2006-01-29 04:19 UTC Keeping busy, blueberry style
Since Hyatt has decided to shun us, we've had to take matters into our own hands. I went to Treaster's movie night on Friday two weeks ago, where we watched Fight Club (a piece of art; my second viewing, my first being at a more depressed time of my life) and Ronin (it has three pretty good chase scenes, it's true, but I got the impression that the plot in between those chases was mostly just there to justify them; this movie also has a pretty high innocent bystander death count, which was pretty shocking). Then, Thursday, I went to Jay's movie night, where we watched Monsters, Inc (non-US edition, so I annoyed the others by pointing out the three or four things they changed to cater to non-English audiences), and A Bug's Life.
It's funny how Monsters, Inc has at least three references to other Pixar projects: the trailer scene seems to be taken from A Bug's Life, and Boo gives Sully a Luxo Jr ball and a toy orange fish reminiscent of Nemo's Dad.
Speaking of which, Kam's latest comic is absolutely hilarious if you happen to be in the demographic of "Stargate Atlantis fan who knows how to read Ancient and also happens to be a big Finding Nemo fan".
Earlier in the week, I lent Nori my copy of The System of the World, since she had temporarily mislaid hers during her move. In exchange (I never actually lend books, I only swap them) she lent me Persepolis (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4, in the US edition cunningly labelled "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2"), two (autobiographic) novels about a girl growing up in Iran over the last 30 years. Wow. I highly recommend those books. (Unfortunately these were translated from the original French; the second book in particular has some quite poor translation in places, so if you can find the originals I'd read that instead. But most definitely still worth reading.)
On the principle that this is representative of her tastes, I now plan to eat my way through Nori's entire bookshelf.
On Friday it was bryner's birthday, so we went out. First, seven of us went to dinner in Palo Alto, without calling ahead. The subsequent long wait gave me the perfect opportunity to visit Know Knew Books, a used bookshop with so many books in a tiny space it's unreal. I bought three old paperback science fiction books. After dinner we went to the city, to a bar called The Cellar. I danced (sorry, Nadia would rather I called this the more accurate "flailed", to keep this distinct from ballroom dancing), for some two hours. It was fun, though rather exhausting. Around midnight some of us went to another club, which was interesting but less fun than I expected. We eventually got home around 4. Which would be great except that I need to get up ridiculously early several times next week and my body is going to hate me!
On the work side, last week this Web log ended up being mentioned on hundreds of Web tech-heads' sites, as they amused themselves reading my frustrated parser reverse-engineering. Then around midweek I ended up being Slashdotted because of some research I did that Google published. I love that Google let me do this research. I've been hoping to study authoring practices for years.
Tantek has been insisting on research-before-specifying-new formats for a long time in the microformats context, and finally the WHATWG specifications will similarly be designed with actual data, instead of us pulling stuff out of our collective behinds. Amusingly, some people thought that my use of SVG meant that Google was Evil, and some people thought that the existence of the report at all was proof that Google was Good.
Tomorrow I'm playing 18xx, later in the week I'm going skiing, next weekend I start volunteering at the West Bay Opera as backstage crew. It's going to be a busy few weeks.