Film

While I’m not nearly as much of a movie buff as many, I do like ’em and watch ’em when I can.

A few more movies

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I added three more DVD’s to the collection over the weekend. Here’s what they were:

The Black Cauldron: Based on a series of books I enjoyed as a child (The Prydain Chronicles, by Lloyd Alexander), this was one of Disney’s least successful animated films, but it always had something of a cult following, and was one of my favorites. Interestingly enough, the reasons that it failed are most likely the same reasons that I enjoy it — it is one of the few animated Disney adventures that is not a musical, and it’s more intense than most, to the point that it was Disney’s first (and, I believe, is still their only) animated ‘family’ film to earn a PG rating. It’s a good one, though, and this DVD was something of a revelation, as the original aspect ratio of this film is 2.35:1 — the really wide “scope” format. In other words, with the full-frame video that I’d had for years, I was literally only watching half the film! Only a few Disney animated films have been made with this aspect ratio, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this was one.

The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover: While not exactly a well-known film, this has been a favorite of mine for a few years now — and goes solidly in that classification of “oddball, screwed-up, disturbing” films that I enjoy so much. Much of the premise of the film can be inferred just from the title, but what that won’t tell you is just how visually stunning this work is. There are five major sets to the story, and each set has its own dominant color scheme to set the mood of the characters and action in that room — to the point that as the characters move from room to room, their costumes will change colors to match the theme of the room they’re in. Fascinating stuff, though not at all a movie for the masses — it was decried as pornography as much as it was hailed as genius when it came out. Ah, well…either way, I enjoy it.

From Dusk ’til Dawn: Just an absolute blast of a film. I’ll leave arguments as to whether it’s really “good” out of this — it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and that’s all I want sometimes. Besides, the first time I saw this (in the theater), I went in not having seen any previews for it, so the sudden change in tone halfway throught the flick caught me completely unawares…made for a very cool show. This edition of the disc is nice, too, as it is a two-disc set that includes a full-length documentary on the making of the film called “Full Tilt Boogie”. FTB’s just packed with fascinating stuff — as it’s an actual documentary, rather than just a 20-minute promotional fluff piece, it gives you a ton of detail on what it takes to make a film like this. Very, very cool.

Pie, ghosties, scots, and naked girls (kinda)

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Sunday rolls around, and another week has done and gone. Been a good week, though.

The work week was pretty uneventful, for the most part. It seems that the opinion is that I’m catching on to things rather quickly there, however. John (the person I’m replacing) has decided that this week he’ll only be working half-days, and will make this Friday his last day…then I’ll have the shop to myself. Pretty cool. I also talked with Shelley (my boss within Xerox), and the impression I got is that while I’m not using my DocuTech training at this position, there are good possibilities for that in the future. This was great to hear, as it makes it sound even more possible that I will be getting hired on by Xerox on a permanent basis at some point in the future. It may be a while before that happens — as I understand it, they’re currently in the midst of a hiring freeze right now — but with any luck, I might be officially part of Xerox sometime after the first of the year.

Earlier this week I went out to see American Pie 2. I’m not entirely sure why that ended up being my choice, as I am no great fan of the first one, but that was where I ended up. Pleasantly enough, it wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t label it a classic by any stretch, nor will it be a ‘keeper’ for me when it comes out on DVD, however it was surprisingly funny in spots, and I ended up enjoying it much more than I did the first installment. Much of it was a rehash of the original, but it felt to me like it held together better this time around…more of a real story connecting the characters, rather than merely placing a bunch of misfits in screwball (and often disgusting) circumstances one after the other. And, I gotta say, Alyson Hannigan (as Michelle, the ‘band geek girl’), was great — stealing the film, in my eyes, at least. So, all in all, not as bad a film as I thought it might be.

I also went out Friday night for the midnight show of Poltergeist. Very cool…it had been years since I’d seen this film, and along with many other horror films that were beat to death with sequels, it’s always pleasant to revisit the original and see just how good it actually is. Probably very much due to the production (and uncredited co-direction) of Steven Spielberg, the film is much more along the lines of what I like to see in a horror film — a slow build that allows you to make some connection with the characters before things start getting freaky, followed by truly innovative ideas as these unexeplained events start affecting the family. Quite nice.

I’ll try and get around to at least moving these mini-reviews into the Movies section of my messageboard soon…kind of tired now, as I’ll explain in the moment, so didn’t do that part yet.

Saturday, I headed out with a full crew of people (Casey, Dez, Chad, Don, Karl, Tim, Jenny, and Wendy) to go see the Barenaked Ladies in concert out at the Gorge (a gorgeous [no pun intended] outdoor amphitheater by George, Washington). Casey had bought me the ticket before I had even made it down to Seattle as a ‘welcome to Washington’ present, which I thought was all sorts of cool. We all loaded into three cars Saturday afternoon, and undertook the roughly 3-hour drive to the Gorge. We eventually made it out to the campsite at Potholes State Park — apparently, it was the closest one available, even though it took us another 45 minutes or so after passing the Gorge to get to it — and set up camp there. Admittedly, it was a very pretty little campground.

After getting everything set up at the campsite, we packed ourselves into two cars, and headed down a quicker route back to the Gorge for the show. The way there was fascinating — currently, huge amounts of the state of Washington are on fire, and there were amazing clouds of smoke from the fires just 40 miles away or so in the sky. The smoke turned an otherwise clear night to a completely opaque murk. Just fascinating to see — and the smell of burning pine in the air was an added reminder that all this stuff wasn’t that far away.

Wildfire smoke, Barenaked Ladies trip, WA

We got to the Gorge during the first opening act (who, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of), found a spot and got settled during her last couple songs. The second opening spot was The Proclaimers! All sorts of cool…though I’ve only ever picked up one of their albums (Sunshine on Leith), I’ve enjoyed their music since I first heard “1000 Miles” in the movie Benny & Joon. They played a short (or so it seemed to me) but very clean set, with a nice mix of songs, some that I recognized, and some that I didn’t. After a short break while the stage was slightly rearranged, BNL came on.

This show was great. While I’ve never known much of BNL before this (most of my exposure has been their radio tracks — ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’, ‘One Week’, and ‘Pinch Me’, all of which I’ve liked), so didn’t know many of the songs, these guys put on an incredible show. They obviously have a lot of fun with their music and their concerts, and spent a good amount of time between songs joking around and generally having a lot of fun (from the lead singer while relating a story: “We were celebrating Christmas. Sure, I’m Jewish, but we’re big fans of presents…we’re not big fans of a kind, benevolent God. We like the Old Testaments wrathful, vengeful God. So now we celebrate Easter, too.”) Bouncing back and forth between their songs, with frequent jaunts into random snippets of other music, plus three encores, the show was an absolute blast.

After the show ended at about 11:30pm, we all went back to the campsite, and ended up sitting up and talking until sometime after 2 in the morning. We started out just sitting and talking, still pretty jazzed from the show, then Karl, Casey, Tim and I got into a discussion covering everything from Economics to Politics to whether or not the human race is breeding itself into extinction, and didn’t realize how long we talked until someone actually thought to look at a watch. The night was absolutely beautiful, too — I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Milky Way as visible as it was last night.

This morning we all got up, slowly got ourselves ready to go, packed up, and headed back into town. Now I’m back at Casey’s just long enough to put this post up, then it’ll be time for me to head back to my apartment and crash out before it’s time for me to work tomorrow morning. Very good weekend, though…was a whole lot of fun, and a nice change from kicking around my apartment. So, this is it for now…until later….

Impressions of work, and lots of movies

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Welp, after just over a week of nothing, I’ve finally made it back over here to update things again. Sorry about the lack of updates…but now that I’m back on a work schedule (Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm), by the time I’m off work, bussing out to Ballard to dink around on the ‘puter isn’t the highest thing on my list of priorities. I’ve gotta admit, I’m going to be so incredibly happy when I can finally get all set up at my apartment and don’t have to do all this goofball running around anymore.

Work is going well. It’s been really interesting so far…a very big change from the prinshop environments I’ve worked at in the past (TimeFrame and Kinko’s). As XBS@Andersen, LLP (the official name for where I’m stationed) isn’t open to the public, but is the private printshop for Anderson, it’s much more focused than the more ‘anything-goes’ workloads I was used to. There are five or six primary styles of reports that I’ll be making that make up the majority of the work, plus whatever other copy projects the company comes up with, but it’s a lot more predictable. Definitely takes some getting used to…I’m not really sure if I can say if it’s better or worse, but it’s definitely different.

Seattle, WAOne thing’s for sure though — I miss my DocuTech! I got really spoiled by my years of working on that beast, I think. As this printshop is much smaller and has much more limited runs, they don’t have the high-end equipment I’ve been able to play with for the last few years. I’m back to working with analog equipment…and the digital copiers we have aren’t networked, so everything I work with is hardcopy. A big switch from the push towards all-digital (or at least as much as possible) that TimeFrame was working for. It seems like every time I turn around, with almost every job I do here, I’m seeing ways it would be easier and/or faster for both myself and the client if I had a DocuTech at my disposal…but at the same time, I know that the volume isn’t high enough to justify the expenditure that that would be. A shame…maybe if things go well I can talk them into networking the newer machines in so we can get some digital quality. Who knows? Since I’m still on temp status at the moment, though, I’m not going to start pushing for that just yet.

In other news…well, there isn’t really any other news. Now that I’m working again, I don’t have my days free to wander wherever I want, and I’m still not quite financially comfortable. I’m not in dire straits or anything, but I’m not to a point where I can drop money every time I feel like it, either. I’ve been killing a lot of evening hours watching movied rented from Blockbuster…however, I can’t remember quite all of them. Hrm. Let’s see&…ones I remember as being on the better end of things include The Million Dollar Hotel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Gift, Snatch, Wonder Boys…What Lies Beneath was better than I expected…and I know there have been a few more, I’m just spacing on them at the moment. I also got to go see Dr. Strangelove (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) at the Egyptian’s midnight show last Friday. That was a lot of fun…more so because there were a few people near me who obviously had never seen it before, and it was great to hear people laughing at it for the first time. In a day and age when most people won’t be satisfied unless the newest and fanciest CGI graphics are splashed across the screen every fifteen seconds, it’s great to hear that there are still people entertained by a mid-60’s (?) black-and-white political comedy that appeals to the mind rather than being just pure eye candy.

So anyway, that’s about it for the past week. It may very well be another week before I get to another post, due to my work schedule. In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on figuring out what to do about getting my ‘puters over to my place so I don’t have to keep making this trek. Wish me luck!

Books and movies

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Not much of an update today…things have been pretty slow this weekend. Spent just about all day Saturday at home, doing a lot of reading. Finished Snow Crash, burned right through Mindplayers, by Pat Cadigan, and just got started today on Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder.

I did hit Blockbuster video and picked up three movies I hadn’t seen before. I went with Scary Movie (figured I might as well finally watch the thing — I think I was better off beforehand, though), Cherry Falls (about as entertaining as a silly little modern cheeseball teen-horror flick can get), and The Contender (by far the best of the three, a nice political drama). Of the three, the only one really worth watching was The Contender.

At the moment, I’m just pretty bored…looking forward to the day when I can get my ‘puters to my apartment. Ah, well. Tomorrow morning’s the second interview for the job I’m working on getting…hopefully all will go well.

Job details, more books, and monkeys

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First off — as far as I can tell, I think the interview this morning went great! :) Here’s the details I’ve got on the job I may be getting hired for.

Turns out that the place I interviewed at today was a temp staffing agency called Todays. I’d actually applied for a data entry position through Monster.com, but when they saw my resume, they felt I was better qualified for a posting that wasn’t quite official yet. Should I get this spot, I’ll be working (pay attention now, this gets slightly tricky) at a local firm who’s name I can’t remember for Xerox as an employee of Todays. Got that?

See, Xerox has a service where they send trained operators out to various firms to run their equipment — Xerox knows that people who know what they’re doing are touching their equipment, and the firm doesn’t have to spend its own personnel resources on keeping the copiers going — works well for all parties involved. I’d end up getting dropped in the middle of this — officially a Today’s employee, temping with Xerox, but working at this firm.

But, there’s even a little more to it than this. As it turns out, this firm had a special request with this posting. They have an employee working in this area with ‘special needs’ — exactly what that means hasn’t been specified — and they wanted to see if they could get someone with at least some management/leadership experience. They don’t need a manager, but they did want someone who would be more able to and comfortable with working with this employee; able to give help when needed, act as something of a liason between this employee and others, and the like. Given the supervisorial (is that a word?) experience I have on my resume, Today’s felt that I would be a good pick, and apparently that impression held true during the interview today, as they seemed highly confident that I’d be called in on this job posting. So…now I just cross my fingers, but at least from where I’m standing, things look really good. Woohoo!

In other news….

Yeah, I’m a voracious reader. I posted yesterday that I’d just started re-reading Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg. Welp…that’s done with. Next up on the dock is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, one of (if not the single) seminal works of “cyberpunk” fiction, and an acknowledged source of inspiration for many of today’s top computer/VR developers. Great stuff.

As for the monkeys. My parents were kind enough to drop me a bit of money to help me out until I start getting paychecks and get up and on my feet. So, me being the fine, upstanding, and responsible young man I am — I took the opportunity today after my job interview to go see a movie! Erm…hey, it was a whopping five bucks for the matinee, and I was in a good mood after the interview. So sue me. Anyway…went out to see Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, one of the big films I’d been waiting to see this summer. So how was it? Horrid — the end result was it’s a matinee at best…quite possibly only a rental. Much as it pains me to say that about a Tim Burton film, it’s true.

Family, blondes, and jargon

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First off — hi dad! :) Got a call from dad yesterday — he and mom were off on a trip to England and Scotland (anywhere else?) with the Alaska Childrens Choir for the past few weeks, and just got home. Seems everything went well for them, and I’m now told that Edinburgh is a wonderful place to visit, should I ever get the opportunity. Hmmm…well, I’ll certainly be keeping that in mind….

I’ve been seeing ads for Legally Blonde for a while now, and I finally decided to break down and go see if it was as cute as it looked in the ads. It definitely was (something that’s always nice).

Lastly for today, as I was going through my boxes of stuff last night, I stumbled across a book I hadn’t read through in a while. The Jargon File is a compendium of slang and jargon from the hacker community that has been an ongoing project since roughly 1981 — a full 20 years now! While it would at first appear to be aimed solely at the hacker community (which, to be honest, I can’t exactly dispute), it also has a broad appeal to people outside of the community, especially those with a decently sharp sense of humor and a love of wordplay. I started re-reading it last night, and had forgotten just how entertaining it can be to read something that is, in some respects, a dictionary of technical terms and slang. In particular, I think my dad would really get a kick out of it, given what I know of his sense of humor and interest in words, wordplay, and etymology. The file can either be found online, or can be purchased in bookstores as The New Hacker’s Dictionary (though the online version is more current).

Bring out the gimp!

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In this case, unfortunately, the gimp is me. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for the past few days, nursing a banged-up knee — hence the lack of much in the way of updates here. Bleah.

Thursday night went out with Chad, Casey, Casey’s girlfriend Jen, and a friend of Jen’s named Steve to a bar called Neighbours just a couple blocks away from where I live for their 80’s night. Very fun place — it seems to be a Seattle version of the old Wave in Anchorage — a gay bar that’s been deemed ‘safe’ for the straights to hang out at. Was a good night, but at one point I was dancing on a platform, and when someone got a bit too close to me I backed up, and fell right off the platform. I caught my knee on the edge of the riser as I fell, and while I didn’t really realize it then, apparently I damaged myself pretty decently — by the time Friday rolled around, I could hardly walk. Very frustrating, and led to my primarily holing up in the apartment for the weekend.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do it alone. Laura, a friend of mine from Anchorage is off on vacation and had a couple days to kill in Seattle, so I had said she could crash at my apartment. She came in early Friday morning, her friend Jenny came in Friday evening, and they took off Saturday around noon. Then Saturday afternoon my friend Aliena (who Kirsten, a friend of mine up at UAF, had introduced me to) came by, and we spent a very pleasant night kicking back at my apatartment and watching movies (as she’d been kind enough to bring up a small TV and VCR so we didn’t have to just stare at the walls all evening). Aliena crashed at my place, took off about noon today, and I decided it was time to head over to my computers and wade through the backlog of messages from the past few days.

One other cool thing, however — there’s a cool little theater just a couple blocks away from my apartment (The Egyptian, at Pine and Broadway) that was playing Run Lola Run at midnight on Friday and Saturday, and I got to go see it Friday night. Quite cool, having only seen it on DVD before. Apparently, the Egyptian does midnight movies on a regular basis, which could be all sorts of fun — next weekend’s is A Clockwork Orange. Whee!

In any case, I need to get busy getting my resume ready to go as I dive into the local job market….

Final fantasy, sleeping in a shoebox

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Okies — first off, if you’ve been looking forward to Final Fantasy at all, go see it. Eye candy — lots of eye candy — and it’s well worth catching on the big screen for the full effect.

Spent the night in the Shoebox last night. First off — as soon as I can afford it, I need a bed. While I can deal with sleeping on the floor, it’s not the most comfortable way of doing things. Ah, well…details, details, right? Oh, and I need to see if I can get the neighbors to refrain from turning up their stereo quite so loud at 6am. Other than that, not bad. :) Anyway, got my stereo hooked up, so I can listen to music, and then got stalled on unpacking anything else, when I realized I don’t have anyplace to put anything. No shelves, no tables…oops! Guess things are just going to need to stay in boxes for a bit longer. Felt kinda silly when I realized that.

No biggie, though — I’ve got my music, got books, and now comes the big challenge — hitting the streets in an attempt to find a job. Fun fun fun….

A shoebox, a dragon’s kiss, and Kate

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Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAFirst off — and most important — I’ve got my apartment! I called Melvin (the landord) at about 5pm today, and he told me that I could come on down and get the keys. Immediately I headed out the door, swung through Radio Shack to grab a telephone, and rode the buses out to Capitol Hill. Talked for a few moments with Melvin, then took my first steps into my first apartment in Seattle. Woohoo!

Shannon Apartments, Seattle, WAI’ve got pics up here to share of the apartment and the building. It’s pretty sparse at the moment — everything I own is still in Casey’s garage — but hopefully I’ll be able to rectify that fairly quickly. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to get everything over there just yet…but I’ll find a way. I’m still at Casey’s for the moment, as I didn’t get anything over to the apartment tonight, but things will start moving that direction soon enough, I’m sure.

View from insideIn order from top to bottom, here’s the pics I’ve got — as always, you can click on the thumbnails for full-size versions. First off is the building itself — the Shannon Apartments, with my outside door circled in red. Next is just a closer view of the doorway — you can’t see them in this photo, but on the left and right of the entrance are doors into two other apartments — the only other two with street entrances. The next shot is standing in the inside doorway looking out towards the street, and the last shot is of the inside of the apartment (affectionately deemed “The Shoebox”) from the outside doorway. Fun fun fun!

This is all of itI caught Kiss of the Dragon tonight. In brief — it’ll be an entertaining rental, but not much more.

Had one interesting little tweak to the night on my way home, though. I was crouched down at the bus stop at 1st and Pine waiting for the 18 to Ballard to come by, when a guy comes jogging down the sidewalk. As he passes me, he flashes his hand in front of my face and yells “Boo!” It startled me and I jumped a bit, but he just kept running by, so I didn’t figure it was much more than that — was even a little amused, so I laughed a little. Apparently that was the wrong response, however, as when he heard that he stopped, turned around, and stood right in front of me.

“Yo, loco, what’d’you say?”

I didn’t bother standing up — I figured if I stayed crouched down and let him loom over me, it’d keep him in psychologically in a position of ‘power’, where if I stood up, I’d have been taller than him, and more of a threat.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No, man, what’d’you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

At this, he turned to the man sitting on the bench next to us. “Hey, what’d he say to me?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

The guy paused for a moment. “Oh.”

Then he patted my shoulder, shrugged, and started running down the street again.

Wierd…but still kind of entertaining, and at least I didn’t get thumped.

Then, just a few minutes later, who should I see at the other end of the bus stop but Kate and her boyfriend Duncan! Rock on — Kate’s been one of my favorite people for years, and I’d been wanting to track her down for a bit. So I wandered over and got her attention, swept her up in a big hug, and spent the rest of the time waiting for the bus (which was late, by the way, something about some big all-star baseball game that I’d probably know more about if I cared at all about sports) and about half of the ride home talking with her. Was very cool.

Incidentally, she and Duncan had both just watched The Score, the new Ed Norton/Robert DeNiro flick, and said it wasn’t that impressive. A bummer, as they’re both good actors, but got a rental recommendation from them on that one. Ah, well.

So that’s my excitment for the day. Now — let the moving commence!

Buses are fun

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Just got back in from catching Cats and Dogs out at the Cineplex Odeon downtown here. Quick blurb: quite entertaining, and well worth a matinee showing.

Was an interesting ride in, though. There are various repairs still being done around town from the earthquake last February, and they’re currently closing down the Ballard bridge (the most direct route between Ballard and downtown Seattle, and the route the #18 bus usually takes) each night, forcing the bus to take a longer route. Not normally a big deal, except that it gave me that much longer to listen to some woman who had this amazingly stereotypical ‘New York Jewish’ accent rattle on and on. Another reason to actually like the fact that I grew up in Alaska — I don’t sound like that!