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So do you suppose it’s because I’m a child of the 80s who grew up under the specter of mutually assured destruction that when I see a strange and fast moving light in the sky my first thought is: “Hmmm? Wonder if that’s a missile. This could be it.”

Maybe it was just the Depeche Mode I was listening to that had me in an 80s frame of mind. Either way, if anybody needs me, I’m going to be up in the mountains, leading a rag-tag group of high school football players.

WOLVERINES!!!!

Speaking of (more or less), Tron is showing as a midnight movie at the Nuart tomorrow (Friday). I’m going. Any Los Angelinos feel like coming along?

See now, this is why I can’t ever have pets. How do you trust your friends to come stay in your place unsupervised when you know they may just be waiting for a chance to wrap the entire thing, quarters, toilet paper and all in tinfoil?

OK, maybe I could work on finding friends who aren’t so clever or if clever at least not so fiendish. Still, what would I do about the allergies? It’s a riddle to be sure.

These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of a test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950’s. Via

iPhoto - a few nice new features (in particular the slide show edit/delete tools, the ability to handle more photos (they claim), and less so the ratings smart albums and rendevous sharing). However, I don’t care about any of the other applications in the suite, and it isn’t worth $50 to me on its own. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it will work on 10.2. I would have expected them to use this as a club to force people up to 10.3.

iPod Mini - the rumors stole the thunder here. I was expecting $100 and $200 prices on two models. $250 is too much, but now they have room to announce a smaller version and a $50 price cut in six months I guess.

Garage Band - looks cool enough I guess. I have no interest in making my own music, but I know lots of people do. Interesting that you have to pay an extra $100 to get the hip-hop and electronica loops that I imagine their core user will want to have. Of course the killer feature will be in six months (?) when they announce that now you can upload your creations directly to the iTunes music store. They didn’t announce that was going to happen, but I have to believe it’s coming.

As to the rest of the announcements - who cares?

There seems to be a Gremlin in my computer today. If I leave it alone for a few minutes (which I think means if I don’t move the mouse within some fixed amount of time), the mouse locks up on me and I have to unplug it and plug it back in.

HUGELY ANNOYING!!!!

It’s happened from time to time before, but it’s worse today for some reason. I’m guessing some timed process is crashing the USB driver or it just gets tired of waiting in a loop for a mouse event. I don’t know.

Also, my home computer has recently taken to crashing when I sleep it. It just locks up, and I’m forced to reboot. Upon reboot, as likely as not it fails to detect the hard drive my system file lives on (or even the other hard drive for that matter). The first time I went so far as to remove the IDE cable and try to reseat it. Since then I’ve learned that simply turning it off and waiting a few minutes or turning it off, unplugging it and plugging it back in generally fixes it eventually. Sometimes I have to unplug my WiFi router too. I’m not sure if these bizarre dance steps are really doing anything or if it just needs to wait long enough for something to discharge or charge or …

HUGELY ANNOYING!!!!

If I was any kind of geek, I’d get in there and try to work out what’s going on. As it is, I just do the dance steps I’ve been taught, sacrifice my goats and cocks, and pray to the tech gods that they’ll continue to honor me with the bounty of their grace.

HUGELY ANNOYING!!!!

Yesterday, I was driving up the 110 Freeway just at sunset, and the light and color in the sky was remarkable. As I came around a turn, I saw the skyline of downtown LA, and the setting sun was reflecting off the buildings in a really beautiful way. I started looking for a place where I could pull over and get some pictures.

I finally spotted a metro overpass that looked like it might be about right. I pulled over, and drove around for a while trying to get turned around so I could park. Sadly, by the time I got up there I’d missed the light by about 15 minutes. I tried to take some photos anyway, but I didn’t have a tripod with me, and it was just all wrong.

I headed up to the same spot today, but the smog that the rains and wind had blown out the other day was already starting to build back up. And, I got there about an hour too early this time. I waited around taking shots as long as I could, but my hands were frozen, and I was getting bored. Plus, I’ve been in really foul mood for about 2 days (stupid full moon playing hell with my psyche), and just wanted to get out of there and go get some warm food.

I did take some photographs. If I’d been able to wait just 15 or 20 minutes more, they would have been so much better, but I didn’t, so there you go.

A few weeks ago, I saw a preview for Les Triplettes De Belleville (The Triplets of Belleville). I instantly resolved to see it. It looks just amazing, but just as quickly, I forgot what it was called. Now that I’ve stumbled across it again, I’m just setting a memory anchor for myself.

Also, I finally got around to seeing Lord of the Rings, Return of the King today. I thought it was good. The special effects have really improved over the course of the series. I watched Fellowship a few days ago, and Two Towers last night, and back to back like that you can really see the progression. The effects are pretty primitive in Fellowship compared to what you get with Return of the King.

My one complaint is the movie seems to spend the last 3 hours (OK, maybe the last half hour) throwing up one ending after another. It’s worse than AI or even the Hulk in that respect. When “The End” came up on screen I was like “Are you sure?” I can’t even imagine how long the special edition is going to be.