we’re out in new york for the week, for new year’s and to visit hmc’s best friend jo. we flew out on the red eye on monday night/tuesday morning, which was fine athough i couldn’t quite get comfortable to get a really restful sleep and instead kept waking up to readjust. all the window seats were taken, and i was going to sit each of us in an aisle across from each other, but hmc wanted me to sit next to her, so i ended up in the middle, which is perhaps the worst seat for sleeping. what we do for love, i guess.
it was raining lightly when we got here, but it stopped after a couple of hours (which we spent asleep at jo’s), and it’s been relatively nice and warm, only in the 40’s and 50’s so far, which is great for new york this time of year. haven’t really done much as of yet; hmc’s still time zone adjusting. we ate at this tibetan natural food restaurant, which was yummy, except for the traditional barley soup, which was pretty fucking tasteless. they also had a great fuzzy yak which we were scheming to steal but were foiled at the last minute. already hatching plans to go back to abscond with it.
oh, and we saw tim burton’s new film, big fish. which was surprisingly mainstream. the trailers make you think it’s going to be all fantasy and tall tales-like, but it ends up being a mostly hearwarming family friendly movie, with a little bit of fanastic elements. fine but shmaltzy; perhaps his most mainstream movie to date.
interesting idea out of microsoft (oxymoron?): reduce spam by putting a cpu premium on every mail message that is sent. essentially, shift to a sender pay system, but the onus is not monetary, but paid in computing time, basically using cpu to solve some cryptographic puzzle, which would cost a few seconds for every email. which would be fine for ordinary uses, but would be prohibitive for mass mailings of thousands or millions of spam. of course, this would require the buy-in of everything that sends mail, radically changing the infrastructure. and also of course, who would be happy to supply everyone with a mail client that would do this? hmmm. for a small fee…
on the other hand, would spammers combat this by using things like spyware and viruses to secretly steal cpu cycles from peoples’ machines, making secret distributed spam networks? spamming@home?
from the new yorker:
The Harry Potter phenomenon, which also launched a tsunami of licensed products, hasn’t proved to be particularly toyetic, either, perhaps because the children would rather read the books than play with the toys.
went up to sugar bowl in tahoe for the day for some secret snowboarding! there was absolutely no traffic, so we got up there in three hours and were on the slopes by 9am. it was an absolutely perfect day, sunny without wind, and even though it hadn’t snowed since sunday, the snow was groomed and really good, and not icy at all. we had a lot of fun, and it was good to get a day in before the new year. we were up there until about 2:30pm, and then decided to call it a day. well, strictly speaking, my thighs and calves decided to call it a day. we would have beat all the traffic home, but then got caught in the traffic from that terrible car burning tragedy, which forced us to double back and drive around the bay and come down through marin.
i went to that ridiculous lord of the rings trilogy yesterday. when i signed up for this thing, i thought, “well, it would be cool to see all three of them in the theatre, back to back, so you can tell what is going on in one continuous story arc, and also on the big screen.” i do remember watching the two towers, and after a few hours frodo and sam were ready to go into mordor, and i was like, “ok, now something’s going to happen, i’m ready!” and then the movie ends. so this sounded like a good solution.
little did i know that it was actually the extended editions of the first two movies, meaning that the first one started at one in the afternoon, the second one at five, and we wouldn’t even get to the final one until ten at night! actually, it was a really nice experience. the theatre was really cool about stuff, keeping people comfortable, having a special guy bring in a cart with food so we didn’t have to leave the theatre to buy concessions, and even giving free pop refills. and actually, they even bent their rules and allowed us to bring in our own food if we wanted to!
to be honest, the extended footage wasn’t bad. it didn’t really make much difference to me for the first movie, but it did make the second movie make more sense. although a lot of the extended footage was just waiting for liv tyler to try and say her lines in elvish. sheesh.
the return of the king was pretty great, and i’m probably a lot more objective than the rest of the audience, not really being a lotr fan in the first place. (why was i in there again?) the battle scenes were incredible (don’t mess with oliphaunts), i mean really epic, like some of the best i’ve seen, like braveheart or spartacus or ran, not crappy like gladiator. and it was really good from a movie standpoint: it didn’t drag, and was pretty captivating and exciting. of course, wait until the 5 hour extended version comes out…
oh, and at the end (1:30am!), they gave us all a little resin stand with a filmstrip frame from each of the three movies, actually cut from a print of each film, to commemorate the trilogy. very nice, and these immediately showed up on ebay for $30-300+. mine has aragorn, gandalf, and eowyn.
so i muckered up my laptop, and there’s no one to blame but myself. what happened was that my subscription for my copies of norton personal firewall and norton systemworks (including antivirus) had run out, which means that i was no longer getting virus definition updates. bad idea. it turns out renewing the subscription for both was only like $25, which is not unreasonable. however, i also figured out that i could upgrade to the 2004 version of norton internet security, which was firewall *and* antivirus, for only $30, which would give me the new version of both products, and new features like spam blocking, etc. never mind that i already had a relatively effective (and free) spam blocker running. so i threw down, and upgraded. and that’s when all hell broke loose. the install kept hanging, i tweaked it through, it didn’t work, i uninstalled some things, i mucked about some other things to get it to work, and then for a while nothing norton-related was working. finally, to date internet access (firewall and antivirus) is working, but now none of the other systemworks stuff works (protected recycle bin, speed disk, etc.). and the spam blocker doesn’t work. and the ad blocker no longer works. the problem is that i know a little too much about all this stuff, so i end up trying high difficulty exercises, and sometime end up messing things up beyond what normal people would be able to do. this is the down side of being a tinkerer.
on the other hand, it’s interesting to see ads again on webpages after a couple of years without them. not necessarily better, but still interesting…
ok, so it’s one thing when bush concocts this whole campaign to attack iraq based on the global threat that iraq presents and the hidden caches of weapons of mass destruction, and then when he can’t find any, he changes the whole aim of the invasion to the glorious and noble goal of bringing democracy to the iraqi people. from the new yorker:
but, it’s another thing to spew out this convenient crap, and simultaneously not follow it by kowtowing to china, by recommending that taiwan not hold it’s own democratic referendum on a “no missile, no war” stance which would ask voters to demand that china, a clear communist state with clear stated intentions of “retaking” taiwan, remove all its missiles aimed at taiwan. in other words, clearly, it’s not that democracy is really important that we should protect it everywhere we can, but it’s that democracy is a convenient buzzword that we can use to fight countries who probably don’t have nuclear weapons.
ok, a little oversimplification, but fucking come on already. instead of supporting the democracy which has already risen out of martial law (which came from china in the first place), bush has the gall to say that china is a “partner in democracy”.
how bad has it gotten that i’m glad to have conservatives on my side?
so i finally started taking yoga. it’s been a long time coming, with people recommending that i take it for years and years. and after waiting for someone to drag me to it to no avail, i took the big step and just went on my own all alone(!) to a yoga101 class at the yoga tree. and then after that, i’ve gone to two classes in two days. so the funny thing is, and i know this is almost silly to people who actually do yoga, but i had no idea how meditative yoga is. if you see it or do yoga videos, you don’t really get a sense of that aspect of it, but for me it’s a really startling and welcome change from what i’m used to my normal mental running around internal fretting. (this may explain the frequent naps, because my brain is tired, right?)
the first night i did this hatha flow class, which was packed to the gills, and it was good and moved pretty fast, but i was able to keep up with most of it and only had to come out of a couple of poses for a couple of minutes. and then the next night was more of a beginner hatha class, which was a lot slower and taught you the poses, but we ended up holding them a lot longer, allowing us to concentrate on our breathing and be aware of ourselves in our bodies during the poses.
it’s funny because i end up recognizing a lot of the poses or similar stances from when i took kung fu, and there’s a lot of stretches which are the same and muscles that i worked on when i used to train. (somehow those warrior poses aren’t as bad if you’ve been forced to try and sit in horse stance for ten minutes at a time!)
but my big question is: if you spend a couple of hours doing yoga every evening, when are you supposed to watch tv and basketball? who has the time?
i just got back from seeing the new alejandro gonzález iñárritu film 21 grams. to be honest, i sort of agree with spoiler new yorker review, which terms it “an arrogant failure”. there’s a lot of cutting back and forth in time, as if they took a linear story and threw it in a cuisinart, and while i was able to follow it pretty well, in the end, you feel like, “ok, this was an interesting exercise, but to what effect?” the whole premise, if you stop and think about it, is a little strange and outrageous, almost david lynchian, and while mostly everyone’s pretty great in it, there’s that one key kitchen scene where they come up with the key plot point to tie everything together, and unfortunately, it’s just the one scene where naomi watts isn’t very believeable. (she does, once again, prove that she has very nice breasts, which are prominently displayed throughout the movie.) i guess the message is that life doesn’t just go on, but certain events in life cause you to change, and in that change your old life ends and your new life begins, each phase being a death and a birth, a new life. in that case, man, you’re dropping like 21 gram packets all over the place. the moral? bring wetnaps, i guess.
one of my best friends rachel luna just had a baby yesterday. i went and saw them and held little outback in my arms for over an hour. this may be the most beautiful baby i have ever seen in the whole wide world.
flew down to lost angels for thanksgiving. spent it at hmc’s oma and opa’s (does that make it oma and opa in-law for me?), which is always nice, but after all that starchy american food, i sometimes yearn for those nice taiwanese holiday dinners at my parents house. i used to try to hit both in one day, but man, that’s a lot of 1. driving and 2. eating for one afternoon.
so while at the laker games this weekend, in between watching them pound the spurs and then the pacers, i picked up a $5 knock-off lakers cap. not for me, but for this customer i work with who keeps pestering me to replace the other cap that i gave him which he subsequently gave away. what, am i made of caps?
where this actually comes into play: when i flew back into sf this morning, after taking bart back from the airport, i step out of the bart station to be unexpectedly confronted by rain. what the hell? so unprepared for this. my torso’s covered because of my fabulously utlitarian rei one jacket, which protects me from the wind and rain, but as for my head, well, it was all nekkid and ready to be soaked. however, some clever thinking on my part resulted in using the $5 knock-off laker cap wrapped in a plastic shopping bag over my head, which ended up keeping my head and face dry, and still preserving the cap for swag presentation. however, i did notice that i did look like a big fat dork. so it occurred to me that this is what getting old is all about: being willing to look like a dork to do what you have to do. i think this is where it all begins, eventually leading to walking around downtown carrying a sign protesting “13 galaxies united against president bush for crimes against the zorastrians.”