Well this was another weekend that didn’t end with me feeling relaxed. I seem to be busier Sundays than Saturdays. I did the running thing this morning. Then it was off to a disappointing brunch.
It was followed by the play “Humble Boy”. The play was okay, but it was a struggle to stay awake for the first half hour. After that it got more interesting and I was alert. But still, I think it was an overpriced entertainment. But that is what you get when you see a play at the Citadel theatre, downtown.
Grocery shopping, with a quick meal for dinner, and then I had Michael over to see “Team America: World Police”. Funny, but friends had overhyped it for me. I kept hearing how it was so side-splittingly funny, it was impossible not to be let down.

There was supposed to be a scooter ride tonight. I just tried to go. The scooter was working fine, but the ride was cancelled. The cops are patrolling Whyte Avenue, enforcing that everyone on a scooter have a class 6 license. I was told that you only need a class 6 license if your two wheeled vehicle is 50cc or more. Which would clear most scooters, including mine. I don’t know what laws changed.
I’m going to have to look into this, because my scooter may have just become a lot more expensive. Taking a motorcycle safety course is not cheap.

Splinter

For the past few days I have had a sore on my chin. I assumed it was a pimple that I had scratched to much. It was really bothering me because I had an appointment with a new hairstylist this morning and I wanted to make a good impression. But the darn thing wouldn’t heal.
A few minutes ago I examined it in detail under the bright light of a mirror. I saw a big beard whisker trying to grow in it. Maybe that is what is causing the problem? I’m willing to try anything to get rid of this thing. I grab some tweezers and try and yank it out. It comes out surprisingly easy. I look at it. It’s thicker and longer than I would expect. And no pain either. Wait a minute… This isn’t a whisker. It’s a splinter!
For the past three days I’ve had a splinter lodged in my chin!
My theory is that while riding my scooter, some debris thrown up by a car got blown into my face. The wooden splinter hit me perfectly to embed itself there, where it has been annoying me ever since.

Quoting other people

I’ve learned that writing a column can be like working at a sausage factory–use filler if you have to, just for God’s sake keep cranking the grinder. The upside is that sometimes the sausage comes tasting pretty good, even if you’ve run out of pork and had to use horse lips.

Paul Mather, 100 Years of Subatomic Humor

That’s how I feel about writing in LiveJournal. I might not have anything to say, but I need to keep writing. Nothing bad will happen if I stop, but it becomes that much harder to start again.
There is another side to that thought process.

If your blogging software doesn’t have a built-in Whining checker, you should install it as a plug-in. It’s worth whatever you have to spend for the thing. Whenever I’ve written a new entry that pushes the self-pity button rather hard (why o why is everyone picking on me, why don’t things ever go my way, I’m so totally right and that person is totally wrong and you people can see that, can’t you?…that sort of thing) a little alert pops up with a “Stop” icon, accompanied by the text “Nobody gives a **** about this. They’re your readers, not your therapist, and they’re certainly not your ****ing Mommy. Got it?”
We have a modern digital analogue to getting drunk and phoning old girlfriends…and its name is LiveJournal. Fellow bloggers: I urge extreme caution.

Andy Ihnatko, May 5th, 2005

I guess there is the light side and dark side of LiveJournal. Clearly my last entry was missed by the Whining checker. But sometimes all you have is horse lips.

I’ve got to work on my self confidence. Or at least my speed.
I had an appointment with the physical therapist today. For the past few weeks she has had an intern. When I first came in and met the intern, it looked to me like she was checking me out. So I decided today I would ask her out. I wouldn’t get another chance because this is her last week.
Never had a chance. I never really saw her beyond passing her in the hall. I was expecting to have a more “private” moment when she was using the ultrasound on me, but the mentor did that instead. Apparently the intern left early.

Monarchy in town

So, the Queen of England is in Edmonton right now. I haven’t gone to any of the celebrations to see her. I didn’t get a ticket in time to see the big shindig, and I’m not enough of a Monarchist to go out into this rainy weather to catch a glimpse of her.
She only seems to be doing senior citizen activities. Going to museums. Seeing Sir Winston Churchill Square. Visiting legislature. Stuff I figure old people do. i.e. Rather dull. She needs some excitement. I would suggest going to West Edmonton Mall, by then they would be able to call it The Royal West Edmonton Mall, and that just sounds tacky.

Harry and the Allen’s

Well, Harry was not good during the night. He was nervous so he kept making sure I was aware he was there. All. Night. Long. So I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. And he had a problem figuring out whose bed was whose.
Revenge this morning was to take him on my morning run of sixteen kilometers. He was fine for the first six, but then he started falling behind. Eventually, at around eight kilometers, I had to abandon the group and make my own way back. I took as many shortcuts as possible and got back to the start about ten minutes after them.
So you would think he would be tuckered out for the rest of the day. But no. A few hours later and he has all the energy back and is begging for attention. Meanwhile, I’m dealing with an astonishing lack of sleep.

My parents are within half an hour of arriving at my condo. Thankfully, after working all morning, I have gotten the place cleaned up enough to pass an initial inspection.
They are bringing the dog, Harry, too. I’m looking forward to that. I’m planning on dragging him out for my Sunday run and seeing how he does. Running with a dog has always looked far more interesting than just running with humans.

Holy Sith!

Yesterday I saw Episode III. Now that I have had time to digest, here are my thoughts.
My biggest complaint is that there were no plot twists. From the start, you know everything that is going to happen. At no time do you stop and think, “Wow! Didn’t see that coming.” The original trilogy had great plot twists, (“Luke, I am your father.”) but this trilogy only seems to invalidate those great moments. If you watch the movies from Episode I to Episode VI, there will be no surprises. (“Well duh! We saw Vader knock up his mother three movies ago.”) This latest trilogy just seems to be milking all the work that was done with the original.
If I think about that statement for a moment though, it is clearly wrong. If you watch one to six, then one wouldn’t know that Anakin falls to evil. So I guess there were plot twists.
I’ve had people say that it was obvious there would be no surprises because “we know what will happen.” Which sounds silly to me. The twists that we know and love concerned unknowns being revealed. There were still unknowns that could be shown. For instance, somebody should explain who is Anakin’s father. Or just give me some reason to watch this movie if I’ve already seen the next three movies.
Now, with all that said, it was a good movie. On the Star Wars scale, I would rate it higher than “Return of the Jedi”, but lower than “A New Hope”. If “Jedi” lost the ewoks, it would probably beat “Sith”. I feel that George Lucas has been away from directing for so long that he needed the last two movies to warm up and figure out how to make a good movie again. (“Ohhh. You DON’T have annoying characters. My bad.”) But he doesn’t have the mythic scale anymore.

Leftovers

One of the nicest advantages of working for a computer company is the leftovers. Mac OS X Tiger just came out, and being part of a developer connection, we get two copies at work. But they came on DVDs. And the Mac they keep wanting us to work with were first purchased during the short period where Macs came with CD-RW instead of DVD readers. So the disks couldn’t be used for work, so I snatched a copy and upgraded my Mac.
Sweet!
I can’t comment on the OS yet. I haven’t had enough time to use it, and it still needs to get used to its new home. For instance, my morning script (for grabbing all the websites I read and having them ready for perusing before breakfast) didn’t run because the iCal application had updated and needed to be started up again.

In other news, I skipped the evening run tonight. That’s because I just donated blood and it is considered bad form to blatantly ignore instructions on how to behave after being drained.

Last improv class

I just got back from my final Improv class. It went way into overtime because we had class evaluations where everyone gave feedback to everyone else. So it went on forever. Somewhat annoying because there is a task I’ve been trying to get around to that I had planned to do afterwards, that I don’t have time for now.
But, the evaluations were very good for me. The instructor commented that I wasn’t retaining information and I wasn’t listening anymore. If I had to reason it, I would say that I’ve gotten cocky. I was let into the level 3 class, and now I feel like I’m slumming in the level 2. I need to ditch that attitude.
Tara, a very nice women in the class, pointed out that I have a loss of innocence and that I’m now arrogant and angry. That is probably also due to the “slumming” reason. I might also blame the pain in my shoulder that plagued my earlier class which is making me cranky, but that is just finding a weak excuse.
The number one thing I have to start doing is have my characters care.
Now that I’ve gotten all these great notes, I want to implement them. But there are no more classes. And I don’t know when they will be back. Probably by the time they are back I’ll have forgotten everything that I learned.

I’ve been falling behind in my TV watching. I guess I have better things to do. Anyway, I was in a couch potato mood yesterday, so I went through what I had taped and watched some shows.
I have a love/hate relationship with Enterprise. I like the primitive starfleet, but I hate the frequent time travel. It feels like some executive got his hands into it and wants the show to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator, instead of Star Trek fans. Understandable, but also stupid.
But it seems that since they know that this is their last season, all the stupid executives have bailed and gone to ruin other shows. Since the producers have nothing to lose, they are doing VERY Star Trek shows. I just watched a two part episode set completely in the mirror universe. Where everyone is mean and nasty (and Spock has a beard), and it parallels the original universe. And they did it right from the start, even the opening credits were military in nature. (I hate that DS9 ruined the mirror universe by getting rid of the empire and making humanity a bunch of scrungy refugees.)
And they did the episode with references to classic trek shows. Stuff that would be completely lost on a casual viewer, but mean everything to someone who knows Star Trek. In classic trek there was the episode “The Tholian Web” (Yes I am enough of a geek to still remember the names) where a starship, the Defiant, was dragged into another dimension, and Captain Kirk nearly went with it. Well, apparently that ship travelled to the mirror universe and into the past, so that the mean and nasty Enterprise counterparts got their mitts on it.
So here we have the classic trek starship in a new episode. The mirror universe people flew it around, even started wearing the classic trek uniforms. It brought back so many memories. All the usual sounds were there, right down to the twitter when someone on the bridge intercoms the captain. They were in the classic Jefferies tube, but this time, they went to the top. So many memories. But while the sounds were the same, the effects were modern. When the phaser was set on kill, the person disintegrated in such an eye-pleasing manner. They even threw in a Gorn for good measure. Complete CGI, but still… Gorn!
I miss classic trek.

It’s been awhile, but here is the quick update.
I have still finished Jade Empire, but am contemplating starting over and acting like a jerk throughout the adventure. See what is different.
I just finished Ultima 3 within 260180 moves. I had previously seen the game beat long ago, but that was only through the use of many cheat programs. This one was completely on the up and up (if you don’t count map books I’ve had since the dawn of time.) I even did all the work to get the clues as to what needs to be done to win the game, instead of looking at the clue books I have around here.
Torn rotator cuff doesn’t hurt anymore, but the shoulder blade winging problem is causing runs to be painful.
My parents are visiting in two weeks. I’ve got to get this place cleaned up.
I’m a player in an RPG again. It’s not D&D but Star Wars. (Really raring to see Episode III now that I’m playing it.) I’m getting a sadistic joy in watching the DM complain that it is taking a lot of time to prepare for a game. I feel free.
That’s about it. Good times.

My Father

There was an article in the paper yesterday about a website where you could rate your university professors. Since my father is one, I thought I would check it out today.
That was probably not the best idea. He didn’t rate very well. Embarrassingly, I was talking to him on the phone, while I was bringing up his rating. I didn’t mention what I was doing, but it was hard to keep talking normally as I’m seeing several students say “Most awful prof I have ever had.” At least others were nice enough to say “course requires a lot of work. Prof is sometimes confusing but is always willing to help.”
The newspaper article at least came to the defense of some of the poorer rated profs. “the samples are only representative of students with an axe to grind. ‘Intro chemistry is a difficult class to teach because there are lots of people who really don’t want to be there'”.
Still, it’s a bit of a let down to see that so many people hate your father.