch it at some explosive barrels next to the little encampment of Civil Protection officers and watch them all go flying.

Physics rocks. Oh yes.