ich bin ein auslander

happy belated birthday to jon… dropped by the bowling thing on wednesday and then the dinner last night… cameras were mercifully set on low.

got my ipod back today. well, another new one anyway.

Tons of comment spam deleted today. How annoying.

What’s been going on? Not much. Lots of work… went and saw the Passion the other night with Wendy and John… it was pretty good. Moving, in a weird sort of way… must be the roman catholic upbringing. But I did have problems with it… lame sound effects for the blood spurts, way over the top violence… really focused on that aspect of it, very little of the actual message of peace and love in the movie. Wendy pointed out the naked terminator-esque rise at the end… and of course, my favorite aspect was the still vengeful god that smote anyone who said anything nasty to Jesus in one way or another.

Still… evil always gets the best outfits, don’t they? Satan’s robe rocked the house.

Rather strange timing - we randomly sat down and watched all of the Last Temptation of Christ a few days before, when it was on Bravo… for no real reason, without realizing we’d be seeing the Passion as neither of us really cared much. Altogether, I preferred the message conveyed in the Last Temptation more, although Dafoe, Keitel and Scorcese or however you spell it are SO overrated in my book. The Passion certainly looked a lot better.

For my money, the most enjoyable time spent with Jesus is reading Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Friend. Not only is it laugh out loud funny, but it’s how things really should have been. It makes sense.

Oh, and can someone please explain to me why Monica Bellucci is supposed to be the be-all end-all of hot female sexuality? Granted, covered up in a robe playing the Magdalene in the passion isn’t a sexy role, but I didn’t think she was all that in the Matrix either.

Long, boring article about Microsoft dorks “playing” and developing “future technologies…” - http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/03/05/visual.diary.ap/index.html….

but one part at the end caught my eye -

“Rashid, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University before joining Microsoft, is already thinking ahead. One item he has in mind: an alarm clock that figures out when to wake you based on current traffic conditions. ”

I swear to god, I’ve heard that about 5,000,000 times over the past ten years. And there still isn’t one of these on the market. Lame, lame, lame. Can people really just recycle the same quotes year in and year out like that?

martha’s going to jail. woo hoo. can we now, please, do something about halliburton?

went and saw the lead singer from the old 97’s play solo last night at largo. never been to largo. never heard of the guy or his band… but he’s john’s favorite in the world right now and he had an extra ticket, so wtf. had lots of beer, the guy was pretty good…. clever lyricist, not really my cup of tea musically. reminded me an awful lot of miles hunt’s solo stuff (from the wonderstuff) except i like the english vibe better than the somewhat country tex-mex that this guy had. but whatever. a good show. might be right up the alley of some of the folks that read my blog, so you should go check him out.

tonight off to a client’s gig. tomorrow, a bbq and then a birthday party. sunday, the sopranos. somewhere in between all of that, a ton of work.

Good to see that as apple expands and becomes more of a force, they’re also starting to suck as much as microsoft. iPod number two (number one, bad hard drive after 6 months) has lasted only 2 months. weird whiny noise for two weeks, now only one of every 10 songs will play and it’s no longer recognized by itunes or the updater.

then, 6 attempts to use the online service form submission throughout the day failed on either the last or second to last page… which meant a good 5 minutes or so each try, filling out the same stupid information

so then a 30 minute wait on the tech support phone, only to be forced to run through ALL THE CRAP I’VE BEEN DOING ALL DAY AGAIN to convince them it’s really not working. Now I have to wait until monday to get the box to send it back to wait a week or two to get a new one.

which will probably break in a month or so as well.