atomicthoughts.com

Overheard today at the allergy clinic:

“Were you born in Tucson?”
“We’re both from New York.”
“Oh from New York City?”
“Outside the city. Long Island.”
“I saw Perry Como there once.”

New UPS feature lets you redirect packages over the web

http://watchmywrist.com

Rent watches, similar to Netflix. Since I’ve worn a watch maybe a dozen times in the last 10 years, I’m obviously not the target audience. Even then, I’m still not convinced it’s a real site. :)

Of all the various services that make some attempt to derive my location based on my IP, you’d think that our cable modem provider could figure it out. Why do I have to type in my stupid zip code to get somewhere? Shouldn’t the site know it’s own customer?

Meeting somone at Beyond Bread for lunch and showed up early to use the
free wifi. I knew they turned it off during lunch. It’s an extremely
popular place and they need people in and out. But their blackout hours
are 10 to 2! Way too long.

So I go into Isaac’s room and he’s standing there thumbing through his closet. For some reason he can’t decide what to wear. I suggest a few options but he looks at me disdainfully. He puts his thumb on one shirt, thinks to himself, then looks up at me. “Daddy, can you check the weather?”. I just grin and walk away, opting out of my standard response of “This is Tucson, we don’t have any weather.”.

This is the look he finally came up with.

There’s a special kind of frustration when you spend hours debugging a problem and finally find resolution. And the resolution is that it’s not your bug, it’s in the software you’re working with.

Sometimes I wish everything I did was open source. I was reminded of that fiddling with WordPress this weekend. I didn’t like where something was on the admin interface, so I moved it. Easy as that.

With this though, I file a bug report, and hope they get to it. While the project sits and waits…

Tucson is about to go through a major 3 year highway project that will completely hose traffic for a major part of town. Our local newspaper just announced an “I-10 closure blog” in which they’ll keep folks abreast of the latest problems. But wouldn’t it be more useful to have the option of getting an alert on your cell phone saying “22nd west of Park is at a standstill.”? It would only be useful if someone sitting on 22nd west of Park was submitting the tweet, but that would probably need to be moderated…

Apparently, I watch a lot of movies…

The Departed – This movie was all that and a bag of chips, although I didn’t entirely care for the very end. I wasn’t completely enthralled like some of Scorsese’s other work but it was still a great movie. Not the best movie that came out last year though, that’s still Children of Men.

The United States of Leland – This was an odd movie. Stellar cast of Kevin Spacey, Don Cheadle, Ryan Gosling, and a few others. It was a fairly straight forward indie feeling movie, but the pace was fairly slow. It also used a voice over from the main character, but it didn’t add much to the movie. I think the movie was trying to tell me something, but I’m not sure what.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead – One of the trailers on Leland. It looked like a great thriller starring Clive Owen. In fact it was a really boring supposed thriller with Clive Owen in it. I was completely disinterested from the start.

Northfork – Another Leland trailer, but this one didn’t disappoint. This was part movie, but mostly an art house flick / cinematography-palooza. The movie parts and dialog were interesting, and the imagery was great. Roger Ebert’s review covers it well, although he’s more effusive about it than I am. I would recommend it, but you should probably read Ebert’s review to make sure it’s your cup of tea.

A Good Year – Last year’s Russell Crowe / Ridley Scott team up that was pretty much a flop. It was an okay movie, but fairly uneven and well below the recent standards of those two guys. Genre wise it’s a “romantic comedy”, but the romance was slight and the comedy was mostly incidental.

The name of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) became synonymous with an era, not unlike his colleague, Representative William Pleistocene (D-MN)