Writing Wrongs

The temps got up to around 90° in my neck of the woods today, but the apartment does not get any direct sunlight, so out on the patio it was only about 82, and inside it was mostly 76 since that's when the air conditioner kicks in. It is like boot camp for Thailand. Minus the humidity.

Slept till 9:30, eventually walked a few blocks to the nearest manicure place and my timing was perfect, got my nails done right away, even though only one person was working. Nice little place, probably they have two people doing  nails/pedicures and one or two doing hair during the week. I think it's called Touch of Silk. Manicurist was a very nice middle-aged Chinese-Vietnamese lady who kept up a conversation through the whole time. I'll be back.

Back home, tried the patio for a while but it was too hot. As usual, most of the traffic was families with kids. Boring. Channel surfed and found Ghostbusters II on Bravo, which IO watched because a friend of mine was the person inside Slimer's suit. Funny, at the time I tuned in, the ghostbusters were climbing out of  the sewer covered in slime, and Bravo put up one of their annoying little promo overlays which said "Real Housewives of NYC get some unexpected visitors". LOL. I managed to record that, and Slimer's last 3-second appearance as a bus driver.

Vacuumed, and also shampooed some trouble spots. There is an area I spilled some red Crystal Light or similar house brand drink, and nothing is getting it out.

Made a banana smoothie, this time remembered that the malted milk was the one on the left, the one on the right is Parmesan.

Looked up an article I did in 1974 for the Astoria, OR paper at the request of a friend (via her husband on FB), found the negatives for the photos which went with it and scanned them in with my neat little Wolverine hand-held film scanner. It does a great job, except it expects store-bought film where the gaps between each image line up with the notches on its feeder. But these were hand cut from 100-foot rolls so some of the photos needed the ugly black line cut off. Posted them on FB, instantly got comments from several of her hubby's friends.

At about 6:30 I headed to Palo Alto, got to the theater sooner than I expected, waited in the park for the box office to open and was happy to find they did have a ticket reserved for me. The back to the park with my Kindle. Am now reading Hugo nominee with the unlikely name of The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees By E. Lily Yu. I gave up, sadly, on Mary Robinette Kowal's Kiss Me Twice. Two problems - the mobi formatting was annoying (top and bottom headers are in line with the text) and pdf formatting was unreadable on the Kindle (6 point type. Trying to expand it made the type bigger, but cut off at the width of the screen). Bigger problem is it is awkward, as if she was writing a detective story as a class assignment. The beautiful flow she had in last year's winning story is just not there in this one. Sigh.

Back to the theater, took my seat, and people were still arriving at 8:05. My row was full, as were the rows in front and behind me. Most of the side section seats were empty, as well as the last five or six rows. I made a note to move at halftime.

The play is called The Lieutenant of Inishire, and according to the director's notes, it is an attempt to show through over-the-top humor the insanity of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Had this been produced during the bombings and assorted bloodshed and other nastiness, it might have had a point, but these many years after everything is peaceful, it is just another case of beating a dead horse. And poorly.

I did not enjoy the play at all. Had I been able to understand the words, I may have laughed once or twice, but the cast all talked far too quickly, with way too thick an accent, and mostly talked upstage. It also helps it one opens one's mouth when one speaks.

The first scene takes place in a humble Irish home. The second in a torture chamber, with a victim hanging upside down from his ankles, stripped to the waist, bleeding from under his pants. Several audience members gasped and looked away. This scene has what I took to be light banter between the torturer and the victim, but as I could rarely understand either of them, all I saw was a person hanging upside-down for far too long. I think at one point he was given a choice of which nipple would be cut off, but I'm not sure.

A couple of scenes later, the woman sitting next to me started to snore.

Half the audience did not come back for Act II. As he left, a man in the row behind me said there was still time to watch the baseball game on TV.

The only reason I did not leave is after the play was free food. The play just got worse and worse, in thoroughly predictable ways, except for the next-to-final twist at the end, which I would bet a case of Guiness was thrown in by the author after the play was finished, when he showed it down at the pub to his drunken buddies. The twist at the very end was the expected punchline of the shaggy dog story which the play is.

The sets were okay, scene changes were marred by too-loud, too-cacophonous metalicized Irish folk tunes.

The free food was quite good. I only saw one person from Jeckyl & Hyde (my free ticket was thanks for being in that show earlier this season). Some of the conversation was amusing. One man pointed out that one of next year's offerings, Miss Saigon, is a musical. As if this was unknown previously. But it did make me think that there should be a rip-off musical, Donald Trump's Miss Saigon Universe - The Musical!

Home, unpacked the eBay-bought VCR, and it did not work. It fired up okay, but would not play a tape, fast forward or rewind for more than 3 seconds, and when I started to open it up to see what was going on I didn't - when I saw that someone who did not know how to had already done so, bending one metal part and breaking off a plastic catch. So I sent a nastygram to the seller, and bought one from a repair shop.

Plans for tomorrow:
Take pictures of my eyes
MIB3 - matinée if I wake up in time (not a problem, 3D is at 12:20)
Spend some time at Starbucks
Take the camera out for some GPS testing.
Move two boxes out of the bedroom. One goes into the computer room and gets sorted, the other will probably get dumped. Very heavy metal sections which snap together with plastic connectors, which I stupidly threw away when I moved.
Get a massage, if it cools down.

Busy day at work.  The CTO gave a presentation on a new device which has been on the wish list for at least 4 years, it was very thorough but easy to understand, and he did a masterful job of showing how the timing is now right to get the intro version on the market ASAP and then ease our way into the full blown dream machine.

Lunchtime I went to the apartment and picked up the new laptop, and shared turkey bologna and Kraft Singles with Domino. Two of the few things she will eat out of my hand.

Back at work, Something Went Wrong with the machine which lets us stream video clips. I have two tests waiting for that to get fixed. Received a new set of dates for two of my projects.

Home, set up the two laptops on one of my spare routers via ethernet cables, turned off wi-fi, and ran Windows Easy Transfer. Both machines are Windows 7, and it was very easy to start, but with about 350 MB transferred, it wanted the "old" computer's password.  I haven't used the password since I first got the machine, because it has a fingerprint reader. I tried all my usual passwords, but nothing. I canceled that part, and left it to grab the remaining 5GB while I took off for the RetroDome and The Game Show Show.

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Nutshell: this is the same gang which destroyed You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown last year. A double-wide married couple, he is trained as an opera singer, she is more  of a ballroom dancer/musicals soprano. I thought I was going to see a series of TV game shows simulated on stage, but what I got was a 2-act 3-hour musical similar to the 1940's Radio Hour, mostly backstage soap opera set in a TV game show. It doesn't deserve a full review, so here's the mini:

Leading man has an opera-trained voice and has no idea how to relax and just sing. Leading lady was once a wonderful dancer, but that was 60 lbs. ago. All the people in the show except for The Woman Who Plays All The Small Parts were too old for the show. Audio was way too loud (everyone was wearing a face mike, and there were also hand-helds, stand mikes and desk mikes. Most of it sounded strident.

I almost walked out a couple of minutes into the second act, when ( spolier ) they went all macho man sexist anti-career woman as their message. If I was the leading lady I'd have clocked the sponsor and stomped out.

The set was well done except for the wheel of fortune being too high for any contestant to reach. They did do three snippets of game show with audience members ;participating. The Match Game section was a hoot. They totally misused kevin_standlee's mike.

Lots of forgettable music, childish lyrics and most of them went on forever.

The cast was very energetic, and they could all nail all the numbers with one more week of rehearsal. And they could stand to cut four numbers and add another game, and pay more attention to when the applause sign should be tuned on.

Not worth the discounted subscriber price.

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I was expecting the show to be over by 10:30, but it was 10:53 when I was out the door, and had just enough time to grab some enteric aspirin and dishwashing liquid from Target across the way which closes at 11.

Then some grocery shopping across the street.

Back home, the PC transfer was done, but it was not complete because of those files which needed the old computer's password. I did the trick on the old computer of adding another administrator account, with one of my more usual passwords, and using that to reset the "howeird" account password. But when I tried the transfer again, it still wanted the original password.

So I am running the system-to-factory-settings routine on the ASUS, will set its howeird account to the same password as the new one on the Toshiba, and try again. Let it run overnight.

Plans for tomorrow:
10 am manicure & haircut
lunch at one of the restaurants near the nails place
Home/nap

Probably the most powerful thing my father ever told me is that, like us, he and his father did not get along, and one of his biggest regrets was he never had the chance to reconcile with his father. His father was a handyman, and fell off a roof when my dad was 19. It took decades, but by the time my father was gone, we were on good terms with each other.

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Someone who had a crush on me when she was in high school (I was 23) is now one of the production staff at Seattle Opera. Over on the Book of Face, she posted the trailer for their current production of Madame Butterfly, as well as an article in a not-quite-local paper about the 6-year-old girl whom she found to play the part of Pinkerton's son. I did not want to be rude to her over there so I'll say it here.

First, there are plenty of boys in Seattle who could have played that part. Plenty of girls too. Okay, so the kid is only from Lynnwood, but that's a nasty commute from the northeast end of Lake Washington to the opera venue in downtown Seattle, at least an hour one way after school.

Seattle used to be a place where young opera talent could get a break, but they decided to cast an older performer (14 years since her debut) as the leading lady. She looks older than that. The role calls for a teenager. The woman has enough vibrato to stress test a 747. The fellow playing playful boyish Pinkerton is a stuffed shirt. Nice voice, though. The mix was horrible - the orchestra in most of the clips was too loud to hear the soloists' words. It does not look like a production I would go out of my way to see.

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This morning listening to KNBR, the local all-sports station, they played a Home Despot commercial and an Orchard Supply commercial back to back. OSH was advertising patio and outdoor furniture on sale, and I've been thinking about buying a chaise for the patio, so I went there after work. I did an online search and found nothing I wanted, but often the store has more than the web page. I did find a nice one for $99 at overstock.com. Anyhow, OSH had nothing I wanted. Heavy iron ones for $179 which needed a pad for more $, a horrible flat plastic one in gray, and something called a Zero Gravity Chair which looked a lot like the dreaded Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Almost went straight home, but remembered that everything I had planned for this weekend fell through, so I had time to make pickles. Detoured to the produce place and picked up 4x7 pickle cukes. And a nice big celery bunch. And some medium big limes. Celery meant needing bleu cheese dressing, so next detour was to my local supermarket, which did not have the brand I liked but they had "good enough".

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Home, the 2012 map from Garmin was under my welcome mat. I'll try it out tomorrow.

Watched the latest episode of Who Do You Think You Are? which followed Quincy Jones' daughter Rashida's search for her Jewish mother's ancestors. It was incredibly moving, I'm pulling it from TiVo onto my PC and will make DVDs for my sisters, and my aunt.

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Work was boring. I cranked out a ton of test cases for a new feature, but I think I'm at a dead end for now. Will pursue it Monday.

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Lunch was a rare case of me driving the gang, irony being we went to a hole in the wall Japanese place across the street from my apartment. I've eaten there once before and was not impressed. But it was a nice day so we sat outside. One of them has a very loud voice, and is virtually un-interruptable, so it's nice that he has interesting things to say. He does pause from time to time, but not often.

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I forgot to go to the PO, mostly because I usually do that at lunchtime.

Plans for tomorrow:
PO, mail the calendar to Michi in Japan
Manicure (my nails have grown way faster this last 2 weeks than usual)
Best Buy - see about having the GPS antenna in the car placed where it gets a better signal
Make pickles. Plan A: 7 jars w/4cukes each. Plan B: same as Plan A, but spears instead of whole pickles. Plan C was pickle chips, but I've already scrapped that.




 

Seth Grahame-Smith wrote this thing, apparently one in a series of opportunistic "famous folks from the past meet the undead" offerings.

His writing style is okay, as far as putting one word in front of another goes, but he turns what could have been an action-packed thriller into a moderate-paced narrative.  

The gist of it is someone has found a bundle of secret journals and letters by Lincoln, and gives them to a writer to make a novel from. That novel is the rest of the book. In which we learn how Honest Abe came to be a secret hunter of vampires, and how most of his family dies from vampirism. Seth re-invents vampires as super-human beings with super speed and strength. He gives them knife-like claws and psychic abilities. And the longer they exist, the less sensitive to sunlight they become, and most of the ones in the USA are able to co-exist with the living in daylight, with the help of sunglasses.

The author scrupulously follows real-life Lincoln's time line, but saves himself from having to write action scenes by skipping chunks of years with lame little notes about how Abe fought lots of vampires during those years, or retired from vampire hunting for those years.

Not a compelling book. Definitely not worth Kindle price. Pick it up at a used book store if you feel compelled to read it for yourself. I understand the movie hs gone way overboard on the blood and gore, so I'll be skipping that. 

What I said on The Book of Face:
Beauty & The Beast at Irvington HS has unbelievably inventive costumes, lots of clever choreography and directing, the BEST HIGH SCHOOL STAGE CREW EVER, marvelous sets built for lightning-fast changes, and the loudest intonation-free orchestra since The Think Method. Lumiere is brilliant and The Beast is great. So many excellent supporting performances. Unfortunately the female leads were both fighting severe colds, so many of the best numbers suffered greatly. Brave kids - it's scary to open your mouth during your solo and have nothing come out. One more weekend, I hope they are better by then. Note to producer: It's probably better to end Act I with the standing-ovation-worthy production number, regardless of how long it makes Act II.

What I did not say:
The sound person (people?) sucked. Every one of the 6,487 cast members was miked with those annoying, distracting tubes-on-the-face mikes. Maybe three of them were actually adjusted correctly. The mikes on all of the leads were cutting out regularly. At halftime they tried to blame cell phones, but that's a crock - cell phones haven't used those channels in years. And cell phone interference adds sound to the stream, it doesn't make it lose audio.

Two things needed to happen for this show's audio to work:
1. Muffle the orchestra. They were playing too loud by 200%
2. Only mike the soloists. In that theater any three or more people singing together will be heard un-amplified.

What else I did not say:

Gaston was boring. The part calls for over-acting. And it would have been nice if his mike worked.  His sidekick's mike worked, so whenever he was in his sidekick's face, we heard him.

The staging for the title song had Mrs. Potts singing far stage right while Belle and The Beast mimed their parts center stage. Belle's ball gown is blindingly beautiful, and she looked stunning. The Beast's uniform costume was perfectly tailored and he looked stunning too. But I wanted to see the singer as well as the action, and this staging did not let me do that. I might have liked it better if the singer was off-stage. Or upstage  of the table.

The way they did chip was a child was sitting inside Mrs. Pott's cart, only his head from the chin up visible, above an oversized, chipped cup. It was pretty unnerving at first. And at second and third. Like a David Copperfield trick gone horribly wrong. But clever, very very clever.

Some of the more stand-out extras were the cheese grater (beautiful girl, made me wish she was 20 years older), the dresser - who held her pose for about 5 minutes without batting an eyelash, and then came to life just as you thought she might be a mannequin. Salt and pepper shakers looked like twins, simple costumes of one black and one white chef's smock and a mushroom-shaped floppy hat with black spots to indicate the holes. Gaston's four bimbos were loud and giggly and inane, as they should be. There were some beautiful plates.

Several times the director made use of not only the through-the-audience entrance but also we were serenaded in the aisles on at least two numbers. I thought it was a little freaky, I'd rather keep the 4th wall up. It was like gratuitous 3D. But they sang in tune and together, which is hella hard to do with people facing three different directions, 20 feet apart.

If Belle and Mrs. Potts have most of their voices back, it will be well worth seeing next weekend. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm. Click here

That was fast! delivered this morning, picked it up from the office at lunch time, and am using it now.
Cons:
heavier than expected
uses a dongle for wired ethernet connection
no scroll function on the touchpad
The "a" key may be intermittent.

Pros:
Very pretty
faster than greased tachyons
sharp display

Time to get back to work, will pound on this more later.

More on this later, I hope:

Went to see Cinequest's shorts #2, which were all superb, and completely made up for the meh of the night before.

All but one were beautifully shot, one was done on 35mm instead of digital and was a little grainy and in some places fuzzy, and colors were dull. Quickly:

Otto and the Electric Eel - dir. Duncan Skiles, Andrew Zuchero - United States
A man is cooking dinner for his date, it burns, he fires up a boatload of electronics and creates a flying electric eel, which he battles and finally kills - while his date is ringing his doorbell. Cheesy special effects, but a lot of humor with a happy ending.

Smorgasbord - dir. Jennifer Glynn - United States
Two women run a buffet restaurant, and are romanced by customers. The reverse Heimlich maneuver near the end is worth the price of admission.

The Padlock (il Lucchetto) - dir. Ettore Nicoletti - Italy
What starts as a very romantic story about a couple who add their lock to a chain full of lovers' locks around a light pole, turns hilarious. Points for biggest laugh in the shortest time.

Count Back from Ten - dir. Tamar Halpern - United States
Beautifully written and photographed and touching, the dreams of a young girl, with a heartbreaking reveal at the end.

Everything is Incredible - dir. Tyler Bastian, Trevor Hill, Tim Skousen - United States
An old man with polio has been building what he calls a helicopter since 1958, with interviews of his neighbors and relatives.

Reinaldo Arenas - dir. Lucas Leyva - United States
This is a very strange title. The film is about a shark being hooked buy a fisherman, from the shark's point of view. Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer who was jailed for his work against Castro, eventually made it to America and committed suicide when the depression of AIDS became too much for him.

Sterling Hallard Bright Drake - dir. Robert Sickels - United States
A man in Walla Walla, WA has erected his own tombstone near the front of the cemetery, though he is very much alive. It is covered with odd drawings and misspelled quotes. High school classmates are interviewed, and then the man himself. Excellent videography.

Sailcloth - dir. Elfar Adalsteins - United Kingdom
John Hurt stars in this one, about a man who gets out of his nursing home bed, shaves, gets dressed in a suit and tie, sets off the fire alarm and walks out during the confusion. He takes a sailboat, outfits it with two sheets taken from the home, and sails out to sea and a tragic ending. Technically the best of the bunch. Oscar worthy.

In Search of a Donkey (Chasse à l'âne) - dir. Maria Nicollier - Switzerland
This is the 35mm entry. Three Japanese men are served donkey meat by their local chef, and go in search of a donkey to kill & eat. Much hilarity as they see a nativity scene in a shop window and mistake the donkey for a sacred Christian symbol. Adorable film, wish it had better production values.

I cannot believe that a minimal cast, B&W silent movie won Best Picture for 2012. There are so many aspects of movie making which The Artist did not have to deal with. Ditto Best Director. With all the stunning films and directorial triumphs this year, this film at best wins Miss Congeniality. Best actor? Maybe. If you like mimes. Ben Kingsley not even being nominated for Hugo was a travesty.

OTOH I was very surprised at the spontaneous standing ovation and thunderous applause awarded to Meryl Streep. I had no idea that on top of all that talent, her co-workers also sincerely like the person herself. That's good to know.

The memorial segment is when I tuned in, I saw it all, and was very pleased Elizabeth Taylor, who did so much brave and charitable work in her lifetime, was given the final spotlight. Cliff Robertson would have been better served with a clip from Charlie instead of Spiderman. And maybe Peter Falk deserved a second clip, from The Princess Bride. All the images flashed by too quickly. The chorus, however, was wonderful.

Woke up sleepy.

At work I went into the lab to finish testing a document I was re-writing. Got 90% of the way through when the machine (running Red Hat linux) decided one of the font files was corrupted and would not come up with the graphical user interface. Gnome, I think. After trying all the tricks I know without having in installation disk, I had to give up and file a trouble ticket, which may never get looked at, let alone acted upon.

I'm not too upset about that, while I was running the tests it looked like maybe that feature is not in the new product, and the old product is going end of life with this release. The document is an in-house how-to strictly for QA and engineering, customers would have no use for it.

Lunchtime I went to the Mexican-Arab market, got some more sale priced pistachios and a bottle of lime juice. Then checked out all the little eateries and decided on  Sushi Blvd. I got the big tempura plate (should have had the lunch sized one) and it was a lot of food. included salad,  miso soup, rice, edama beans too. Tempura was a little soggy.  Next time I'll go for the Nigiri, expensive as it is. Nice place, quick service, sushi bar plus tables.

Home a little early so I could see an apartment rep about changing my lease to one cat. They have pet rent which is monthly per pet. Also picked up two packages - poster frames for the 20x30 and 12x18 prints I'll be showing at the Contact Conference. Spent about 2 hours mounting the 10 big prints. The smaller prints will be done later - I have 25 candidates for 10 frames, so I'll invite the art show director over to help me choose.

Have I mentioned Smash yet? I think not. Several of my musical theater buddies said it is a must-see. I missed the 2-hour special but Tivoed the 1-hour "pilot". Sans commercials it's about 40 minutes. maybe 8 minutes of that was actual performing (singing, dancing) the rest was Bo Ring. Soap opera stuff. Angst. Oh wait, there was about a minute of really fine and amusing acting by the ingenue who is invited to the director's apartment for a special audition for a part as Marilyn Monroe. That was well done.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Thought about going to the skating rink benefit for the local roller derby women's team, but it's 21+, alcohol centric, so no thanks.

Up and out by 8:30, spent almost as much time writing up the re-opened bug as doing the nine setups and video captures. And then there were about six test cases to FAIL and reference the bug. Sad, really, because the cases I was testing didn't fail, what happened is something in the way the videos were captured made the analyzer refuse to work on the whole file. Kind of like failing a driving test because one of your blinkers didn't work.

Lunch was at the Korean buffet, China China. I made sure to have some sushi.

At BASFA last night someone mentioned Repo! The Genetic Opera, and a quick check showed Fry's had it, so after work I picked up the blu-ray version. Also got a plain DVD of Nine. I saw a stage version at City Lights a few months ago, and wanted to see what it should have looked like.

Home, watched Repo and was surprised both pleasantly and un. The surround sound, when they used it, came in clearly on all channels, but amplitude was all over the place. The first 5+ minutes was intro, no singing, mostly comic book frames. Each chapter began with a comic panel which was drawn from a live freeze frame. Cute idea. When they finally did get around to singing it was tuneless, and often childish. Toward the end there was actually a bit of melody when Sarah Brightman sang her one number (which was rudely cut off in the middle).

The story goes like this: It's 2030 or so, people have died in droves from organ failures, and a tycoon sets up a company which sells replacement organs, and gets the laws passed to allow the organs to be repossessed if payments are missed. There are two sub-plots. The tycoon has two sons and a daughter who are just plain bizarre and he hates them. He also had a fiancé who left him for a doctor. The doctor accidentally poisons his pregnant wife, but manages to save the baby girl. It is now 17 years later and the wheels of jealousy begin to turn.

Which brings me to some of the pleasant. The cast.
Sarah Brightman is the tycoon's squeeze. She was blind when he discovered her, and gave her amazing eyes.
Paul Sorvino is the tycoon. He has an impressive operatic voice which the score does very little to let him use. He's also a solid actor
Paris Hilton is the tycoon's daughter, and she actually acts! You may not recognize her. The character is addicted to surgery, and she wears many faces (literally).
Anthony Head of Buffy fame is the doctor/repo man. Once again a nice voice but not much material to show it off. Impressive physical acting.
Alexa Vega is the doctor's daughter. They let her cut loose once toward the end to show her chops, but for the most part she sings boring tuneless stuff.

It was almost worth watching. It definitely is not something to watch while eating. Lots of gore and mutilation. There have been comparisons to Rocky Horror but this gem does not even come close on any aspect except maybe cinematography, and I chalk that up to much more modern available technology.

If I'm at BASFA next week, this will be on the auction table. No sense hogging it.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Nine (?)