Posted by Jim at March 9th, 2005
I’m trying again for a Saturday morning brunch. Last time, things worked out pretty well (there were no snowstorms…). If you want to come, contact me.
It’ll be something simple. Pancakes, sausage, and probably something like muffins or cinnamon rolls.
Things should start around 10 am and last as long as people want to hang around.
Posted by Jim at March 9th, 2005
Recently Kristen and I have been watching a movie a week. This is a challenge since we have different tastes that sometimes overlap.
Shall We Dance is a Hollywood adaption of a Japanese movie. Whether or not it’s true to the original, I enjoyed it. That being said, it felt true to the original in the sense that there were points that it felt Japanese. What I mean by that is that there were certain sorts of characters and plot situations that I’m more familiar with in watching anime and reading manga than I am in watching your typical Hollywood movie.
Here’s the story: Every night John Clark (an estate lawyer) takes a train home from the office, and, every night he notices the same beautiful woman looking sadly out the same window. On one night, however, he gets off the train at the nearest stop, and, realizing she’s staring out the window of a dance studio, signs up for lessons.
Despite the fact that he’s married, this does not turn into an affair. He falls in love with the art form, and moves on to revitalizing other parts of his life.
I’d love to give a long list of why I suspect it’s close to the original, but I won’t for two reasons. First, because it will probably turn out that everything that feels like it should be original was added. Second, because it’d likely be a pretty poor read.
I’ll just mention a couple things that felt like they should be in the original. First, the fact that they had the main character see the woman through the window of a train in Chicago rather than having it happen through the window of a car. Second, many of the characters just did not feel Hollywood. Many of the characters were exceptionally quirky, most had secrets they desperately wanted to hide.
I should mention that I’ve got no interest in dancing, but I did like the movie. Kristen liked the movie too and kept talking about taking dancing lessons after it finished.
She’s likely to be disappointed on that front.
Posted by Jim at March 4th, 2005
For the last week I’ve been undergoing a major time crunch at one of my jobs. Essentially, I’ve been reworking a conference registration and online payment system I set up a year ago. One would think that that would be easy since I’d already figured everything out once.
Unfortunately, it was a bit of a rush job last time as well–not to mention my first time programming in php–and I saw a lot of things I could improve. Thus I’ve been spending all available hours trying to put things together.
Now though, I’m telecommuting and there’s the added wrinkle of cats. Last year, people at the office left me alone and didn’t ask me to do things for them while I was working on this. Cats are not quite as considerate.
Cats work on the assumption that if someone is sitting, they have a lap available. Computer programming always involves sitting. Thus, I can be minding my own business, trying to organize the project in my mind or solve an unexpected problem when a cat:
1. materializes seemingly out of nowhere and leaps on my lap or
2. in the case of one of my more timid cats, materializes out of nowhere and pokes me with his paw, indicating that he wants to be petted and
3. when I ignore him, leaps straight to the top of my desk,
4. balances in the small area between the monitor and the edge of the desk (blocking the monitor) and
5. then walks across the keyboard toward me, making a purring noise and inadvertantly scattering “kjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj” or “wsfddddddddddddddddddddddddddd” into random spots within my code.
It’s enough to make a person want to buy a laptop and work from coffeehouses instead.