thunkgeek.com

But I just finished Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and I really enjoyed it. We saw the movie a couple of months ago, and being the person that I am, once I found out it was based on a book I figured I’d better read the book as well. Chevalier’s writing style is very clean and readable. She does a good job of putting you into the time period without resorting to an overblown simulation of period accents or language usage in her dialogue. I found it a little odd at first, I hate to admit, reading a book written by a woman and written from the point of view of a woman. I felt like I was reading a girl book. Chauvinistic me. Anyway, it was quite a good little read.

When my alarm sounded 5 minutes ago I instictively reached not for the snooze button, but my pager, thinking that I could it use to to turn off the alarm and thus prevent myself from having to get out of bed to quench the infernal beeping. “Does the noise in my head bother you?”

I ought to be slapped with a babel fish for not having previously mentioned my insane level of anticipation vis a vis the Hitchhiker’s movie. Please see the trailers here and here.

Thank you, that is all.

It seems I’ve been watching a lot of movies at home the past few days. What’s really extraordinary is that they have all been really excellent. I watched the Three Colors Trilogy again over the weekend. I hadn’t seen them for almost a year, if I remember correctly. They were as good if not better this time as last time. It’s so refreshing to see films that tell real human stories in an intelligent way. You know?

Erica and I watched Ray over the last two nights as well. I’ve wanted to see it ever since it was released, because I have always been a fan of his music, as well as had a lot of respect for his triumph over personal demons and his humble beginnings. We didn’t get to see it in the theater for various reasons, not the least of which the fact that it is awfully difficult to get a babysitter. So, the other night I decided I was just going to go rent it. That’s the first time I’ve been inside a video rental store in probably half a year. Anyway, I knew a little of Ray Charles’ story before seeing the movie. I guess I know a little more now. It’s an incredibly well done film and Jamie Foxx deserves every bit of praise he got for his work in the movie, as does every other person who worked on it. I loved the movie. Erica said it was depressing. There seem to be only two types of movies in Erica’s view… depressing ones and ones she will watch over and over. There’s no spectrum of quality, just whether she would watch it again and whether it was depressing. Any movie that shows a person who ever suffered even a little tiny bit, is depressing, even when it goes on to show how they struggled to conquer their issues and finally made an inspiring rise to greater than imaginable heights. Any movie that contains a cute, however unlikely, romance, or features a spontaneous group dance number, is a movie she’ll watch over and over. So, for example, Get Over It, which features both a cute romance and several dance numbers, would get an A+ in her book, though the movie itself, while enjoyable on a juvenile, popcorn level, is no masterpiece. Anyway, Erica’s opinion on Ray was “That was good, but I wouldn’t watch it over and over again. It was depressing.”

I also watched Whale Rider again yesterday afternoon with the kids. If you haven’t seen it, please do, especially if you have kids, or know someone who has kids. It’s not a childrens movie. It’s a parents movie. It’s a beautiful story.

We’re in the planning stages of a trip to see Erica’s roommate from college get married in April. The festivities are in Kennewick, Wa, so we decided we’d make a real trip out of it and go to Seattle for a couple of days before the wedding, then come back southwest to Kennewick. At this point I am in the throes of my typical vacation over-planning syndrome… trying to cram in as much as is humanly possible on every day of the trip. Of course once I actually get out on the road I usually feel like dumping half the ideas we had and doing as little as possible other than puttering around whatever city we are going to and resting at the hotel. Vacations are supposed to be restful, right? My itineraries usually calm down at least a little by the time we actually leave the house, but it always seems we end up not being able to do quite everything we wanted to. Oh well… there’s always time for another trip.

My wife makes mistakes sometimes. It’s just part of her character. It’s part of what I love about her. We’ve started referring to these little things as her “foibles.” I had the bright idea a couple of weeks ago to setup a website for her so she could record her foibles for posterity. She’s just made the first few posts today. I feel so proud. I just gave birth to another blogger.

myfoibles.com

So I’m here working on spam filtering again. Thought I was done with this. Never assume, right? We decided a couple weeks ago to try to increase our filtering capacity by mirroring some of the block lists locally. Since then I’ve been fighting with the machines we setup to do this trying to find the right methodology and now the right hardware. I think maybe I finally have it all set just right. Ugh.