So, this post has been coming for a long time, but I really haven’t had any reason to post. I’m quite sorry about it, and I realize that my last post rolled well over a couple weeks ago, so yeah… I’ll work on it.

My weeks in movies, that’s one topic I decided I wanted to cover with this post. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve seen 4 movies, I think. Underworld, Lost in Translation, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Intolerable Cruelty (in that order). Let me cover them all real quick: giving a quick opinion.

1. Underworld. Good, the female lead is cute, the supporting actor that plays the head Vampire is quite cool. Would I pay full price to see it again? no. See it when it hits the cheap theater.

2. Lost in Translation. See it. Amazing movie. Sophia Coppola has 2 great movies under her belt, and I can’t wait to see what she produces as she goes on in life. She is going to be like her father, produces little, but all of it quality. Oh, and the female lead… HOT.

3. Kill Bill Vol 1. What can I say? Covert and I (and Outlaw too to my knowledge) love revenge movies. There’s so much potential there for truly brilliant action, and gruesome actions toward other people (mentally and physically). This movie is very Tarentino. Great shots, amazing soundtrack, and really, I have to agree with Gene Siskel, this movie was very much about the genre of Samurai movies of the 50’s-70’s and not so much about the story. Nevertheless, since I have seen the movie, I have wanted to go see it again and again. Not for the hemophobic, but I will say that while there is a huge amount of blood in the movie, almost all of it is humorous in nature. Then again, I was shown in Psychology that laughter is a common human response to an uncomfortable situation… so it could be that it was humorous only for that… but I tend to think just because most of the bleeding was such an exercise in hyperbole as to be hilarious rather than grotesque.

4. Intolerable Cruelty. Coen Brothers to the core. As usual, a story that may have been covered before, but not to the level that they cover it. A tried and true story, often almost Shakespearean with humor infused throughout. Amazing fight scene as seen in Raising Arizona, or the couple in Barton Fink, or the rather violent/graphic one in Fargo. This one involving a rather lovely character named “Weezey Joe”. Clooney plays his part wonderfully and very reminiscent of his role in O Brother Where art Thou. Catherine Zeta Jones does a wonderful job, even without her husband. 😉 I highly suggest going and seeing this movie if you’re a Coen brother’s fan. If you’re not, or are unfamiliar with their work, see it anyway… and if you’re a cheapskate, wait until it hits the $1.50 theater and see it there. Then go rent the rest of their movies and see those. Please don’t ask me to rank their movies, I don’t think I could.

If I was to rank these four in the order I’d suggest seeing them, then I’d have to go: 2, 3, 4, 1. But 3 and 4 are very close. And 2 is my main suggestion because I think it’s amazing… Bill Murray is wonderful, Johansenn is amazing, and Coppola is perfect. I hope it gets some nom… though I’m not sure what. Kill Bill will, and Cruelty will too… but they are mainstream movies. Lost in Translation is just now getting main stream coverage at major movieplexes, so my hope is that it will gain the acclaim it deserves. Though, I will say, it takes a few minutes to get over the Japanese references.

School is interesting. I’m taking a whole lot of chemistry, and when I can convince myself to go, I rather enjoy it. Really, I’m pretty burnt out. I know it’s just a whining, but I really haven’t had a good long vacation in a long time. I really just need to go somewhere. But, I really don’t know where. Work is interesting, and overall pretty uneventful, but building up to to Winter Break. For those of you who have seen the Jschool, we will be upgrading our really old shitty lab (full of 7500s and beige G3’s) to be all modern. Flat Panel 17″ iMacs. The bitch is still going to be print accounting, but hopefully we can get that taken care of. It will so speed up the lab. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about quark or pagemaker, but that’s all Andre’s job to figure out.

On that note, I must say I love MacOS 10.3… I have been running the final build for some time. The biggest thing, I must say, is that on my 12″ powerbook, it makes my machine run much cooler.

Some of this post was done while I was in Central Oregon over the weekend. Could be the last time I go over there. My Grandparents put the property up for sale. Really has me pretty upset. I’ll miss that place a lot if I can’t go over there anymore. It’s been around longer than I have, so I always remember going over there and enjoying the dry heat, thunderstorms, beautiful landscape, etc. Probably one of the main reasons I believe Oregon is the most amazing and pretty state there is. And I’ve been to a lot of the states, though I must admit, not all of the areas within them.

Well, anywho, I should go. I’ll try to make another post by the end of the week, but I’m not making any promises. Thank you for being so patient and not bugging me about my lack of posting, or the nice black background you see since my last post rolled. I think I might have some different posting topics if I get a chance to post again. Partially sparked by books I’m reading, and partially by what’s taking up a lot of my free time at work and home… watching Good Eats.

See ya.

So, yeah, I let it roll again. so sue me. I’ve been busy at work, and when I come home all I want to do is sleep or play with linux. There are 3 laptops all wandering around the palce with various ssh sessions logged into the TiVo box I’m working on, or the server, or whatever. It’s relaxing. And I’m learning from it. That and and all the patches are starting to get on my nerves. But, I’ll say one thing, I’m a whore. I find a distro of linux, and I fall in love with it, and then wonder how all the other distros aren’t this cool. This month/year it’s gentoo. Debian is cool and all, but it’s so friggin’ behind the times with versions, and just is overall not quite as friendly to installing software that there aren’t .debs for. Sure, gentoo may take a long time to install, but it’s so much fun to have a completely optimized and custom system at your fingertips. Eh, geek.

Work has been hell. And I hate Microsoft with all my blackened heart. We are trying to move people off an Exchange 5.5 mail server running on an old DEC Alpha Box, with NT 4.0 on it. We’re moving them to the campus mail server. A good move, but a bitch to do. Exchange doesn’t want to let us go… so it throws these phantom messages into people’s mailboxes that the mail transfer program freaks out about, and then bails. The sooner we’re off this thing the better. We finally killed the other NT4 box, and it’s so much quieter in here. Once we kill the dead UPS and the Alpha box, it’ll be quiet quiet in here. I so want to put linux on the alpha… but, that’ll have to wait until we’re quite done with it.

Lets see, what else. I got my bike. Oh gods, do I love it. And shoes, it’s so much different to ride a bike with clipless shoes. The official line is 40% more efficient… but there’s just something really cool about being able to push and pull yourself up a hill. They really have a learning curve… not just the whole method of clipping in, and then clipping out (else you fall over… which I have yet to do). Those both come fairly easily. The much longer process is learning to use both the down and the upstroke to create an equal energy stroke, and create a nice very low impact ride. That takes months… so, I’ll keep that part up, and getting to the point that clipping in and out are 2nd nature. I have some accessories to buy (shoes, a purse to match my top… lol), like a saddle bag, some fenders (a stratocaster, a precision bass, hehe). A light will be a fairly major purchase because I want to buy a nice halogen with a rechargable pack. Those usually run 80-120 bucks, so that’s a bit later (like, when I have to start riding in the dark). Also a must is rain gear… I think I can see my birthday list coming.

So Covert is gone, Kat is gone, and Val is gone. And of all of them, I’ve really only talked to Val since she left. Kat has net access (since she posts to her blog), but Covert seems quite preoccupied. I mean, the least he could do would be to tell me what’s going to happen tomorrow. To answer his question, or rather, statement, I don’t think I’m quite like a Californian with a recall ballot. I didn’t get this pushed on me by someone else. I wanted the job. And like all the people that hopefully will be voting for the elected and rightful governer of California (no, not Arnold Schwartzenegger), I will stick it out. I’m just frightened to see my schedule for this upcoming year. Yes, that’s right, I haven’t registered yet. Why? cause none of the classes I sign up for ever fill up. And I’m lazy.

I would post pictures of my bike, but I haven’t taken any yet. I really just need to get the pictures part of my site up, but I keep forgetting to do some brain storming with Kilo to figure out how to do what I want to do. In the interim, I will put the stuff up manually. gah, I hate doing manual work when you can write a perl script to do it better. The main bitch is, Kilo will probably either A. do all the work himself and I will learn nothing from it. 😉 or B. want to use MySQL to do it, when a few simple text files will do. Either way, I should have a test page up, maybe, within the next few days. I just need to find what pictures I want to populate it with. I also need to get the personal info up, which likewise will require some newer pictures of me. Gar…

Well, I think that’s it for now, I can’t really think of anything else. Tom is on vacation this week, so my previous week of hell can no go into the nether regions of my mind… ah, /dev/null

You know… I am starting to long for the days of sitting around Microservices not doing anything. This job is actually starting to piss me off. So now I’m working on discovering a migration issue… but it’s so tediously mindnumbingly boring that I think I’m going to shoot myself in the foot just to watch myself bleed. It’s that bad… probably worse. I am wanting to say “fuck em”… let them live without old mail.

On the life outside of work, it’s okay… though I’m losing several friends for a year or more to overseas. Covert to Japan, Kat to Japan, Val to Austria, and Bonnie to Italy. Then you have Justin going back to Seattle. gar… and a friend from SakuraCon is being antisocial (at least to me), so I can’t say hi to her. On the plus side, Shanna is back in town, so I’ll have SOMEONE to hang out with. Hope that all goes well and nothing too bad comes from this whole new mingling of roommates. Me? I just want to go sleep at this point… I haven’t been sleeping enough… grrrrr….