April 2004 Archives
Figured I'd better update any regular readers on my post from earlier this week:
The co-worker who was in the motorcycle accident has survived so far. They're mostly keeping him sedated, but he has a good chance of recovering.
I survived disaster recovery. My office desktop, however, did not survive my return. Luckily, I had a new desktop standing by (been meaning for a couple months to swap it out and start installing software), and I had just checked my major projects into source control.
My uncle is still recovering from heart surgery, and while he's had a couple of setbacks, the doctors are finally pleased with his progress the last couple of days.
So, things are looking much better than they did as of my last post.
My uncle had heart surgery about a week ago, and he's still in ICU, slowly recovering.
Today is the first day of a three-day disaster recovery drill, and I'm waiting for the call to come out and do my part.
One of my co-workers, who was supposed to be part of the DR drill, was in a motorcycle accident this morning and is not expected to survive.
Nothing seems all that real right now.
I am trying to figure out licensing for a server component I need for a web application, and I am getting contradictory information from two different parts of the same company.
If I wanted this much smoke blown up my ass, I'd get some incense, a fan, and some flexible tubing.
I just got back from seeing Hellboy in a movie theater, and it was fantastic. Almost good enough, in fact, to be worth going to a movie theater to see it. Eventually. After fifteen minutes of being advertised at, that is. (Plus the amount of time that the asinine "advertainment" slideshow played on the screen before that.) During that fifteen minutes, I kept digging my ticket stub out of my pocket, simply to confirm that I had, in fact, paid money for the privilege of being shown a bunch of extended-length commercials, trailers, and pure asinine propaganda. I will begin to consider showing respect for copyright when the holders of copyright make some pretense of showing respect for me.
Really, is there somewhere that I can go and simply pay a fair price to be shown a first-run movie without being sold to advertisers in turn? I understand that broadcast television is a manufacturing process, in which human beings are converted into viewers which can then be sold to advertisers. (Somehow, paying a cable company to transport this manufacturing process into my home does not seem completely insane. Yet.) However, if I am paying an entertainment venue out of my owm pocket, I want to be a customer, not a product. If said venue wants to gouge me out of more money, that's fine, at least to the extent that I will make an informed choice about what I expect to receive for my money.
I'll probably be back in the theater in a few months (maybe when Spiderman 2 comes out). That ought to be long enough to forget why I haven't set foot in a movie theater in the meantime.
