Category: Work

Out of the frying pan, into the movie theatre

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Another week down. And very productive work-wise, I might add. I got so much stuff done that I didn’t feel bad leaving at 3:45 to go see a movie. X-Men 3 (imdb | rotten tomatoes) wasn’t bad; nothing special, and worse dialog than the first two, but good end-of-the-week entertainment.

The weekend’s shaping up to be an entertaining one; movie tonight, bbq and poker w/ T-Bone et al tomorrow and dinner with CBGB Sunday. Somewhere in there I have to shoehorn in a bunch of marketing.

Giddyup.

[tags]x-men 3, poker, bbq, weekend shenanigans[/tags]

Acronymrods

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It drives me nuts when people giving presentations use dozens of acronyms…not commonly used acronyms either, but acronyms that only their team and a few other teams use. Usually I don’t care enough about the topic to ask for clarification, and I can figure out every third or fourth acronym, but I feel bad for the new people.

Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends.

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Busy day. Got to work around 7:30 and left around 7:00. I can’t really remember doing anything major today, just a pile of little things. Seems like that’s all I can get done anymore. I’m thinking about booking a small room for myself one afternoon every week…no email or phone, just a notepad and a pen and my brain.

Anyway, it was partly busy ’cause I’m away all next week. Course number…6, I think. A friend of mine from university is coming into town tomorrow, and I have about 10 other things on the go, so I have lots to do between now and Sunday morning.

.:.

I just pre-ordered the fifth season of Six Feet Under. Good thing Nellie has her Young Riders nostalgia to keep her occupied, otherwise I don’t think she could keep her mitts off the SFU discs until I get home.

.:.

I’ve been pretty silent on music & movies lately. This is what I’ve bought in the last month or so:

  • Living Things . Ahead Of The Lions
  • Cat Power . The Greatest
  • Rogue Wave . Descended Like Vultures
  • Trespassers William . Having
  • Mogwai . Mr. Beast
  • Neko Case . Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

I also have new albums from Ben Harper, Gomez, the Fiery Furnaces and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in my ‘inbox’ waiting to be reviewed. The new ones from Clearlake, Magneta Lane, Rainer Maria and Beth Orton are on my wishlist.

As far as movies that are still out in Toronto that I want to see:

  • Ask The Dust
  • Beowulf & Grendel
  • Cache
  • Inside Man
  • Match Point
  • Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story
  • V For Vendetta
  • Why We Fight

The movies coming up this spring/summer that I really want to see: American Dreamz, Flight 93 and X-Men 3.

Of Mice and Lem

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Finally back at work today. Still not at 100%, but at least I no longer feel like patient zero.

.:.

CH (the local channel that picks up Global Television’s scraps) has pissed us off once again where The Shield is concerned. Nellie discovered that, with two episodes left in the season, they’d moved the show without announcing it. Good thing she noticed when she did; the finale is this Sunday (which I’ll miss ’cause I’ll be on course…gack!!), so we had to bittorrent the second-to-last episode. And maaaaaaaaaaan, is it gettin’ good. To take a show that good and add Forest Whitaker…it’s almost too much. I’m practically giddy thinking about the showdown that’s coming up. There’s not much on TV that can catch my interest like this.

Come to Tsukuba. We're Number 53!!

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Today was one of those days when I just didn’t sit down long enough to do anything until about 4:00. Hence, I forgot to post to Girlfriend Du Jour, forgot to update my hockey and basketball pools (costing myself some points) and haven’t posted anything to my blogs (work-related or personal). But all four of my meetings were good, I got a pile of work done between 4:00 and 7:00 and I still got home in time to watch Montreal pound Boston.

.:.

Another by-city quality-of-life index. Toronto tied for 14th, Vancouver finished 3rd. Five Canadian cities finished in the top 25, but 3 Swiss and 3 German cities finished in the top 10. And as if I didn’t want to visit Geneva and Switzerland already, they finished 1-2.

Oh, to be a blue Versace dress…

Dan Dickinson

OK, so, the Oscars:

  • Jon Stewart: very funny. I think he kicked ass (especially the Cheney joke and the “Three 6 Mafia: one Oscar; Martin Scorsese: zero” bit) but I don’t think they’ll ask him back. I think his humour goes over the head of a lot of the viewers.
  • God bless God for making Salma Hayek.
  • Crash didn’t deserve to win best picture. It was good, but it wasn’t the best of the year. Likewise, Reese Witherspoon. Good, but not even in the same league as Felicity Huffman in Transamerica. Rachel Weisz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, George Clooney: well deserved, all.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

.:.

As I said yesterday, we watched three movies over the weekend:

  • North Country (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was pretty good, but not as spectacular as we were led to believe. Basically equal parts Norma Rae and Dead Poets Society, with some Fargo thrown in accent-wise. Worth a rent, though.
  • Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was up for best documentary, so I wanted to watch it before last night. I love documentaries, and this was a good’un; slick production, topical story and a truth bizarre enough to be prize-winning fiction. Highly, highly recommended.
  • 9 Songs (imdb | rotten tomatoes) is one of those films that I think I liked, but could never recommend to people. It was porn, basically. We knew it was nothing but concert footage (of some very good bands, by the way) interspersed with some dialogue and some explicit sex scenes, but we didn’t know how explicit it would be. It’s the kind of stuff they can’t even show on cable, not even on shows about porn. But it wasn’t tawdry, or exploitative; it was a pretty accurate representation of the lives of a couple as they go to concerts at the Brixton Academy, eat breakfast, go on holiday and fuck repeatedly. If you’re the type who can see filmed sex (and filmed music) as art, you might like it. If nothing else, it’s an interesting experiment.

.:.

There’s a bunch of stuff in the news that caught my eye:

  • South Dakota has, for all intents and purposes, banned abortion. America must be a very scary place for a lot of people right now.
  • Toronto Hydro plans to roll out citywide wi-fi like some other major cities in North America.
  • Halifax is still debating the construction of two towers in the downtown core. Personally, I think they should do it; no matter what you build in Halifax, if it’s more than 10 stories, it’s going to block somebody’s view of the citadel or the harbour. I’m sure people thought Purdy’s Wharf was a giant mistake too, but it’s become just as much a part of the cityscape as another building there.

.:.

Today was a long, unpleasant day at work. [Corleone] I keep getting sucked back in [/Corleone] to the technical stuff; moral of the story: never believe someone when they say they won’t expect a temporary solution to become a production solution. They spaz when the so-called temporary solution goes away, even though it’s not your job to provide them with anything. I did my part, I was a nice guy, I saved their ass for a month, but I made sure to wash my hands of it. Still, I got it done and managed to fix a few other things as well. Best of all, I have no meetings scheduled for tomorrow, so I have a whole day to catch up on the work that I’ve missed by essentially wasting my last two weekdays.

I have the sudden virus.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I seem to have come down with a cold in the last couple of hours. Bam, just like that. Stuffed up, sort throat, the works. Booo, colds.

.:.

Sometimes I like doing geek stuff again. Taking computers apart, setting up hard drives, creating databases, generating something. It’s nice to actually see a tangible result sometimes. Meeting minutes don’t count.

I'm having a thermal event

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No, not a hot flash.

The test server (read: unauthorized blog server) we use at work had a bit of a meltdown this morning. It seems that it’s fallen prey to a common affliction for this particular Dell configuration. This morning I noticed that it wasn’t running; when I tried to start it up it told me that the previous shutdown had been because of a “thermal event.” I’ve been around computers for a while, but that one was new to me. Anyway, as that link points out, it’s a faulty motherboard capacitor problem, not a problem with the hard drive as I thought initially, so there’s not much to be done about it. Luckily a replacement was already on the way.

.:.

Check out preview.local.live.com (in IE); it looks pretty but doesn’t seem to serve any functional purpose. Like Paris Hilton or my appendix.

Actually, come to that, both of those things are pretty fucking ugly.