Saint Patrick's day weekend is a three day weekend here in Ireland (hey, we don't get president's day), combine that with Paula still being sick and we had plenty of time to just vegge in front of the boob-tube. All we needed to do was find a good batch of entertainment.

We bought Revenge of the Sith about six months ago but we never got around to watching it.  We couldn't, of course, just start with episode III, we had to start at the "beginning", episode I (as painful as that would be to sit through).

Watching the whole series in the space of 5 days brought up a few of questions. 

1. When Obi-Wan dies he vanishes, leaving just his cloak.  When Yoda dies, he vanishes leaving no clothes at all.  When Darth dies, he leaves everything behind, clothes, meat-sack and all.
2. Why did Leia set out to bring Obi-Wan and the death star plans to Alderaan?  The rebel base was on Tatooine.  You're going to great lengths to find this guy, why send him on a wild goose chase?
3. At the end of episode VI when glowing Obi-Wan, Yoda and Anakin show up to watch the end party, why is Obi-Wan all old and Anakin all young?  Sure, George had to make his re-edits... but that one is just dumb.
4. If Obi-Wan and the rebels were going to such great lengths to hide Luke from his father why didn't they change his name to something other than Skywalker?  Combine that with stashing him on Darth Vader's home planet with Darth's step-brother and it makes me wonder how many brain cells Anakin had left functioning after being given the oven-baked ham treatment.

I guess it doesn't take a genius to poke holes in George Lucas's writing.  But honestly now, how were the Jedi able to keep peace in the galaxy when all it takes to defeat them is persistent taunting?

Jedi: "Stop you fiend! Put down those stolen power converters!"

Thief: "Oh no! The Jedi! Say, how's your mother?  She still mad that I dumped her and dating your sister?"

Jedi: "Oh!!! Why you! Grrr!! .... Aw nuts.  Let me help you carry those."

Thief: "Thanks"

Web pages are complicated.  People want to share their life stories and pictures, but learning HTML is hard (ask Trina).  So the world of blogging was born. 

Blog software has made it very easy to set up and maintain your content, whether it be a running account of how all your cat's hairballs look like past presidents, or something much, much less significant.  Blogs do, however, have the problem that they often get abandoned for great lengths of time (Dick's blog comes to mind :D).

So, what's today's generation of zero-attention-span kids to do?  Sign up for twitter, of course.

Twitter is, Don MacAskill appropriately called it, a service for microblogging.  It's optimized for very short, simple posts.  It will even prompt you periodically via SMS or IM to find out what you're doing.  After a quick setup you can add your mobile phone number and Twitter will send you an SMS every 24 hours if you haven't updated (a reply to the SMS will post right to your twitter log).  You can also add twitter as an IM buddy if you're using the right service.

It's a fascinating little toy, with all the needed components to make it entertaining for all of about a week (friends lists, ease of use and cool little widgets to add to your other web pages).  For me, however, the signal to noise ratio is way too high to be useful.  There is a public timeline which is sure to get crowded with legitimate and illegitimate spam (when I checked there were two posts within minutes from BBC sports) and switching to a private timeline will require a set of friends as exhibitionistic as yourself.

Still... entertaining enough to play with for a while... though I won't be able to afford to have the SMS notifications turned on (the closest local text is the UK).