fine whine

So I've watched Jersey girl and you know, it wasn't awful. It wasn't horrible.

It was, in a word, conventional. Smith may have thrown in a little bit of bawdy language (but using actual terms, not euphemisms) and a slightly smarter soundtrack (if not an entirely appropriate one, as somebody somewhere criticized one of the Springsteen tracks being used to backscore a sappy montage or some sort) but otherwise it's a fairly standard take on the inappropriate parent genre. George Carlin puts in a fairly serious performance, which is unique if not disappointing, and in fact is overshadowed by Stephen Root (from NewsRadio and Office space).

Overall it was missing something, and it wasn't just his and Jason Mewes's cameo as stoner duo Jay & Silent Bob. It's missing that Kevin Smith spark that sets is just off of the mainstream. In most cases the directors slog through mainstream films to ultimately make the interesting stuff. Smith has done it backward, toiling away on interesting little pieces so that he can apparently make middle-of-the-road claptrap like Jersey girl. Not to say that Jay and Silent Bob strike back was all that good, but it wasn't like anything else that came out that month.

But hey, everybody makes a few missteps. Peter Jackson, who can now do no wrong, once made Bad taste and had it to be considered his best work.

Once Smith dumps more of his usual crew (really, Kev, the Ben Affleck train isn't one you want to be staying on much longer) and smartens the scripts back up, he might be back on track.

I'm angry. I received an email in my work inbox today that really annoys me, mostly because I'm annoyed that it angered me so much.

They're 'restricting' our ability to change the desktop wallpaper. By 'restrict' they mean to say 'remove' since now anytime my coworkers or I minimize all windows we will be greeted with a cool blue background with the company's logo (which is itself just two words in different weights the same font mushed together).

I already know who I work for: a company that wants to suck every drop of individuality out of its workers, apparently.

I'm not sure why this bothers me so much. One theory that I have is that this is due to the other erosion of my 'freedom' lately, in that certain sites are blocked including Flickr and all web-based email (POP3 access too) as well as a host of sites designated as tasteless, games-related, insecure and more. They've told me that I am not to be installing my familiar free applications such as Irfanview and Firefox because they are not officially approved. They've demanded that we purge all emails older than three months, though my inbox quota frequently fills up in under three weeks if not three days.

I want to work and restricting what I do on my computer is restricting my work. But keeping me from changing my background doesn't really change what I can do.

That said, blocking me from the Control Panel does. That is another point on the email sent today, that the Settings portion of the Start Menu will be 'restricted' and by restricted again they mean 'removed' going so far to explain the point as to define icon ("picture") and to show a screenshot of the butchered Start Menu.

Damnit though, why can't I keep my personal backgrounds? Am I not to have any shred of personality or humanity on my desktop? I suppose I could compensate by color-printing my collection of desktops and littering the walls of my cubicle with them, but somehow that seems, well, wasteful and stupid.

Whereas their policy is just stupid.

I'm not in the office today, but if I were I'd likely be fooling around on the internet more than usual. You see, the company has decided to shut off access to web-based and otherwise accessible personal email accounts in the interest of security and whatnot.

This of course irks me, not because I particularly care for my email but more for the fact that I don't like people telling me I cannot do something.

So it's good I'm not at my desk, as I'd probably be working on breaking through the security. Which is probably why another category of blocked sites is 'proxy avoidance information'.

If there is any good to come from this entry, then, it is this: If you email me during the day, even through my contact page, I likely won't get to it until nightfall.

Officially, that is. I'll be working on a workaround straightaway.

So now that I'm two co-workers down (well, somewhere between one and a half and two, or maybe three, if Michelle when pregnant counted as working for two) I've had something of an increase in my workload. Threefold, if not more. Without getting into any detail, I can say that it's an awful lot of garments and emails.

Oddly enough my phone is ringing less and less, disproportionately so if not in some weird inverse of the the email increase. This may be some sort of pleasant side effect, or I may just be slicing my time into smaller bits such that the intervals between calls, being filled with more and more work, seem all the more distanced even though the calls still come at the same rate. Or not.

Naturally I am under the delusion that I can somehow handle all of this.

Perhaps I delude myself because I have nobody else to delude, as promises of help and the like seem to be hopeful suggestions, not concrete assistance.

Tomorrow and Friday I leave the office to trek across the Rust Belt, and all the time I am going to be away from my emails and garments and desk and phone.

I'll look at my emails, unofficially, but that's all. I'm not going to check my voicemail, and I'm going to pretend that the place is at a standstill without me.

Which, effectively, it is, since I am apparently the Final Authority on a number of little decisions, the cumulative result of which is a pair of jeans in a store.

Well, several hundreds of thousands of pairs of jeans in hundreds of stores, but the idea's the same.

From my "Well, Duh!" Page-a-day Andrews McMeel calendar for yesterday:

In 1841, England's greatest daredevil, Samuel Scott, performed stunt acrobatics while hanging by a rope with the noose around his neck from London's Waterloo Bridge. One day the noose slipped. Scott strangled to death on the bridge while the audience cheered, assuming it was part of the act.

Well, that's what the calendar says. I haven't found any corroborating evidence (or really anything at all about this so-called 'greatest daredevil' other than somebody else's diary transcribing this very same paragraph, albeit without attribution) or any evidence that doesn't corroborate.

Ten minutes in Lexis-Nexis yielded nothing about the guy.

There's apparently a book by Lou Harry entitled Strange Philadelphia that supposedly mentions "Samuel Scott's Last Leap (1841)". Is there anybody out there in Philly (or with access to the Pennsylvania libraries) that could see what this is all about? Inquiring minds must know.

Inquiring minds might also want to know why the writing on the calendar is so horrible, with bad prepositional phrases and other poor sentence structure. However, inquiring minds really just want to debunk, not proofread.

Today at lunch I fled the office for what I called 'some errands' though what I really amounted to was 'shopping'.

I went to Target and Lowe's, to look at digital cameras and bricks, respectively. Target had been clearing out display models over the weekend and had some rather nice deals on warranty-less and non-returnable cameras that I wasn't willing to grab on Saturday when I was last there, and today I found all the good stuff gone. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I purchased twenty eight more bricks for our back yard. We're trying to make it look like somebody's done some work back there, not just put holes there (as was the result of our dandelion purge that is still ongoing). It was nice to get away from my desk, as today I didn't feel like working very much. This is not to say that I'm not working, just that I'm not fond of doing so.

In further Honda Odyssey news, they're still all over the place. I saw four on my drive this morning, and another six at lunchtime. There is only one in the parking lot at work, and it's a light-grey/silver new model, probably less than half a year old.

The most striking one, however, was the bright yellow taxicab. Columbus residents can likely call 444-4444 and request cab 216, which is probably one they use for groups headed to airports and whatnot.

I realize that I could pay attention to any common vehicle and see so many and it would stand out (such as the new Mustang or the Mini when those first appeared) but this... this borders on uncanny.