So, what have I been up to lately. Not a lot, really. Saturday I caught up with Julius before he went back to Germany. Got flashed by a red light camera in Menlo Park on the way back from that, which was just awesome. Not a lot I could have done about that; wrong place at the wrong time. There goes another thousand dollars I didn’t need, no worries. Most pointedly, unlike the previous incident with the turning right on red business, this was no epiphany – as I already said, I wasn’t really doing anything wrong, just a victim of circumstance, so it’s real hard to swallow. Especially since the retard in front of me at the time was the major cause for the whole thing, and it’s almost certain she’s never had and never will have any infractions against her. I’d be cool with all the road laws if they weren’t so personal.
I finally have my tax crap ready for processing. The whole “oh yes all your monies belong to us” business has been resolved and the ongoing financial burden isn’t too bad, all in all.
I saw a cop pull over a bicyclist on Monday, presumably for running a stop sign. Which is sad, because you’d have a hard time finding any car that doesn’t run the stop signs on that particular intersection. It’s always a tad interesting going through that in the morning, if I hit the busy time. And it was raining.
I installed Safari 4 about ten minutes ago, and am still admiring my big screen full of shiny grey boxes with icons in them. Not sure what the purpose of all these grey boxes is, with their ugly, aliased edges, but, far be it from me to question.
I started doing push-ups again last week, for the first time in… well, since I was an intern, I think. I started doing sit-ups as well this week… which is to say once, yesterday… now my sides hurt. I went to the gym last night for the first time in nearly two months, I reckon… and followed up tonight. Somehow I have not gained any weight since I stopped going, which puzzles me, as aside from being decisively less fit I also feel more cuddly.
Before Canada and after (well, after the sickness passed) I had a bit of a run seeing movies in the cinema more nights than not. But then I ran out of really compelling movies, and once I reached the movies involving cheerleader camps and fashion, I had to put a stop to it (if only because going to such movies by yourself, being a guy, is even more embarrassing than normal). On the upside, Watchmen apparently comes out tomorrow night, and there’s a few other things in the next few weeks which might be good too..
Early this week I reached the end of the TV show Coupling, which I’ve been watching steadily for many weeks courtesy of Netflix. The quality is rubbish, their servers are overloaded or down outright more often than not, and their stupid Silverlight player requires most of my iMac’s attention – and won’t even play back video smoothly on a MacBook. If it weren’t for Coupling having a strong audio focus I’d have given up. I’ve more or less given up on watching streaming movies from Netflix. I have instead tried out two movies from the iTMS.
The first was Platoon. I didn’t realise it was so dark, and serious. And surprisingly good. And it contains pretty much every A-list male actor of today, including Johnny Depp (though he’s in it for what, maybe three seconds?) and John McKinley, who seems to pop up in war movies all over the place.
The second was Lord of War, which was rather good, though it would have been more entertaining if it weren’t depressingly close to reality in certain key respects.
My car decided that it had developed a fault on Saturday morning. With all the amazing technology and full-text displays in it, it conveys this fact by illuminating an engine-shaped mask. Exactly like my 1986 Commodore did. Using the exact same engine outline, as far as I recall. This awesomely flexible image can convey any type of malfunction, anywhere on the car. On the down side, some might say it’s a little ambiguous.
So I took it in to get looked at, and unsurprisingly they found nothing wrong with it. So they turned the light off. “Bring it back in if it happens again”. Right. My money’s on the idiot sensor that also, periodically, tells me the fuel cap isn’t on. Perhaps there’s a second fuel cap somewhere on my car that I’m not aware of. I guess I haven’t noticed it because it’s apparently missing; that would explain it. I shall have to conduct a search at some point. Put some ads on Craigslist or somesuch.
Also, I discovered that at some point in the progression of Leopard software updates, Rosetta got some pretty sweet bug fixes which now allow Homeworld 2 to run flawlessly. Aside from the performance, which is a bit sad on six player maps, but still… on the downside, that pretty much details my Sunday. And Tuesday night.
I’ve been working quite late most nights, since just before Canada in fact. Partly because I wasn’t going to the gym, which was in turn a result of a particularly poorly placed blister on my toe (the result of going to the gym… my shoes have become quite loose, inexplicably, as of two months ago). On the upside, that has meant eating at work, which means I can route directly from the front door to my bed, and out again, and have minimal exposure to the shifting, possibly sentient mess. Also, we have no spoons. I don’t know where they’ve gone. We literally have no spoons. But we have about thirty knives. I’ve been using disposable plastic cutlery. It should strike me as bizarre if it weren’t already status quo.
But most importantly, Safari 4 still has not loaded one single web page preview for its evidently useless ‘Top Sites’ view. Go Safari 4. It’s also slower to load web pages, so far, than Safari 3. Yep, awesome.
Contrary to the general tone of all of the above, I’m not donning eye shadow and listening to the Cure… I’m just grumpy that I got home too late to play Homeworld 2. ;)
