• 19 January 2009 08:10am: Forgot the memory card for my DSLR today but remembered my TLR with film.
• 19 January 2009 03:39pm: With all the dire predictions of web(bubble) 2.0 corps folding in the recession it's nice to work and an unsexy corp with actual revenue.
• Yesterday at 03:39pm: It's so cute that to install APC (a PHP module) that you need Perl installed.
• Today at 04:35pm: New toy hopefully arrives tomorrow: Nikon D700 DSLR and Nikkor 16-35mm f/2.8 lens.
• Today at 05:28pm: Obama got the first five pages of the mX today. Hard not to feel the excitement even on the other side of the world.

twitter.com/plicease

Today really felt like shorts weather. Yay for spring! I was in the parking lot down at Wyoming shops today of all places and I felt better than I have in months just because it was so warm. So awesome to feel so alive! I am excited about the approach of beach weather.

$5 got me a once-again-working tyre and for $60 I replaced the ink cartridge in the printer (well more like $30, but I also got a B&W one), which I think I already had a replacement for in a drawer somewhere. These things would be much easier to find if they were on the floor where I can see them.

Also excited because 30 Rock is back on iTunes. I am pretty sure it is on TV here somewhere, but I am also pretty sure it isn't on Aunty which means commercials which I hate. Why does everything have to be about selling stuff? It seems like they can't even sell me something without trying to sell me something else now a days. Like the other day I noticed someone had an iPhone so I asked how she liked it. She said it was wonderful, except for the phone part (it drops calls apparently). Remember when we used to get phones primarily for... well the phone component? Apple has done this really amazing job of making us focus on things that aren't really important. That would make Steve Jobs a wonderful President don't you think?

Brendan Fraser was awful in that Dragon Emperor movie. He was terrible in the first two but he managed to set a new low. The start of that movie so wanted to be Indy 4, which is weird because it was the least cool movie from the series (though still so much better than any of the Mummy movies).

Wanted was pretty bad too, but it was the Russian version which sort of made it interesting. All of the writing was pretty much in English except for the stuff that was important and you were supposed to read, which was in Russian. The audio was English though, so it must have come from a source that was subtitled, although said subtitles had unfortunately been stripped. Cyrillic on the bottom of the screen is the only thing that would have saved it. Seriously. Why do I watch terrible movies? Still, I can't complain for the price of admission on either count.

Today when I left the house I noticed it was raining. Then when I was in the train trying to dry off, I noticed it wasn’t raining. Then when I got to St. Leonards and was walking the last leg to work I noticed that it was raining again. I was feeling a bit like Truman when the rain cloud was following him.

I have sort of decided that I want to get an iPhone which makes me feel like a sell out because I think they are stupid. On the other hand I view it as a free iPod touch which would let me watch videos on the train, which currently I can’t do because although over powered, my notebook fails at video when it isn’t plugged into a wall why is that? I’ve noticed that since I started commuting from the Central Coast a lot of my thinking revolves around getting a train which will likely allow me to sit down, and what I am going to do when I get that seat.

Last Friday I went to see Assassins. We were prompted to go see it on account of everyone in my family is a fan of Sarah Vowell and she had a highly amusing anecdote about the musical in the introduction to her highly amusing and well researched Assassination Vacation. I sort of had a celebrity crush on her sometime back. The lighting was really badly done, and the sound was a little buzzy at parts, but several of the actors were actually pretty good. Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth were good, but my favourite was the innately jovial Guiteau.

There is something about flawed somewhat incompetent villains that I find endearing. My favourite cartoon character has always been Starscream, the constantly scheming traitorous lieutenant to Megatron. In watching the new BBC Robin Hood series I immediately took a liking to the Sheriff because of the joy in which he employs his sarcastic wit and sadistic pleasures. Lately, however I am liking Gisborne more and more. His melancholy manner and the way he feels so uncomfortable in almost any situation (but especially when he is trying to Marion) is wonderful to watch. It is somewhat troubling that Guiteau is not a cartoon or legendary villain. He’s a murderer.

I started reading the highly entertaining Linux Hater's Blog. It was indirectly linked to from a /. story, and even though I love Linux as a development platform and for developing web sites, it sucks shit on the desktop, and this guy understands exactly why and explains in a concise but nuanced way, along with a whole lot of entertaining^[1] vitriol. The thing is Linux is never going to be a serious player on the Desktop, so it is all fairly academic. I can’t really stand any of the modern user interfaces for an extended period of time. My Mac seems like a relief after a long day using Winblows at work, and sometimes GNOME and KDE are even offer a welcome respite from either or both. So I am picky, that is probably my fault. What is distressing is that user interfaces are getting progressively worse. I spent a day or so using Vista in order to make sure an application at work I was finishing off worked there, and it was a really horrible experience. If I didn’t know better I’d say that they Microsoft was trying to convince me that XP wasn’t so bad after all.

1. if you are entertained by geeky computer stuff

So today I was looking up the Presidential order of succession on Wikipedia today, because that does, after all, effect my day to day life a lot. Then I somehow found the POTUS page, which has presidential portraits at the bottom of the page from Washington to Bush II. It’s interesting to look at because you can see how the official POTUS portrait changed with technology over the years, but also you can see the emergence of the Smile!

If you go back in time and look at Washington and Jefferson, you see dour, somewhat gloomy expressions. I guess times were rough back in those days. Men were men, women were women, and nobody smiled. Ever. It really isn’t until the mid twentieth century that presidents start to look happy. JFK looks bemused, Carter is chipper, Regan looks pleased with himself, and Bush I has this dorkish senior photo smile plastered on his face. Fast-forward to this century and Bush II has that infamous smirk on his face. Like him or loathe him, he’s going to have the last smirk.

In my lighting class I had a discussion with a fellow student as to whether or not smiles were good for photos. I took the position that they are, although I should qualify that by saying smiles are nice for formal portraits. I hate it when I am taking candid photos of my friends and they stop to smile. When I first started taking photography seriously, my friends would stop and smile every time I pointed the camera in their direction, but fortunately this became tedious for them and thus trained them to ignore me. It’s much more fun to be a fly on the wall. So it is kind of ironic that I argued that smiles are good for photos.