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Unplugged

I'm officially one week into my vacation, with about two and a half weeks to go.

Yesterday, I really reached that fully unplugged state. A lot of those little errands and todo items got finished a couple days ago, and the vacation has settled somewhat into routine.

It's amazing how after getting unplugged from the hectic routine your entire pace can change. Instead of slowing down though, things seem to be speeding up. For the first few days, I had that: go go go, high speed work mentality, and applying that to my home routine, a lot got done in those opening days. But now the pace is a lot slower, with no sense of urgency or rush, I can take my time with things, I can afford to let my self get distracted here and there. The days slowly start to slide later into the evening and the late night. You look up at the clock though and woosh half the day is gone before you know it.

The other thing though, is how quickly you get unplugged from people too. Sure there's Twitter and IM and such... but that can be sortof jarring; the people on the other ends of those systems are still plugged in and on the hamster wheel. They're still going a million miles an hour and my biggest concern is contemplating what to make for dinner.

Also on the topic of people. Most people are gone from 8am to 6pm. And when they get home, they're still on that frantic pace and trying “maximize” the 3 or 4 hours they have before they need to go to sleep. They're frantic, and still plugged in.

Me, I'm slow and unplugged. (at least for 2 more weeks.)

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Stimulus

I heard talk on the political shows this weekend of putting people to work, building roads and bridges etc. infrastructure stuff as a way of stimulating the economy.

While I'm sure there are alot of roads and bridges that need repair. Is this really going to do anything? It's necessary to maintain roads and bridges, but as a stimulus I don't get it. You need new functionality to stimulate an area. And I don't see the the stimulus in repairing and replacing.

Building the Hoover Dam changed water and electricity for a region. Putting a new exit ramp off of iWhatever, what's that going to allow? A new strip mall off the interstate? There's way too many empty store-fronts as it is.

I don't know the answer, but more guys standing around in the middle of orange cones doesn't sound like it's going to do much in the short term to me.

Now, Universal Health Care? That's got possibilities. Take the fear out of losing your health care, getting sick and going bankrupt, and suddenly starting a new business seems alot less risky.

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Twilight

I saw Twilight yesterday. I'll go light on the review, because frankly this movie wasn't designed with me or my demographic in mind so there's little point in taking it apart piece by piece. But here's a snapshot of thoughts:

As teen films go, this is better than alot of stuff that's been released recently. And also for a teen film the acting and characters are better than most. Most of the kids actually behave like kids and that's refreshing to see in a movie of this type.

The biggest problem with the movie is it's complete lack of plot. As you watch the film, you'll think you'll know where it's going several times, but although it points the plot gun, it never really pulls the trigger.

There's some good jumping, high speed superheroey type action in the film. The action isn't in service to anything, but if you enjoy watching people perform superhuman feats, well there's a fair amount of that.

Most of the movie involves watching the two characters above get as close as they can to eachother in breathless halting quivering moments of sensual set-up that like the plot gun above also never gets it's trigger pulled.

The two lead characters "fall in love" which happens for all practical intents and purposes off camera because all their relationship driving conversations, and they are shown having many conversations, happen for the most part in silent montage.

Three quarters of the way through the movie there's a spontaneous bit of jeopardy that for the life of me, I didn't fully understand the reasoning behind, but perhaps the director realized the movie was coming toward the end and she best get on with having a chase and a fight of some sort.

I laughed several times, when I wasn't supposed to, but I laughed. I enjoyed several of the superheroey scenes and the characters were for the most part well rounded and not unpleasant to watch or listen too. The film is very earnest but I wouldn't recommend a theater viewing unless you are a teenage girl (but if you are that, then by all means do race to the theater as this is crafted specifically for you) But those with an interest in Superhero stuff will find this no harder to watch than an episode of Heroes, and well given that, I'd say watch it sometime on DVD or cable when you've got some time to kill. eh.

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Dorito Daredevil

I had this video randomly show up in my email today.

I work with the people that created and star in the video.

It's even more amusing, if you know the "Daredevil".

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Random Non-Sequiters

I watched the new Batman Brave and the Bold Cartoon last night. Didn't care for it. I wasn't completely opposed to the concept of them doing a more kid friendly Batman cartoon. But the show is just bad. If they were going to go the more campy cartoony route, they should have really commited to it. I can't see too many kids getting into this show, as it plays it too straight to be parody and not well enough to be considered a straight forward show.

Let's Go Surfing

» Not really a fan of Best Buys' New Logo

» Batman Mask made out of Duct tape. Cool.

» Gmail has added txt messaging and video chat. I'm looking forward to trying out the video chat. Not sure3 that I'll have much use for the text messaging.

Also saw a while back that Google is now OCR indexing scanned documents. Pretty cool. I haven't come across any in any searches yet though.

» This WD HD Media Player which can play video off of attached USB drives looks slick. It would have to be half it's $130 price before I would consider using one probably.

» Remember the Milk is a web based task list program. It's pretty neat, but now that it has a gadget you can embed in the left side menu of gmail... it's a pretty convienent tool. Also I set up RTM to take direct messages via twitter. Doubley useful since I always have twitter open.

» Interesting article on Love and Hate dugg mostly for the cool baby photo illustration.

» Kronos looks like a Nice AdobeAir based Stop Watch/Project Time Tracker Program.

» Photo Table is an interesting little Air App that lets you drag images out of your web browser and let them float on your desktop. Not very practical... but neat.

» If you do any onscreen measuring for Web Design etc. you might want to check out this Adobe Air free floating Caliper Application.

» Cool current movies done as Noir Posters

» Sumatra PDF viewer is a very nice, very clean, small and portable.

» 123people.com is a fairly good and quick way to stalk more information on someone.

» Denver prefers Bacon to Fries almost 2 to 1.

» There's going to be some incredible amateur web video hitting desktops soon if this short created with a Canon 5D Mk II is any indication.

» I know I tweeted it, but have I mentioned Change.gov on my blog yet?

» Saw a great OPML file of 110 different design feeds on a Digg article linked to this site I didn't want to import that many feed into my Google Reader, so I downloaded a portable RSS reader GreatNews and imported the file into there. Lots of great design stuff.

» JOKE

» PrevURL.com is a good way to preview those various tiny url service without actually going to the site. Also a good way to make tiny thumbnails of websites too.

» The Nirvana Baby is 17 and has recreated the album cover

» HBO is making a fantasy series. Cool.

» Ever wonder how many Obama's could fit on the head of a pin?

» Watchman Character Posters

» Now that Google Reader has built-in translation I'm going to have to find myself some non-english blogs.

» Superman sex humor

» Free Audio Extractor will save the audio from a bunch of video formats, including flv, to MP3. Great way to make Youtube Videos into Audio Files.

» Ubiqq.com is a no-registration required video conferencing aplication like Ekko.tv/conf

» Squirrels dancing to Michael Jackson.

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Review, Film Review

Went to the midnight show of James Bond, Quantum of Solace last night. Packed theater. Youngish crowd, which you would expect for a midnight show.

QofS picks up pretty much directly where Casino Royal left off. There is a nice opening Bond style chase/action scene and then you get the full blown Bond Style Title sequence music video.

Daniel Craig IS Bond in this film. It’s a grittier, more realistic take on Bond as if you stripped all the movieness off of Sean Connery’s performance and played it raw. Craig as Bond moves through every scene with determination, precision and a grace while very GQ is not over done. Grace might seem a misplaced word, but when you see the film, you’ll probably get what I mean.

This Bond is licensed to kill, and very efficient at it. Never superflously, but never with any unnecessary delay either. Really good Bond film, if you liked Casino Royale, you’ll like this one too. A real guy flick, Good stuff.

PS Thoughts: M was good, we do get some nice computer display tech in this film. There’s really only the one short Ford commercial this time. They don’t say Bond, James Bond, but they come close again with a “shaken, not…” And Quantum as a modern take on Spectre has a lot of continuing story possibilities. Bring on the next Film!

Star Trek Trailer

The Star Trek trailer debuted before Bond also. It looks really good. It seems James T Kirk and Spock are going to get a little Casino Royale/Batman Begins type treatment. What I’ve seen so far with this trailer and other pictures on the web has me very excited for this film. I can’t help but think that this movie will be Rodenberry’s original vision as seen through the lens of a world gone the way of the Apple Store. Some might think that sounds odd, but I’m very interested to see how they explore that type of future. May 2009 is going to be a long wait for this one.

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Who watches the... WATCHFRIENDS

The right music can make anything awesome.

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Star Wars - an a capella tribute (one guy singing all four parts...)

Neat

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Did you know that Obama got ELECTED President last night?

Pretty cool.

Now he has ALOT of stuff to do.

He now has a very big community to ORGANIZE. (50 states worth plus some territories, and even a fair ammount of influence over everywhere else.)

I hope he finds alot of SMART, HONEST people to help him implement some good stuff.

...because I got up today and walked into the same gray cubicle that I walked into yesterday. So far last night just EQUALS more HOPE.

One small thing though, some subtle change is already happening. Nothing inspires change and nothing gets emulated quite like SUCCESS. And speaking of SUCCESS...

...did you know that Obama got ELECTED President last night

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Played with tweaking Pidgin (multiple IM client) today.

Found that you can change the themes in Pidgin to any Gnome theme, I learned that in the bottom of this article (Scroll to: Theme Pidgin with the GTK Theme Selector or GTK+ Theme Control).

There's also an interesting list of Third Party Pidgin Plugins. One of the ones I set up is: Smartear which let's you set custom sounds or wav files for different buddies. I also added Facebook Chat plugin which let's you chat with Facebook friends.

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