No trivia today because Rachel ate some ground up glass in her lunch, much like Charlie Wilson's dog in that movie. So instead I'm watching a bunch of bad movies, just to confirm that they're bad and I want to get rid of them.

So far the list is:
The Sure Thing - John Cusack's first lead role as an annoying college freshman. The girl from Spaceballs is in it as the prudish girl he likes. Besides one scene where he pretends to be a crazy hitchhiker, there's really nothing funny about the movie. All John Cusack's pickup attempts are unfunny and uninteresting. And the cross-country shenanigans are unmemorible.

Stargate - The first half of this movie is decent science fiction. Then it turns into a standard sort of rebellion movie and you seee that with all his advanced technology, really Ra just has jet airplanes and guns shaped like sticks. The alien horse-animals look terrible, even by 1990's standards, and the annoying kid actors are given way too much screen time. I think it must take all of a director's and writer's work to make child characters not be annoying. You just can't do it when you've got a dozen of them. A dozen kids in the same movie will ruin the picture, unless they're only in it for a few minutes. One of these kids was supposed to be the mentally handicapped of the group, and there's a slow motion death scene where he's running toward the other kids and the other kids are yelling at him to hurry. Then he got shot. The scene was ineffective and I was just glad the character had finally been killed off. It would have been a better movie if James Spader had shot the kid's character when he was first introduced to the kid.

Eastern Promises - Decent movie, just something I would definitely not watch more than once and didn't even really enjoy watch it the first time. Lots of abused women. Lots of distant, cold characters who pretend to be friendly while they're cold, terrible people on the inside. Apparently the Russian mafia is not as warm and likable as the Italian mafia. But it's only like half a Russian mafia movie, the other half is a "it sucks to be a girl in a russian village" movie. I do like the gay mobster's son character. He was well played.

Tomorrow is my sister Irene's birthday and I have no idea what to get her. She likes art... You all get upset when you don't know what kind of gift to get for me, well imagine being in my shoes. I never know what to get anybody!

(girl on Dating in the Dark)
Appearance is very important to me. I need to be attracted to a guy. I can't have somebody grow on me... like a fungus!

Watching Dating in the Dark. Without whitney because she's cancelled on me. The problem with this show is that the girls range from somewhat attractive to quite attractive. It's like you aren't even risking anything by going into the dark. There's one episode where a guy thinks one girl is fat and so he rules her out, but he's wrong and she's pretty cute. (When the guy traced her outline and found out she was fairly thin he tried to be charmingly honest and quickly destroyed the date. Apparently it doesn't always go over well when you confess to a girl that you've been calling her fat nicknames with the other guys, even if you're sorry now.)

I've yet to see an episode where a guy thinks he likes a girl, but then see's her in the light and decides against her.

The whole "expert's compatibility score" thing is clearly bs. I wonder if, before they had that feature on the show, none of the guys or girls could make a decision about any particular person and the whole thing just floundered around.

This was a good episode. I thought the dufus-looking guy was going to repel the ladies with his silly suspenders and jeans look (it's like he modeled his style after Duckie from Pretty in Pink), but the girls both thought he was "perfect looking". Girls are strange.

Kathryn (to Kaylee): You're a liar!
mom: Kathryn! Don't teach her that word!

I watched The Kids Are All Right (a movie I always mix up with the Local H song All the Kids are Right), with Dave and Huyen. Pretty good movie, except the resolution was a little unjust. It was their last night in the states so afterwards we got some pizza, shook hands, and see you in a couple years. It was a sad night but the weather was super nice so I walked around dc a bit.

This new hard drive has proved to be like poison for my computer. It was working well for a week or two and then, starting yesterday, problems galore.

First it suddenly started causing a super long delay in the post, so long that my computer would get to the windows loading, and then timeout and shutoff before I can log in. Then it burned out my psu, but luckily I had a spare in the closet. Then it caused my ram to overheat so that my computer would reboot but then refuse to even find the ram. (I wasn't sure about this until I touched the ram and almost burned my finger. I'm not sure if that problem is with the new hd, new psu, or old ram.) But everything seems to work fine when the hd isn't attached. Windows also doesn't find the drive when I hook it up with a usb adapter. My laptop seems to find the disk when I hook it up using this external media player, and it looks like all the data is still on there and everything. Now I'm running chkdsk again (I ran it when I first got the drive), but it doesn't look like it's finding anything. One file with bad sectors so far is all. It's going on 7 hours now of chkdsk, hopefully it's almost done. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it comes back as "okay" but my desktop still refuses to read it.

(Undeclared's Ron about You've Got Mail)
"It's just pleasant. It's like waves lapping at a shore or something. It's like they're emailing each other and they don't know, they're all connecting. It's like us bonding, Lloyd, it's beautiful."

I was going to rush down to the doctors office next week to get my Hepatitis-A booster shot. I got the original shot in January, and you're supposed to get the booster 6 months later. It's been more than 7 months now and Dave got me all worried. But according to this page, you just need to get the booster between 6 and 12 months later. I can totally wait on this.

I should file my dc tax return though. I'm not sure how long the extension I filed will put that off.

(about Dave and his wife, who came out to a movie with us)
Kate: I was totally impressed that they jumped onto the idea with so little convincing and that I got my way without having to compromise: definition of good friends.

Just watched a Reno 911 episode that had a cameo by Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory and Charlie and the Waitress from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Wolowitz played a teenager soliciting a prostitute under his mother's supervision. The cops were going to arrest him but then decided to drive him to a Jewish brothel instead. Charlie and the Waitress played two white trash siblings who cause a domestic disturbance over a doll. (The cops thought it was a real baby at first.) The police tell the siblings to "make up" and they turn around and start making out. The police then arrest them for being disgusting. Charlie and the Waitress did a good job.

Yesterday I went to dinner at Founding Farmers with Dave and like 4 or 5 other foreign service people. Listened to a lot of talk about the foreign service, surprisingly. But it was fun. Tomorrow morning Noelle is driving up and we're getting brunch at Founding Farmers. I'm big on supporting those organic weirdos lately.

Sarah asked me whether there was anyone at the reunion who was ugly and unpopular in high school but was a knockout at the reunion. Not as far as I noticed. I think that only happens in the movies. A fair number of people have gained weight, something that's hard to avoid as you get older. But as far as I remember no girls came back to the reunion being significantly hotter than they once were. Though the girls were generally more friendly and down to earth, which in a way made them more attractive.

Now I'm watching Dead Man on Campus and feeling dumber for it. Not keeping this movie.

"Shut the hell up, you once-fat bitch!"

I went to my high school reunion last weekend. It was actually a lot more fun than I thought it was going to be. I couldn't convince Dan to go because he apparently still sees everyone from high school that he has any interest in seeing, which I guess would be just me and David. But I think that might have been for the best because Dan might have dragged me into his labels and us-verses-them mentality, which would have just made the reunion like high school all over again.

I wasn't super social in high school. Anti-social would have been a better description. But I decided, going into this thing, that I would put past biases and bad memories aside and give everyone a second chance. And it totally paid off. People were more friendly than I'd ever seen them. I got hugs from a bunch of girls that I was never friendly with and I talked to (and got along well with) all kinds of people that I never really spoke to in high school. It was almost a redeeming experience. Instead of thinking I went to a small town high school full of hicks and preps, I now know it was a small town high school full of normal kids who were maturing and coping with adolescence.

By far the most unusual story I heard was from my old friend Goose who spent about 20 minutes telling me a story of how he developed Schizophrenia and started hearing voices a few months before the reunion. He bought a GPS which randomly brought up a location in the desert that the voices told him to drive to, but he ran out of gas and sorta went crazy on the way. He started giving away money and acting crazy, and he was arrested and spent 2 weeks in an insane asylum in Las Vegas before his mother could get him out. Now he wants to go off his pills because he has a higher calling and he needs the voices to tell him what it is.

It was like talking to the crazy kid in SLC Punk who thought his mom was the devil. I hope Goose pulls through. He was always a good kid. I bought him a beer, I hope it doesn't conflict with his meds.

(talking about my driver's license. The bouncer had hesitated before letting me into the bar.)
Dan: No wonder he didn't believe it. Is that your photo from when you first got your license?
me: Yeah, that's me at 16. What are you talking about, I still look like that.
Dan: You sure loved those bangs.

I got a 2TB hard drive from newegg yesterday and spent a good 3 hours trying to figure out how to format the thing. Neither Windows nor PartitionMagic want to do it, and people in forums were no help (as usual). People blamed it on everything from file system cluster sizes to northbridge drivers to windows xp being 32-bit. I finally got linux to start formatting the drive, which took a whole lot of finicking as linux always does (gparted refused to format it, but fdisk seemed to be working), when my computer overheated and shutdown 10% into the zeroing process. It does that occasionally because instead of having a case fan I just leave the case open. I probably should have ordered a fan from newegg at the same time. I'll have to get back to this next week.

Flying to CA this evening. Back on Tuesday. My mom called me last night to warn me that it's been cold in Occidental and she had finally gotten tired of it and turned on the heat. Which means the house is going to be kept at a constant like 63 or 64 degrees. Prepare to be uncomfortable. Awesome.

me: It's the same with one of my sisters.
Rachel: Is it Lauren?
me: No, my oldest sister.
Rachel: Is it weird that I know your sisters' names?
(Yes. Creepster.)
(Actually I once knew Rachel's sister's name, but I can't remember it now. I am the less creepy of us. Or maybe my memory just isn't very good.)

I tried to stop into Sticky Fingers Cafe to see Sarah but when I got there it was a little busy and she was nowhere in sight. There were 2 people ordering infront of me and their order was going sooo slowly. Slow like you can only find in a liberal, vegan cafe these days. Starbucks would never stand for it.

After 5 minutes of no progress I cut out and went to giant where I picked up She's Out of Your League at the redbox. I'm expecting good things.

Today I'm doing work, then I'm going to try to find Dave tonight for a last night of probably-not drinking. Only single guys are good at drinking. Once they're in a relationship they're always taking it easy or cutting out early. I think it happened to me too. It happens to everyone. Except my brother-in-law Doug for some reason. Maybe I should move to Texas.

(Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, after seeing Steve Jobs park in the handicapped parking spot at Apple)
"Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped."

I talked to the lady at the front desk of my building and she said that I should be able to go month-to-month after my lease is up. This is really good news. They might still increase my rent (which is already pretty expensive). But at least I won't have to move on the same weekend as the end of the fiscal year at work. Plus there is much less competition for apartments during the winter than the fall. And if I decide to leave DC mid-year I can do it without breaking an expensive lease. We'll see how much the rent actually increases.

Tonight I saw The Other Guys with Dave, Tom, Nick and Nick's wife. Nick only lives a couple blocks north of me. Anyway, the movie was a lot better than the trailer made it look. I'd give it a solid 7.5/10, while the trailer makes it look like a 4/10 at best. Actually the trailer isn't that bad. I guess what I saw was this teaser trailer, which is just stupid and not funny. But the actual trailer gives away some of the jokes, so maybe it's better that I never saw it.

(user comment to a Washington Post article about the $825 Billion stimulus bill)
Tom333: You want to stimulate the economy, Obama? Stop the embargo on UFO technology. We already have the technology for zero point energy and space warp drive. We back-engineered it from crashed UFOs. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both promised to end the UFO secrecy but they wussed out. Don't be a Demowussy, Obama.

I just did 2 miles on the elliptical in 15.5 minutes. It wasn't super difficult either. Maybe I'm getting stronger? That's unlikely. Maybe the machine is busted and level 7 isn't what it used to be. Or maybe it was because I fell asleep on the couch during Seinfeld shortly before going down to the gym. A nap will do wonders.

I didn't really eat anything energizing. I had some coffee, then a corndog for lunch and a bunch of frozen burritos for dinner. Oh! But then I also had some after-dinner cereal, and it was that Basic 4 cereal, which sounds like it should be healthy. That's probably the secret.

After the elliptical I did 5 minutes on the stair master for my ass. That's not really true, but I thought about using the stair master! That's a good first step. I also thought about doing some pushups or light bench-presses to preempt any man-boobs, and I thought about trying to build up some manly biceps by doing some curls or something. I did lots of thinking tonight.

(Micros wants to practice fielding grounders for his baseball league, so I come up with this great idea where I bat tennis balls at him with a tennis racquet. Micros is nervous about getting injured.)
me: i don't see any problems. you've got the tennis equipment, i've got the skills. we can do this.
me: and you've got the health insurance too.
micros1781: Yeah, we'll try it. I'm just saying I'm nervous about the plan.
me: you can't go into something like this being nervous. it's gonna be great. this plan is foolproof.
micros1781: From your perspective, sure.