Lunch ahoy!

I have to say that the past week was almost universally excellent, despite my lack of hot food.

I had lunch with friends on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and my stomach behaved itself amazingly well (until last night, there's something about Fridays...).

Plus, I did a bunch of drawings which are now clogging up my Media Empire.

In addition to all that (which would have been enough), work was really positive, and I actually felt like I earned my Director $'s. I'm even overly enthusiastic about the stuff which should fall into place over the next month to better position our publishing process/systems to handle our future web directions.

The dark ages

Almost 12 months to the day after my last microwave kicked it, I find myself again lacking in nuclear power. I've heard it's possible to heat food using something called a "stove", but I have yet to be convinced...

Spider-Man 3

I finally got around to watching this, and wasn't disappointed. There's a weird tonal change a bit over halfway through the movie, as an alien parasite turns Peter Parker into 70's John Travolta, but that's funny rather than jarring. Venom looks great, and the fight scenes suitably one-up the earlier movies.

Heroes

My well-practiced patience, having waited until the DVD release to watch Heroes, was amply paid off by an absorbing 3 day marathon, where each episode was better than the last. It even had me saying aloud "That's awesome" several times, despite watching it solo.

Of course I now have to wait another year to watch Season 2...

American Gothic

I was thoroughly enjoying my viewing experience of the American Gothic blast from the past until the completely-out-of-order episodes kicked in, and any narrative flow disappeared entirely. Now you may well say "Bertie, surely it can't have been that bad". And I'll reply with the ordering of the episodes, rearranging the order they appear on the DVDs and listing them in the order they should be viewed:

1-5, 19, 6-7, 14, 13, 8, 20, 9-12, 15, 21, 16, 22, 17-18

"Hmmm," you say, "I agree Bertie, that's seriously f**ked up!!!"

The problem here is that I'd watched the first 12 eps before I noticed anything wrong, and by then it was far too late.

On the positive side, the performances were excellent, with some genuinely conflicted characters, and the slowish in-episode pacing creates a uniquely unsettling mood. Not to mention that (when watched in DVD order) you can't possibly predict what's going to happen next...

Brisbane

I've slipped out of the photo-taking habit, so my Brisbane photos from the weekend are exclusively of the ride from the airport:



and the view from my balcony:



But they give a good impression of just how great the weather was, and how different the sights are to my usual Canberra vantage.

Congratulations!

While it was quite a struggle for me health-wise, I'm incredibly glad I had the opportunity to be in Brisbane for Linda and Byron's wedding this weekend. My friends, many now from distant capitals (as well as those from Canberra I don't see often) have always helped me to push through my many varieties of chronic illness, and this was no exception. Thankfully, a few doses of sleep since I got home have taken the edge off the crappiness of my body, and I now have a couple of days to relax, enjoy the rest of a 5 day weekend, and be ready to launch back into work on Thursday. 48 hours of Brisbane trip with only about 5 hours of sleep certainly makes time go by slowly, and while that can be a double-edged sword, I didn't get cut too badly this time around ;)

Not a bad weekend really

• The Eels snuck through in the first round of the finals.
  
• The Hawks also won.
  
• Had one of my Flickr photos "published"
• Sunday morning has returned to fine weather, allowing me to walk again.
• I've watched many, many episodes of Veronica Mars (Season 1), in preparation for the DVD release of the final season next month.
• My new DVD shelves have been installed, giving me room to grow my collection to even more ridiculous widths.
  

So very lazy

In the absence of having anything to say...



You scored as Wallace Fennel, You are an awesome friend and Veronica's sidekick, but you don't mind... except you're afraid of getting expelled for getting all of those permanent records.

Wallace Fennel		50%
Veronica Mars		44%
Backup (2.0)		44%
Logan Echolls		38%
Keith Mars		25%
Lilly Kane		13%
Duncan Kane		13%
Eli		0%

Which Veronica Mars Character Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com
To be honest, I expected Keith Mars, daggy and bald :)

Gorgonzola mittens

As you can see, I made a (successful) last gasp effort at my cycling, 85km in the last 3 weeks, before I switched over to walking to take advantage of the fine spring weather. So this particular graph has come to an end, but I have just returned from my 6th hour-long walk in the past 6 days, ready for my Thursday rest day.

I'm halfway through Sliders S3, and thoroughly enjoying yet another reminiscing TV experience, as well as finally completing my Fast and the Furious trilogy, with an adrenaline pumping Sunday night viewing of Tokyo Drift (aka Fastest and Furiousest).

Interesting? No. My life? Yes.

What else?

And since I finally found the receipt telling me what other DVDs I'd seen the past few weeks...

The Illusionist - You can't go wrong with Edward Norton, and this is a moody murder mystery very different to what I'd expected.

Pan's Labyrinth - Meshes the horrors of the real world seamlessly with fantasy elements to create a distinctly Guillermo del Toro vision. Don't watch this if you're looking for some chuckles, but it's the movie equivalent of a compulsive page turner, really drawing you through to the end.

Hot Fuzz - Just as good the second time around, and having watched the first season of Spaced (with many of the same creative talents involved) since I saw this at the cinema, it's enjoyable seeing just how many of the action techniques were already in place back on Spaced, just cranked up to a larger scale here.

X-Men 3 - Some cool set pieces, but ultimately lacking the sense of real threat which X2 had.

Click - Not the laugh-fest the premise suggests, really focuses more on opportunities lost, with the middle third quite dark... then again... Kate Beckinsale!

Doom - Not bad as videogame adaptations go (at least I'd actually played the game in this case). A couple of surprises, but really it's all about the first person shooter scene which comes late in the movie.

Trontastic

The past 2 weeks have been quite a health struggle, with first my fatigue and then a return of nausea. Neither has been so extreme as to require time off work, or even a return to the doctor (yet), but it's taken up all of my energy and concentration just to get through each day, meaning blogging has been low on my priority stack.

In an attempt to push past this latest illness bout, I've returned to walking, thankfully enabled by a couple of awesome, warm days this weekend. A little over 3 hours of traipsing the suburbs since I got home from work Friday, with DVD watching in between to ensure recovery.

So, what have I been watching?

Tron - I hadn't seen this since my early teens, and I was surprised how well the effects hold up. Maybe I'm viewing it through nostalgic, old-school computing eyes, but it almost made me want to return to coding again.

Alexei Sayles' Stuff - a blast from my mid-teens past, this was mandatory viewing for me on TV back in the laste 80's. And it still has plenty of laughs. If you want to see socialist philosophers advertorialising press-on nails and hair curlers, this is the comedy for you.

The Late Show Presents Bargearse and The Olden Days - Far too many years in coming to DVD, but still genuinely funny, with a few extra tastes of other Late Show sketches.

Thank God You're Here S2 - Sadly only 10 eps long, but this is an even stronger season than the first, which was already hilarious.

The 4400 S3 - Another excellent season, with heaps of surprises all too rare on TV. Thankfully a 4th season is being made, so the story continues.

Return of the G-Raph

The sad fact is that graphs are more exciting than any other content I could write about... So, rather than fight it, I've brought back the most potent weapon in my action-selling arsenal.

At a minimum, this graph shows that, contrary to my usual routine-in-everything, my cycling is either on or off. All up a total of 230km over 3 months, which is actually less than I walked during my year-of-the-repetitive-'burb-circuits. Time for me to up my effort!

Why movies are...

... awesome

• The Simpsons Movie lived up to my expectations, and really ramped up the scale of animation, and took advantage of the longer run time. Plenty of laughs, great in jokes, and pretty much every character who's ever appeared in an episode shows up.

... crappy

• $15.50 for a ticket.
• It took 3 staff 10 minutes to get through the 4 people in line in front of me.
• I got into the cinema 10 minutes after the movie was supposed to start, and still had to wait another 5 minutes before the trailers even started.
• Is "Bratz" really a movie which will appeal to Simpsons fans?

Ah, just like the good old days of "the whinge"!

Memory lane

My photo excursion with Liv this afternoon included an aimless wander at the edges of the ANU, my old stomping grounds, and it left me with only positive memories of a more complex time in my life. Since I left uni, my life has become progressively simpler and easier, and this jaunt brought that cheery truth home to me.

That's all wonderful, I hear you say, but what did it look like? Something like this...

Dodge

While I maintain my MySpace moratorium, I've been sucked into the newer, hipper version Facebook. One feature it has which has made me quite a convert is that I can set it up to import my posts from this blog and have them display as Facebook notes. Excellent idea!

[Music] The Else

They Might Be Giants new album is chock full of catchy tunes, and sits nicely alongside their many other excellent albums. While I didn't dislike The Spine quite as much as most critics seemed to, this is certainly an improvement, with every track a worthy single.

What's that? You missed my point? ... I like this album :)

[Music] New Maps of Hell

Bad Religion are still going strong in their third decade of pumping out politi-punk, and I love their new stuff as much as I did when I discovered them back in '92 with Stranger Than Fiction. You won't hear more intelligent punk rock anywhere.

En garde

While I have no real aspiration to be a Director, I've quite enjoyed my first week of EL2 acting (with another 5-11 weeks to go). The transition has been far easier for me given that:

1. my team leader role had me overseeing 60% of the staff/projects in my section already,
2. I've been in the section for 18 months, and am familiar with all the clients and most of the systems,
3. my boss is still around, just in a changed role.

Pretty much the ideal intro :)

Outside of work, I've finished watching 3 seasons of Alias over the past month, along with plenty of Scrubs, a dash of Fawlty Towers and, over the past couple of days, several movies...

Boytown - I was always going to enjoy this, Mick Molloy and Co. never having let me down before. While there was not nearly enough Bob Franklin, and the ending was a bit "down", this was a good way to wind down the end of my working week.

Ghost Rider - The effects were very cool, Eva Mendes looked great, but otherwise it was only so-so. I admit I'm not any kind of big fan of the comic, but it just plain didn't grab me as a Rider newbie.

Pulse - One word: Kristen Bell :) It did a good job of being creepy, but hasn't scared me away from my computer...

Away

Long gaps between posts for me usually means one of two things. Either I'm sick/depressed or I'm happily doing stuff, without analysing it enough to feed into musing posts. In this case it's been both. I've thankfully recovered fully from last weekend's gastro, and am eating as "normal". I haven't started back into riding my bike yet, but have been busily drawing away.

While I've had very little sleep the past week, that time has not been spent pondering my place in the universe, but just unthinkingly enjoying my current health (robust enough to dismiss illness which would have had me bedridden for weeks if it had hit 12 months ago) and lack of stress. And unthinking is good for me, but not really fodder for blogging...