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Woke this morning to the news of the earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. I’m having a hard time fighting back tears as I think of one of my favorite cities crumbling around its brave residents. I spent 6 months as the President of the L’Aquila branch in 1994 and I love those wonderful people and the ancient city they are so fiercely proud of. A tutti gli aquilini: che Dio sia con voi.

I’ve read three or four blog posts around the web recently that detail people putting up Christmas decorations. They all seem to have an air of guilt about using artificial Christmas trees. What’s the deal? A decent artificial tree runs around $200. A decent real tree runs around $30. That’s a 7 year payback if you don’t count the added cost in headaches of dealing with a real tree. Are they worried about the environment? Do people actually throw away their old fake trees? Growing up I’m pretty certain we had the same fake tree for about 15 years, maybe more and it got donated to a needy family when we were done. The first 8 or 9 years we were married we used a tree that was donated to us after serving for at least a dozen years in other capacities. I certainly don’t plan on throwing ours away for a long long time, and I will definitely recycle it when the time comes. Maybe I’ve missed the boat, but I stand proud and tall, just like my 7.5 foot imitation spruce.

Erica took me to Quantum of Solace last Friday night as a late birthday present. We saw it at Larry H Miller’s Megaplex Theater at Thanksgiving Point. We’ve seen several movies there lately and can I just say how impressed I am with his theaters? They are well designed technically (Save for the digital projection, which I still have not managed to get used to. Doesn’t anyone else see the pixels?) so the experience of watching a movie is top notch, but the real killer feature is reserved seating. We bought our tickets online a few days ahead, chose the seats we wanted, right in the middle of the theater, went to dinner at Thanksgiving Point and then entered the theater about ten minutes before showtime, retrieved our tickets from the kiosk and went to our seats. No waiting in endless lines on premier night, FTW! Erica and I had the same experience watching Mamma Mia at the Thanksgiving Point theater and Jon and I saw The Dark Knight in IMAX at the Jordan Commons theater that way. Kudos to Mr. Miller for removing my biggest gripe from the theater experience.

Now that I’ve covered the theater, as far as the movie is concerned I went in with both high expectations after Casino Royale and low expectations after reading a couple of reviews and a smattering of fan reactions online. Quantum of Solace would have worked as a generic action movie. I can see it easily as a one-off, like The Rundown, or even as part of a sort of internationalized Die Hard-type franchise. It’s not worthy of being called a James Bond movie, and it’s especially unworthy as a successor to Casino Royale.

First off, the quick cutting has got to stop. I don’t know what the average seconds per shot was in the pre-titles scene, but it has to be somewhat less than the 2 seconds per shot average the The Bourne Ultimatum achieved, and that movie made some people sick in the theaters. The opening scene of Quantum is a car chase through the Italian Alps. It would have been ages better with even just a couple of wide, 8 or 9 second establishing shots thrown in as the cars careen around precarious curves set atop 100 foot high cliffs. As it is, it’s extremely difficult to understand what’s going on inside the cars or when the vehicles are seen maneuvering around each other.

The opening titles song by Alicia Keys has been much maligned across the web, so I won’t repeat any of that here. Suffice to say it is less than memorable at best, and complete drek at middle.

After the titles we’re treated to a foot chase under the ongoing Palio di Siena and across the rooftops and through the houses of that beautiful city. Of course, it’s cut so quickly that it’s near impossible to tell who is chasing whom and how far ahead the chasee is at any given moment. Some of the stunts were ingeniously put together, and evidently Daniel Craig performed many of them himself, but you’d have to watch it in slow motion to really appreciate the work he and the crew did. Erica’s comment was “Can’t they at least put one of them in a light colored suit so we can tell who’s who?” Hear, hear.

I could go on and on, but how about something positive? I like a couple of the throwbacks to previous Bond traditions, like the gathering of the baddies out in the open at a packed opera performance, and the bad guy’s lair (a pretty pathetic lair, however) exploding around him as he has a final duel with Bond, and the pretty local operative with a colorful name sent to escort Bond from the airport. The problem with that one, however, was that they never revealed her full name (Strawberry Fields) in the dialogue. You’d have to watch the credits to get the joke, and who, besides Erica and I, stayed to watch the credits?

What the film really lacked in comparison to Casino Royale, though, was the wonderfully slow and deliberately paced character building scenes. I missed Bond just chatting with his co-stars like he did his last time out. The filmmakers need to put a little more trust in their audience. Don’t force feed us quite so much exposition. We’ll figure out the plot on our own, just give us a hint or two every few minutes. Don’t spend quite so much time on mindless action. We know Bond can best just about anybody if you give him enough time.

When we walked out of the theater I had to do a double take when I looked at my watch. The showtime was 7pm and even after seeing trailers up front and staying through the credits, we were back in the car by 9:00. Quantum of Solace is 38 minutes shorter than Casino Royale.  It clocks in at 106 minutes, making it the shortest Bond film yet. I think it suffers for that. I want to know what was cut out. Was it the very element I missed? Maybe they shot those scenes and they just didn’t work. Maybe they listened to the couple of whiners on the internet who complained that Casino was too long? Hopefully we’ll get some idea of that when Quantum is released on DVD. In any case, I was disappointed even considering my lowered expectations going in.

I went to Wienerschnitzel (when, exactly, did they drop the Der? No, really, I would like to know.) this afternoon for a quick snack. I know, I know, but we all have a guilty pleasure or two, don’t we? I crave something or other from their menu every few months. Frankly, I am a little surprised they are managing to stay in business. I mean, the “Most wanted wiener” slogan is bad enough, but this?

Could that possibly be intentional double entendre? Are they (or their target audience) that intelligent?

Last November we took advantage of a balance transfer offer from one of Erica’s credit cards. It gave us 2.99% until the balance was paid off, so it made great sense. We wrote a check for several thousand dollars and took it to our credit union with my paycheck and a check from Erica’s mom paying her for letting out her dogs while her mom was at work. A few days later, the balance transfer check and the check from Erica’s mom were returned and marked “Refer to maker.” I talked with the credit union to see if I could get any more info and they didn’t know what had happened. We ended up doing the balance transfer another way, so that worked out ok, but Erica’s mom was really concerned about why her check came back. She contacted her bank and they said it had never tried to clear her account.

Well, 10 months later, with some surprise help from the bookkeeper here at Fibernet, we’ve put together the puzzle. All the checks I deposited that day showed up at Fibernet’s bank. My paycheck was debited normally from Fibernet’s account, but the other two checks were somehow recorded as deposits made by Erica. The mistake was later corrected and the checks were sent back to our Credit Union marked “Refer to Maker.” All I can guess is that the teller who took our checks clipped them all together with my paycheck on top and they all went to Fibernet’s bank instead of going to the banks they were actually drawn from. That “Refer to Maker” stamp was the real issue, of course. If it had been “Incorrectly Routed for Payment” or something else a little more descriptive, then the mistake would have been obvious!

We discovered Tattles Bar & Grill in Preston, ID by sheer chance. A couple of years ago when we took the kids to Jackson, WY we decided to drive through Preston on the way to see which Napoleon Dynamite filming locations we might be able to check out. We stopped for gas when we first arrived and I asked the cashier if there was anywhere we could get a good sitdown breakfast. She said, “Well, I dunno. I guess there’s Tattles.” Huh? She told me where to find it and that it was just about the only cafe in town, so we figured we’d give it a shot. We drove about a 1/2 mile west of the main drag and found Tattles Bar & Grill situated in an old house surrounded by a gravel parking lot across the street from a farm implement supplier. We were a bit skeptical. Erica ordered pancakes and I was pleased to see their menu featured a “Garbage Omelet,” which is a tradition in my family and consists of just about every vegetable and meat you can think of tossed in an omelet. I ordered that and a scone. Erica asked the waitress if she could get a scone too, and the waitress gave her a weird look and said “I think one will be enough.” She was sure right about that. They brough Erica a stack of three pancakes the size of dinner plates, and my scone was about 9 inches long, almost 6 inches wide and about and inch and a half thick. One was enough. We’ve been back to Tattles three times now. We even went so far as to plan a day trip to the Cache Valley of northern Utah just so we’d be within spitting distance of Tattles for breakfast.

Tattles on Google Maps:

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We took the kids to the Spanish Fork Kite Festival on Friday afternoon. We couldn’t get our kites to fly cause there wasn’t quite enough wind, but it was fun to see all the other kites and the new wind farm they’ve recently finished constructing out there.

The highlight of the event, though, was getting Erica to try a segway.

She was a bit reluctant at first, but after she saw me ride it around a bit she decided to give it a shot. Now she says she wants one. We’ve recently been watching Arrested Development, so even if we had the disposable funds it’d be awfully hard to overcome the G.O.B. segway stigma.

We have a bit of a tradition, here at Fibernet, that when the anniversary of your first day comes around you bring treats for the rest of the company. I decided, since this year makes a dozen for me, I’d up the ante a bit and start an Annual Potluck Belgian Waffle Festival. My mother-in-law bought me (at Erica’s suggestion) a pro-style belgian waffle iron a couple years ago for Christmas, so I brought that, and purchased a second one to help things move along. The rest of the company brought toppings to go on the waffles. I’m pretty sure everybody got full and had a good time:

So here’s the new look for thunkgeek.com. It’s the Fluid Blue theme. I have to get a couple of bits and pieces working, but for now I think it looks pretty good.

Once again it has been too long since I posted anything here and I will again promise to update more frequently. Today I reconnected with a very old friend who I hadn’t spoken to in about 10 years. I gave her the address of the site so I figured I had to mention her in a post so she’d be mortified when she visited. Mission accomplished.

I think I need to change the look of thunkgeek.com. This old theme is awfully busy, which reflects the design trend at the time of the site’s beginnings. So, I hereby begin the search for a new theme that’ll be a little cleaner and nicer to look at. Out.