Retreat

Land of the Dead was great, although as predicted the Sunday Night Film Club turnout was small (but I don’t really care). As is common in zombie flicks, the (living) characters had retreated to a fortified position, as have I. As the weather has gotten unbearably hot I have retreated to our air-conditioned bedroom. And my love for my Powerbook grows.

I have used command-line mailers for as long as I’ve had internet email. Originally, elm on my Unix UUCP account on Dan’s Domain (hoser@gen.ds.nj.us) through pine then mutt at CSH, I have been a loyal command-line user (although I did have a minor dalliance with Mail-It! while using BeOS). I played around with graphical mailers while convalescing, but had all kinds of trouble dealing with my 500+ mailboxes over IMAP, so I threw in the towel. I finally decided to move my mail archive off of CSH’s servers and onto my laptop, and have been using OSX’s Mail.app as my mailer for a few weeks now. So far, so good, and searching my mail with Spotlight is very, very nice. I tried Thunderbird back with my failed IMAP experiment, and while I fully support the Mozilla project, I think I’ll wait for it to get a bit of polish before I revisit it. Anyway, I had started to feel that the only reason I was sticking with CLI email was geek pride, and that I was just being stubborn. Seeing all the niceties you kids and your GUI mailers have had for god-knows how long now I think I was correct in that assessment.

Land of the Dead

I have had fairly mixed results when picking horror films as the weekly selection for the Sunday Night Film Club, sometimes the turnout is good, but often it isn’t so good. So I’ve been avoiding picking horror films, but it was just too difficult to skip on Land of the Dead this week, so I threw caution to the wind and chose it anyway. We are seeing it tonight at 7:20pm, and I know , Audra, and myself will enjoy it, even if others don’t.

Around noon yesterday, and called us to ask if we wanted to go swimming at Adam’s parents’ house. After Corinna and I beat down our spontaneity avoidance circuitry, we said yes and asked them to pick us up (which had the combined effect of giving us 20 minutes to get ready as well as being able to drink and not worry about driving). We had a great time, along with the aforementioned people, we were joined by , Eric, Linda, Todd, and Katie O. We ended up swimming and some barbecue came to bear as well, and although we were originally planning on only sticking around until the early evening, we didn’t leave until 10pm.. It was a fantastic way to spend a ridiculously hot day. Unfortunately, this meant we missed the party at my coworker Brian’s house, but so it goes..

I have this project at work, which I had started working on a bit before I broke my leg. This project had a deadline of June 30th. This deadline was fixed, and couldn’t change even though I was out of commission for two months. What makes this worse is that nobody else worked on the project at all while I was gone. And I’m not talking about “no coding was done while I was gone”, I mean nobody worked on it.. I had questions out to program managers, image scientists, etc. when I left to go skiing that fateful weekend, and when I came back to work after convalescing nothing had changed, none of my questions had resolutions. It was pretty frustrating… Fast forward a month and change to today, and things are looking fairly OK, but mostly because I stopped waiting on those who were roadblocking me and just “got it done”. Of course, as soon as these individuals see the software I’m sure they are going to gripe and complain that it doesn’t meet the non-existent requirements. Fortunately for me, I’ve kept my boss in the loop of my frustration and have a nice set of “get me some fucking information” email to cover my ass.

Anyway, I employed the services of Tim, who has just returned to the company full-time after a co-op a year or so ago, to help me with some UI stuff just to get it done. We left friday with one outstanding configuration UI to finish, but it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, I had one of those eureka moments after I got back from Adam’s last night, and quickly jotted down some notes that should help me thrash out this final bit in short time on Monday (after physical therapy, of course).