2006-03-13 19:09 UTC Ramblings from the West
I went to see a movie at random. I literally walked up to the ticket counter, and bought a ticket for the next scheduled showing, without having any idea what it was. That pretty much sums up my mood these days: happy go lucky.
As it turns out this movie was Failure to Launch, a formulaic romantic comedy that is really much funnier than one might expect. Quite recommended.
I've noticed that I've started seeing where jokes are going quicker than I used to, which is making me laugh noticeably earlier than the majority of my fellow movie-goers (hopefully it's not disturbing). For example, in Failure to Launch there is a scene in a café where somebody is watching a video on their laptop, and someone else asks them "can you turn the volume up?". He replies "these are laptop speakers", at which point is is immediately obvious that the logical and funny thing to do is hook the laptop up to the café's AV system, which fits in with the film's style, and which is indeed what happens a few seconds later. Cue the laughs. But to me the scene is funny as soon as the character has finished uttering the word "speakers".
That probably sounds really arrogant. Oh well.
Kerz and I have made huge progress on our train layout (so much for having a kitchen area, that's now officially Belmont Station and Belmont High Coal Mine — there are two bridges across my sink, and even one across my oven). I have a spiffy SVG/XBL-based Web app UI to run the trains, which is especially nice with my Tablet PC. A few more weeks and I'll have to have some sort of ridiculously geeky house warming party (I just need to get some stools first).
Doing the UI in SVG and XBL has taught me a lot about how SVG and XBL suck. I've tried to address most of the XBL suckage in XBL2. I'm too busy to fix the SVG suckage at the moment (and the SVG working group certainly aren't fixing it, based on SVG 1.2). Maybe once I've finished HTML5, I can work on a new SVG to go with it.
On Friday and Saturday I'll be helping with the regional FIRST championships, part of a high school robotics competition. I'm looking forward to that. Speaking of volunteering, the next opera I'll be helping in is in May. The last one was a blast (hi Ellis, Jaimi, "Fuzzy", Will, "Ed", Hannah, Meredith, Pat, Lazlo, Mark, Curt, Rudy, and everyone!). (You wouldn't believe how hard it was for me to remember all those names. I have serious problems with remembering names. Sheesh.)
Actually because of the opera and other things, this weekend has been the first weekend that I've been able to relax in for at least a month and a half. I was whining on Friday that three separate groups of my bay area friends had separately gone skiing in Tahoe this weekend yet none of them had invited me, but as it turns out I think I needed the rest!
Right, enough ranting for one night. Stop reading this nonsense and go do something productive!