fine whine

A while back my web browsing took on a new idiom: that of me going basically to the same seven sites or so every day, hungry for updates. I shouldn't admit it, but for a long time I was even hooked on slashdot and would reload the front page several times a day, just to see the very bleeding edge of geeky news. Those days have long since passed, but I would still find myself haunting the same few sites, a personal page here, and there and then community-derived lists of interesting links and news, and that was about it.

Then I started doing daily tours of my friends' sites, waiting for updates and occasionally chiming in on the conversations. I wasted a lot of time refreshing un-updated pages, though, and probably sent my workstation usage data through the roof. Not that I worry about that sort of thing, but whisperings and mumblings and half-hearted rumors occasionally contain a grain of truth, don't they?

So anyway, there had to be a better way. Enter Bloglines, a web service to aggregate the news from all the sites I visit based on a wonderful and cryptic technology called RSS. One that I'd used many, many years ago when Netscape first backed it and largely forgot, but now it allows me to see in one single page every update to all the sites that matter to me.

Slick, sleek and chic it may be, but I lose the ability to comment on items directly and also to see the ensuing conversations. I need only click on certain links to do so, but I'd like that functionality at my instant disposal, dammit. All of this is really an excuse to all y'all bloggers as to why I don't comment on your stuff anymore. It's not you, it's me. Really.

Try Bloglines, though. It's changed the way I look at things, in a manner of speaking. I'll be adding a "subscribe to this site with Bloglines" link eventually.

We're supposed to be moving in a week, and as such the packing has long since begun. One corner of our tiny little living room is filled with over forty packed boxes, including some thirteen office paper boxes.

Forty's not enough. We looted the cardboard dumpsters behind the shopping plaza earlier tonight and also came back with five (purchased) fake-Rubbermaid tubs to fill as well. The place is getting smaller with every box that we pack, and all I can think, other than that I should have eaten dinner before nine o'clock, is to wonder if I should have taken any pictures before we started dismantling the place. There's still a relatively intact corner and the kitchen and bedroom are mostly intact... but is it worth it?

Hopefully what keeps me awake tonight is the three dollar pizza and not foolish notions of needing memories.

Watching movies with lowered expectations seems to elevate mediocre ones to generally pretty decent, I've found. Forgetting the reasons I add films to my list to be watched also helps, as it gives me the added challenge of figuring out why I watch a movie. Not reading the back covers also adds to the overall mystique.

That said, having gone into it knowing nothing that I couldn't discover from the front cover of the DVD, I generally enjoyed Virtuosity. It wasn't great (or even good), but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Had I known that director Brett Leonard was also responsible for the thoroughly atrocious Lawnmower man, my judgment might have been a little more clouded. Moreover had I known that he'd done the IMAX 3-D semi-flop T-rex: back to the Cretaceous I might've skipped Virtuosity altogether. But I wasn't aware of those facts nor did Brett Leonard's name in the opening titles trigger the long-forgotten tidbits I have just mentioned, so Denzel, Russell and the rest got the benefit of a relatively clean slate.

Well, they needed it.

Now I shouldn't be so hard on the whole thing. The concept's only about half clich�d, and the overall plotting was rather well done with certain details (mechanical arms, glass-eating nanobots and whatnot) wrapped into the story quite well. Somehow, though, that alone doesn't make for a good movie.

For a film that was shot ten years ago the computer graphics are passable, noticeable only here and there to be severely dated CGI. As for computers in general, this movie generally avoided addressing them at all, and slipped up only a couple times with some technobabble about operating systems and later with an oscilloscope or some other scientific equipment rigged to a bomb using giant fiber optic cables plugged into BNC jacks. Some of their other bits of kit looked jarringly out-of-date and there's this one Pioneer video CD player that looked intriguingly like a concept that never caught on.

Enough geekery. The movie does falter here and there, particularly when Kelly Lynch is onscreen or when Russell and Denzel aren't, and there's a general sloppiness that makes the whole thing look as though the majority of the work went into the scenes that comprised the trailer at the expense of the others. The opening sequence is very well done, and a lot of the sets and props look good, but the whole thing just doesn't gel quite right. There's a scene where the vaguely evil programmer (Steve Spinella, recognizable but impossible to pin down to any single role) is talking to a giant projection of the digital Russell and Mr. Crowe's looking down at the programmer... except he's standing on the other side. Didn't anybody look at the video before final cut? I realize that the graphics were likely added in post, but why, oh why, didn't somebody try flipping it if nothing else? Lazy, lazy filmmakers.

Complaints aside, there are far worse ways to spend ninety-odd minutes. But at the risk of somebody attempting any of them, I'm not going to make a list.

I just fired up the ol' DVD player with the library's copy of Virtuosity and it looks to be suitably craptacular. You know, the virtual reality slash action thriller starring Denzel Washington against a very evil and not very virtual Russell Crowe? You haven't? Well, for now, I can't see a reason for you to track it down.

After all, that's my job. Watching the dregs of moviedom so that you don't need to. This one's looking pretty promising, though.

More on this, eventually.

It's late and I'm tired
D.S.T. sure screwed me up
... time to go to sleep.

Spring means rain. Rain means dreary mornings. Dreary mornings mean I don't want to crawl out of bed. Staying up late for no good reason means I really don't want to crawl out of bed (Allow me to point you to a relatively relevant Sinfest strip).

I think I have the insomniac version of a deathwish. I'm not actually an insomniac, but I seem to really want to be one.

Anyway, this morning as I was braving the morning rush along Northwest Boulevard (through Grandview) I was beset on all sides by moron drivers. This I am pretty much accustomed to by now, having honed my driving skillz on the shores of Lake Michigan (Chicago for the geographically uninclined) and also making sure to keep in mind the most useful driving advice ever passed to me second-hand from India:

Always assume that the other drivers are blind.

If ever I drive in India, I'll have to check that one out. Anyway, the moron in front of me this morning veered over from the left lane to mine and slowed down right in front of me, as if suddenly struck by the need to street-park. I immediately realized it had something to do with the oncoming ambulance (which I had seen long before) but what I knew and this guy didn't quite understand is that Northwest Boulevard is a boulevard and as such has a big strip of grass with curbs between the two sides of traffic. There was no traffic in either lane on the either side, so I can't imagine that the paramedics would hop the curbs and speed over to our side, but I guess my pal with the parked Focus didn't quite grasp that. So it was an admirable effort, pulling over like he was supposed to, but really, really dumb. And it slowed me down.