Prologues and Epilogues

I think The Wire may be on the verge of overtaking The Prisoner as my all time favorite TV show. I don’t like TV, but this is something else. Herc had a great one liner from the last episode, “The Prologue”:

[Carver is giving Herc a hard time for meekly asking a girl out for some coffee.]

Herc: “Hey listen. I was gonna ask for her panties to make some soup with, but I was afraid she’d take it the wrong way.”

What a busy day. I

What a busy day. I never cease to be surprised when life just takes off and leaves me running after it.

After months of horking around, we finally updated the apt minds design website. Hopefully we can get two more websites wrapped up this week and then we won’t have any left to do. Then I’ve just got one big, hard, Miva thing to finish and it’s back to working on my little web gadgets.

And they lived happily ever after...

For those of you who remember your Huntsville lore, Talking Girl is now engaged. No dates have been set. Considering the fact that she lives in Pittsburgh and he lives in Austin they have some not insignificant hurdles to overcome first.

I’m surprised and happy. Listening: Let Me Go Home - Alan Parsons Project

NOAA re-evaluates forecasting models

The Christian Broadcasting Network is running a story that blames bad weather on the Israeli peace process. The insects in Utah and the tornadoes in Oklahoma apparently are examples of this.

I sincerely hope it was just miscategorized as “News” or that CBN viewers realize it’s not news. Listening: Human Cannonball - Butthole Surfers

Text editing sweetness

I was checking out the Apple Design Awards and saw this cool editor. It’s called Hydra. Basically it lets multiple people edit the same document at the same time. While not an original idea, it is certainly one of the best implementations I’ve seen. It uses Rendezvous to find people on the local network sharing documents and let’s you join a shared document. You can also do it over the Internet. It color codes changes according to who made them and does syntax highlighting. They apparently envisioned this as a great application for doing XP Pair Programming.

Emily speaks

[…While rummaging through some of my old toys with Emily…] “Cool, but boring.”

What a day

Get up and get into a fight with Rebecca. Later get into a little fight with Dave. Later in the afternoon get into a fight with Leia. I had a sort of perfect storm of problems raise their head over the past couple of days. Stuff with Dave, Leia, Rebecca, money, and travel all converged to make it upsetting. Then the one person I always fight with, my conservative Republican step-father, no raised voices at all. Go figure.

TV series I miss War

TV series I miss War of the Worlds (1988), Friday the 13th (1987), Tales from the Crypt (1989), and Brimstone (1998).

War of the Worlds had a neat premise, that the aliens didn’t die from the bacteria on Earth they just went into a coma while their bodies dealt with the bacteria. In the first season they take over human bodies since that can protect them and they start infiltrating government. The first season followed a small group trying to prove that this was happening. Then came one of the most shocking series twists I’ve ever seen. A different alien force came to Earth and began wiping out the original alien invaders and the humans. Main characters from the first season were slaughtered. Listening: Take Me Somwhere Nice - Mogwai

Render unto Riley what is Riley's

Alabama Republican governor slashes taxes on poor increases taxes on rich. How often do you see news like that? Apparently Gov. Riley’s justification for this is believe it or not the bible. The New York Times has an Op-Ed piece that wonders What would Jesus do?. Do Bush and Riley read the same bible? I’m surprised to see the bible used as a reason to put through progressive tax reform. Is this the beginning of a split between Christian conservatives? Listening: Leave That Thing Alone - Rush Feeling: confused

movie singularity event

What a great movie discussion. Tonight is the reason I started going in the first place. Someone new made it to the discussion and I have this sense that she is the closest I’ve found to my particular tastes in movies. When she said she looked for stuff to shock the shit out of her my ears perked up. She was very active in the discussion. Atom Egoyan, Hal Hartley, Peter Greenaway, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad these names came out of her as easily as the names of old friends. Originally I’d planned to go see The Sea but I was so engaged in the discussion I didn’t want to give it up. The group dwindled down to me, her and Chris.