In which our hero finally sits his two little ones down in front of Star Wars. It might be the “fixed” version, but it looks pretty good. When they get older, we’ll get into the whole thing about how the “real” version is the “best” version. Han shot first, dammit (but in this version they shoot at the same time, and that Greedo is a lousy shot, lemme just say).
Laundry night (writing in bits and pieces while hauling stuff). Tate and I went to Sport Ball at the West End Rec Center tonight, which meant leaving a little early from work, and hauling butt up the hill on my bike, so I could then walk back down the other side of the hill with Tate. Cycling’s going really well, I think, since I’ve only NOT rode my bike for maybe four days since starting, and I had a Dr’s note for that. Really. Like, specific “No riding a bike for at least a week” kinda instructions.
So, SportBall, or “Dad & Me” class. Imagine a half-dozen or so kids between 3 & 4 running around with an equal number of dads, all playing sorta-kinda sports. Each week is a different sport. The first week was soccer, sorta-ish, and this week was basketball.
Tate *hearts* the running and kicking and throwing, but sometimes his natural inventiveness gets the better of him, and he wants to roll the hulahoop and then chase it WHILE trying to throw the ball through it (to me).
In the control room Luke and the gang hole up in, there are large reddish buckets near the door. What’s in those things? Toner for the printers? Buckets of new helmets? Wine? I bet it’s wine. No wonder the StormTroopers are such bad shots. They should have all just set their guns on stun, and blue hoopie-thingied the hallways every five minutes.
Little tip – if you want your movie to keep rolling along, and have anybody get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, don’t let someone like *me* do the sanity check. I can derail just about anything for a good long time with silly questions like “but if it’s a jail, why is there a garbage chute *right* next to the cells?”
So I hear through the grapevine today that EA’s letting more people go without warning. Must be nice to let people get through the weekend, thinking they missed the cut, and then hit them again on Monday. How do they start that conversation? “Hey, remember how you were saying goodbye to people on Thursday? You get to see them again sooner than you think.” The only thing worse would have been to terminate on Friday, with everyone dressed up.
Hey you, yeah you, the pirate, yarrrrrrrr fired.
Talking to my friend on the ground, who’s got a little more insight than most, they’re weeding people below a certain “usefulness” level, meaning, as he put it “If you’re a producer or up, you’re safe.”
In other news, Microsoft seems to be freaking out rapidly releasing operating systems, or at least, letting us “Field Test” things a lot sooner than I thought would happen. Windows 7 is getting some buzz, probably in order to get people to stop slagging Vista, which was so badly received, it’s caused people to move their entire household to Mac’s OSX instead of messing with Vista any more. There’s this Azure Cloud thing that looks like some kind of application development thing that happens “In the cloud” of clustered systems. Perhaps the Linux community will grab the idea and start building something similar with a pricing structure similar to uh… to uhm… free? Yeah, free. That’s the word. Speaking of free, after three months of using Vista, I started playing with Ubuntu, which is really *really* close to releasing their next incarnation (8.10, which should technically be called 8.11 now, since the 10th month is now over), and as usual the release is solid, stable, and about as easy to use as Linux gets. Is it difficult to futz with? Yeah, sure, but no more so than any other version of Linux, and a lot easier learn than most. Very very good hardware support, even for tablets and old weird laptops you had under the couch cushions.
You know what they say a LOT in Star Wars? “I got a bad feeling about this.” We’re at the garbage compactor scene, and a swear I’ve heard that phrase no less than six times.
Okay, Obiwan vs. Darth Vader. Ripley’s in there… I remember this moment. I was his age. Time to find out if Rip’s grown a soul yet… Nnnnnnnope. Just asking why Luke doesn’t use his lightsaber against the Stormtroopers. As someone commented in June, no need for paternity testing there.
Which reminds me, has Disney actually killed off a parent during the opening credits yet? Seems like they’re getting closer and closer to the beginning of the movie before they play the “Let’s say your parents are just GONE” gambit. Bambi’s mom made it through about half of the movie, I think. Nemo’s mom barely made it through the introduction of the environment.
I freakin’ LOVE the radio interference on the rebel ships. Always have. I don’t know what you call that filter (Vocoder?) but the “meenie-m’noo-m’nerp” sounds are just stupid-awesome. If you’ve listened to the podcast I do with Jonny Vancouver, you’ve probably heard at least one blooper of us making radio noises during a mic check. Team nerd for the win!
Tomorrow? We’ll go through my www.delicious.com bookmarks, and we’ll see if I can recall why I tagged any of the sites listed.
If you can’t wait until then, comment on the blog, find an interesting idea to support (or make fun of), or do the opposite of this.