Timeline

Now, here’s a movie that I don’t think I “got.”

I read the book and I have to say that the characters and the science that Crichton put in there was expertly sucked out for the purposed of the film. It moved like a constant stream of punchlines… one after another… people talking and talking at one another, discovering clues that might have well been tossed in from another movie’s plot.

I’m thinking I’ll get the thing when it comes out on DVD — next week — and add a laugh track to the thing. That should frame the whole picture better.

Virtual PC

I’ve written about this before, but I have to say, this application is so sweet. Today, my corporate IT person finally sat down and configured all the security and corporate apps in the Windows XP custom install they do on all our corporate assets. The thing works like a champ. Got the Nortel VPN working as a service now so that when I’m working at home, the thing just logs in as I boot — logs me into the domain, no less. No more static IPs, it finds its tunnel on it’s own.

Man, I don’t like to have to have it running on my machine, but that Windows makes me transparent in an all-PC environment and let’s me continue to use the PB? Cheap at any price.

Birthday

Tomorrow’s my birthday. It’s my thirty-first. It’s also the first taking into account my new resolution to never work again on my birthday. I put in for vacation three months ago, cleared my schedule, and am right now preparing for my day tomorrow.

As it stands, all the friends I’d planned on playing hookie with for the day are abandoning me for one reason or another. Ted’s unlce died. That’s legit, of course. Dumb luck that the funeral would be on a day of freedom. Why couldn’t it be on a day with something worth canceling? Curt’s got his weekly scoring class in Seattle. I don’t know if this one is as legit as a death in the family, but he’s spent a ton in gas so far so I can understand how missing one week would be a blow to his educational ROI. And of course, Kira has to go to school.

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DVD Madness

This is such a sweet little machine. I burned my first DVD today — a selection of the movies I’ve been making of Sophie over the last year and a half. The process was a breeze, finished in about and hour and a half, and popped the disc right out. I immediately tested it on the laptop itself, where the DVD opened and worked right away.

Then, I put the disc in my TV DVD player. It’s an older Toshiba drive, apparently made in the days before DVD-R and the likes and no, in fact, the thing failed. That’s frustrating. Here I have these projects that I’m queuing up and targeting output on DVD and I can’t even watch the results on my own set. This is where a standards-based industry direction, whether in software OR hardware manufacturing, really would come in handy. Would the Sony’s of the world PLEASE quit dicking around with your own crap and make something that everyone can use? [ed. I know, oversimplification. I'm ranting and I'm pissed]

As it turns out, my Playstation 2 of all things plays the DVD from my Superdrive just fine. So, now I’m only pissed in principle. But I’m still pissed.

Swath of Destruction

So, I’m home for lunch today and it was time to feed Sophie. I tried some soup. No go. I tried some cereal. No go. Finally, I tried some yogurt and with ground up pumpkin seeds in it and she was happy. So happy in fact that she proceeded to create one of the biggest messes I’ve seen since she learned to feed herself with a spoon. As it happens, I was off at the sink washing dishes, only vaguely aware of what was going on behind me. When I did turn around, there was Sophie, all right, covered in food and seeds, sound asleep.

MPAA/Matrix: Revolutions

I went to see the Matrix: Revolutions on Saturday. While there, waiting through the obnoxiosnous that is “The Twenty” now playing at Regal Cinemas, I saw an anti-piracy add by the MPAA. OK, that’s about as related as these two topics are going to get in this post.

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Hanging out at the Potty with Sophie

I haven’t written much about Sohpie lately. Come to think of it, I haven’t written much about nuthin lately. And I think, as irony would have it, that’s because there’s simply so much going on.

Rather than boil it all down and catch up the annals of history with detail, I’ll boil it down to this. Sophie is 17 months old and this morning she went to the bathroom by herself. She was running around naked while Kira and I were getting ready for the day when she dissappeared for a few minutes. She came back into the room clapping and saying “YayYayYayYay!” Kira went into the bathroom and came back hollering “She gets it She gets it She gets it!” Which might as well have been “YayYayYay!” We all stood around the toilet and waved “Bye” at the pee as it flushed away.

These kids, they’re pretty amazing little creatures.

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Cell Carriers that Don’t Get It

Here’s the latest spread on the cell carriers charging for number portablilty. T-Mobile is not charging a dime and is actually giving loyalty minutes away. All the others are charging. Funny, I have a rouding chorus of “one of these things is not like the other one” rolling through my head. I know around my office, where we happen to have corporate contracts with both T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless, we’re seeing mass defections over this issue. I’m an AT&T guy myself and I have to say, T-Mobile, I salute you, savvy corporate citizen.

Gizmodo : The results are in: what the carriers are charging each month for portability

Apple PowerBook 12″

I finally have it in my hands. It’s beautiful. My new Powerbook 12″ arrived at my office at 9:01am this morning and, as only the most beautiful irony would have it, our IT guy Nathan delivered it personally to my desk. He wanted to see it. He wanted to touch it. He wanted to insert and eject CDs from the Superdrive over and over again.

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