Adaptation was an interesting movie. Kaufmann is a creative writer and Nicolas Cage was impressive as was the trick photography used to make these characters interact with each other.
The movie is intertwined with itself on several levels. The movie was about the writing of the screenplay adaptation of a book, a screenplay that included the characters from the real-life story, the movie mirrored the actual thought process behind the screenwriting and the characters adapted to life the way the subject of the movie/book/article, orchids, adapt to their environment. All in all, very clever, interesting and entertaining.
After over three months without my iBook, I’ve finally got it back and am posting this with it! Earlier this year, my iBook started exhibiting the “Angle of Death” problem: if the screen is opened to too large an angle, the screen would go black. I needed a replacement cable so I disassembled the iBook. That is not advisable, there are a zillion tiny little screws of differing sizes and you have to completely disassemble the entire laptop. A couple screws wouldn’t even come out so I had to drill them out.
The replacement cable wasn’t even easy to order. It took several calls and emails to SmallDog, but I finally got it. After disassembling the laptop, I was skeptical that the new cable would fix it since the old one didn’t look frayed as I expected it to be. But I put the new one in anyway and I got it all put back together this evening, powered it up and it works great. I’ve got a few extra screws somehow, though.
This morning I got a comment to my I hate Google post that was clearly very angry and very defensive about Google from someone who clearly didn’t understand what I was talking about. I deleted it since it was full of expletives. I thought it was weird to get a comment on such an old post but then I did a search on Google for “I hate Google” and it’s the #2 item in the results.
Google is a good search engine (I use it almost exclusively) but they’re not perfect and they clearly made some mistakes when designing GoogleAds. And yes, I do think that Google has too much power already.
In a Boston Globe editorial, here’s an accurate and true description of Bush’s accomplishments during his Presidency:
By recklessly cutting taxes, President Bush has enriched the wealthy and neglected the poor, sent the federal budget deficit to record heights, and imposed a colossal financial burden on the coming generation. He has revived the culture wars by flaunting his Christian faith and by promoting traditional values. He has undermined public schools by supporting school choice. He has eroded the wall of separation between church and state by seeking federal funding for faith-based charities. He threatens to reverse decades of progress in civil rights by packing the judiciary with right-wing extremists. He has alienated our European allies with his crude cowboy diplomacy and provided a legitimate basis for anti-Americanism around the world. And he has knowingly deceived the American people in a matter of grave national importance by resting his case for war against Iraq on trumped-up charges about weapons of mass destruction.
But then the author, who I’m embarrassed to say is a professor at my college, goes on to defend Bush’s Presidency. Bush has a poor history of leadership before the Presidency (ran two corporations into the ground) and a terribly poor Presidency as described above. Isn’t that enough to accurately judge someone’s ability to performa a job? Or can everything be reasoned away with “what ifs and “maybes” and optimistic predictions? Only in politics.
Imagine if the average worker in the US had the luxury of performing poorly at their job, harming their employer, harming the community, causing a negative image of the company to the outside world, lying about their job and then able to expect not to be fired because their intentions may not have been as bad as their actions and consequences indicate?
We went to a (co-ed) baby shower for our friends Steve (Biff) and Renuka at Raynu & Paul’s house. Gay won “gourmet soap” playing a baby name game. The food (flank steak and salmon) was yummy. Raynu & Paul’s house is very well-decorated and motivates me to start decorating our house we’ve been in for two years now with barely a picture on a wall.
We got them a baby car seat, a Pittsburgh Steelers bib that reads “Little Steelers Fan” and a Steelers baby bottle. Biff is a big Steelers fan and, coincidentally, I was too for years until I moved to Seattle and can’t get Steeler games on TV.
Then we had to hurry and leave to catch the 11:30pm ferry back to Vashon. It seems like we’re always rushing to catch a ferry.
Someone else sees the parallel between the TiVo and TV and RSS Newsreaders and News: A number of parallels have been drawn between RSS newsreaders and TiVo, but they all seem to take a narrow viewpoint of this very powerful model. The problem is today’s RSS Newsreaders recreate the complexity of programming your VCR, instead of the ease of use of TiVo.
Last night we had dinner at Zoë, which is one of our favorite restaurants with my friend Adam and his new fiancé Lauren (and they paid!). The food was good still, but the portions have gotten smaller. Small as in what Lauren’s diamond ring is not… 4 carats! It’s like wearing a ping pong ball. I think his son can just chip off a piece of it when he proposes to someone. (Gay, you are not getting a $66,000 ring…. ever).
We planned today’s Urban Challenge that they participated in. They finished 36th out of 100 in three-and-a-half hours, 1.5 hours behind the winners. We were their Googlers so we had to figure out the answers to the clues and guide them around the city. We got all the questions right, except for the one that Adam misread. And navigating them around the streets was tough, especially since they weren’t very familiar with Seattle.
Friends Adam and Lauren are competing in Seattle’s Urban Challenge right now. They are on their way to the final two checkpoints, so we don’t yet know how they did. Troy and I served as their “Googlers”, meaning they read us the clues, we solved them and gave them a bus or running route between their destinations (you have to take your picture in front of each checkpoint in order with a digital camera). This is a hugely fun running-treasure- hunt-style game played in cities around the country (Adam and Lauren placed 13th in San Francisco earlier this year). Read on if you want to try your hand at the clues we got…
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As a benefit of flying home for a funeral, I saw my mom’s new house, er, farm in Deer Park. It is really nice, and we should have a photo blog up so I could actually post more than a couple pictures…
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My godfather, Pat Craigen, died last week, just four months after his wife, my godmother, Jean. I made a quick overnight flight to Spokane to attend his funeral, and I’m very glad I did. I saw lots of old friends of my family, and, well, felt a part of someone’s life. Pat was fondly remembered by half of Spokane it seems — my mom worked for him for 15 years and Craigens were her godparents as well. Had you known Pat and Jean you would not be surprised that they followed each other so closely after 54 years of marriage. Likewise, I saw one of their remaining friends, Vern, struggling to survive now that his best friends and wife Lucy are now all gone.
