It's a good thing chevy chase bank is so convenient. I was just looking over my account history and they charge me $2 each time I use a different bank's ATM. This is in addition to the $1.50 or $2 that the other bank charges you to use their ATM. Freshman year I accused the NIHFCU of stealing for doing something similar.

I just got the toxic avenger musical soundtrack in the mail. The evil dead soundtrack is pretty great, so I have high hopes.

(from a star trek: voyager episode review)
Rocket scientists of the week: Kim and Torres, with their brilliant deduction that if you connect the stars on a starmap, you get a flight path. It's hard to think of a Voyager scene that's makes a character look any dumber, and that's saying something.

Last weekend I saw Inglorious Bastards with Matt and Lisa, and then saw 500 Days of Summer with Rachel, Peter and Kate. It was a movie weekend.

Inglorious Bastards was very entertaining. It alternates between tense scenes, funny scenes, and then extreme violence. The premise was a little absurd. It was also a bit disturbing to see people in the audience clapping while watching a man get beaten to death with a baseball bat. I guess anything goes when it's a Nazi. Brad Pitt was pretty good, the actor who played the villain was quite good, and I was surprised to see little Sam from freaks and geeks playing a soldier. You didn't see much of him during the film though.

500 Day of Summer was good in a tragic and uncomfortable sort of way. Kate told me that the first scene is meant to throw you off and think that maybe their relationship worked out in the end, but about a third of the way through the movie I knew there was no way it could end well. Relationships don't work when one person is obsessively passionate and the other person can't make on their mind. I think I was at a disadvantage during the movie because I don't look for rings on peoples fingers (which was a key story element in this movie) and I have a hard time keeping track of a timeline when the it's just a jumbled bunch of numbered days. And at the end I interpreted the next girl being named Autumn to mean that the poor kid was doomed to go through a cycle of obsession and was about to get his heart broken again. (It's tough being a passionate man.) Kate thought it meant that he was moving forward with his life and that things would be different. I guess we'll never know.

(betting whether the 2008 Casino Royale was a remake of an earlier Bond movie)
Puja: If I lose, don't tell Sunjeev.
me: Why not?
Puja: He won't like that I bet so much money.
(brief discussion about whether $20 is really so much money)
me: But if you win we can tell him?
Puja: Yeah, then it's okay.
me: Won't he know that you'd been betting anyway?
Puja: Yeah but then it will be like I was really certain and I just bamboozled you.

I just got back from Rachel and Adam's wedding out in San Diego. It was lots of fun. The sun was a little hot but in general the weather was quite nice, and the wedding appetizers were a little strange (there was some crazy octopus gazpacho and I accidentally ate some kind of duck liver sandwich) but I wasn't bothered by it.

There's something wonderful about being at a wedding when you're unrelated to the couple. It's probably one of the happiest days in their lives, and they didn't have to invite you along but they chose to anyway. I don't know Rachel and Adam all that well so I felt really privileged and I loved everything about the event. Also, everyone ended up being so cheerful, even Adam's step-mother who supposedly got a little angry or Rachel's dad who tells strange nomad-stories just seemed like quirky pieces of a beautiful larger picture. I really had a fantastic time.

Oh, and I saw strippers.

(blog about quest grinding in World of Warcraft)
When WoW implemented daily quests, I realized the industry was really going in the wrong direction. Daily quests are hardly different than a list of chores for some kids living on a farm. You login, you load up on your "dailies", and you grind them out for money and reputation. People do these exact same quests hundreds of days in a row. To make things worse, the culture of the game has devolved such that people averse to grinding out their dailies are called lazy.

Yes, it has been a long time since I updated this thing. I am a busy man these days. Busy and important, as I like to tell myself. This has been my first non-busy few days in a while so tonight I'm hunkering down with an el riconcito burrito (something about their ground beef is delicious) and some star trek. Should be a promising night. Gonna be a busy week as I try to finish my bi-week a day early because I'm flying off to a wedding on Friday.

Ah, this is a good episode. Any time Picard argues with another starfleet officer about whose mission holds precedence, you know is going to be a good episode. And he just pronounced "charade" so that it rhymes with "promenade". I did that once at a dinner with Kate's dad and Kate's sister made fun of me. Apparently you can't take pronounciation tips from Jean Luc.

(about a science fiction roguelike whose premise is that the earth's core has destabilized and exploded, and you have to recover the core from where it landed on another planet)
DraQ: I could readily ass-pull more plausible SF stories when I was four.
DraQ: Why try to make SF if you intend to s*** all over science? They could have invented fantasy setting as dissociated from reality, as they deemed necessary, after all. Compared to this crap Plan 9 From Outer Space looks like diamond-hard SF.
DraQ: Will not buy/download/warez.
Jasede: DraQ sticks it to the man again, vowing not to download the free roguelike from Pirate Bay.

Update, update, update. Let's see, it has been 13 days since my last update. It doesn't seem like all that long, but so much has happened. Since then I have achieved a year of age. We went to the six flags water park, which was lots of fun. It'll be sad when I'm so old that people think it odd for me to be water sliding. The six flags park is decent, but I wish there was a really good one nearby. Maybe someday I'll move to a city with a water park. There were some issues with the weather forecast causing me to change the day, which made it so a bunch of people couldn't make it, and then the weather was nice on the original day after all. It was a huge mess. If only the dc storms weren't so severe.

Umm, last weekend was Joe, Whitney's fiance's going away party. Because of threatening rain, we went to redrock pizza instead of having an outdoor bbq. I think I've grown disillusioned with redrock, they make a decent calzone, but the pizza isn't really to my taste. It was fairly fun though. Afterwards we had some drinks out infront of Joe's front stoop, which was much more fun.

Kate took me out to Good Stuff for my birthday. My burger was very good, and we saw the guy who was on tv. Though we didn't pull him aside and talk to him like Rachel did on her visit. Then we walked around the capitol on one of the nicest dc nights of the summer (weather-wise). Some symphony was even playing. It was all very romantic, just like I had planned.

Also last weekend, Kate and I went with Rachel and Peter out to Great Falls. I had never heard of it before, but apparently there are some pretty big waterfalls just outside of dc. It was a nice warm day, and we bought sandwich makings and picnicked out in the park before hiking around the falls. Then we briefly went swimming in courthouse, and then went out to see the new harry potter movie. Yes, it was a very busy day. I felt kinda bad for Peter. He didn't seem to feel like swimming (the pool water was very cold, I wouldn't have either), and then re-watching a movie he'd already seen probably wasn't his ideal evening. Anyway. The new harry potter movie is super good. So much better than the previous two movies. Rachel called it a "cute" movie, and I'd agree. But that's what makes the harry potter movies good! They spent more time in classes, Malfoy is back to his sneaking, and there's more young love. On the other hand I didn't like how they glossed over the "half-blood prince" aspect, and most of all, there was no Weasley face mauling at the end! The end battle was instead more of a assassination followed by the baddies sneaking out. Oh well.

Tomorrow I fly to san francisco. I'm going to see Eric, see san francisco, then go home and see a high school friend, and then see lots of family. I'm not bringing any work with me, and I'm looking forward to this whole thing.

I've been watching the next generation from the beginning of the series. So far I've made it to the third episode. The first episode has Miles O'Brien as the transporter engineer, but everyone calls him "Connor". Also in the first episode, which I had seen but it never occurred to me before, Q shows up and pretty much lectures "I've seen the original series, and I don't want this to be more of the same!" Then the next few episodes try to highlight Picard's preference for prudence and thoughtfulness over rash action. Some other things I've noticed: there is no galaxy where Tasha Yar would be considered attractive, and the first few episodes put too much emphasis on Weasly being so brilliant and earnest. Also they talk about the ferengi as though they're a super dangerous race, when really the Ferengi are a bunch of traders who only want money.

(Walking down the street with Giorgia and Kate late at night)
street man: Whatever you did to be accompanied by two such oscar-worthy ladies.. you keep that secret to yourself!
me: Umm. Okay.
Kate: You hear that Giorgia? Oscar-worthy.
Giorgia: Oh, I heard it. I don't know what that means, but I'll take it.

I scored a 13 on this Asperger Test. I think I once wondered because I am not a very emotional guy, but apparently there's no AS here. Finally my inattention to detail is paying off! I can't imagine having a telephone conversation and wondering when it was "my turn" to speak. Sounds so awkward. I used to be so non-talkative that my mom had to explain to me that a conversation is like a game of catch: you have to throw the ball back. But I can't help but feel that if you're having a real conversation it is more than just a series of "turns to speak". Information is exchanged. For example, when I'm on the phone: if I have something to say then I'll say it, if I wonder what you have to say then I listen, and when I don't feel like doing either, I hang up. Just ask Kate what a smooth talker I am on the phone. So, so smooth.

(commentary about a editorial where a games reviewer complained about how 40 hour games are too long for adults with other commitments, as opposed to the teenagers with time to kill)
mondblut: Waah waah kids and wife don't give me enough time to play so games should bend to *my* restrictions. If he'll breed a couple more times and won't even have one hour to play, would he demand that games shouldn't be produced at all, since he can't play them anyway?

Up early because I got a text message at 5am this morning saying "Your data charges are very high. To minimize a costly bill & service interruption, please call AT&T 800-331-0500 or 611 from your wireless. AT&T Free Msg"

Thanks for the free message, AT&T. So I called customer support when they opened at 7am this morning, and I think I got someone who was either being interviewed or instructing the other support personnel on how to handle a caller or something because she started the call with a chipper "Thank you for calling AT&T this is Kelly and I will try to do my very best this morning to help you with anything I can!" And she was surprisingly helpful, though I don't think she was expecting my kind of problems this early in the morning.

Turns out AT&T wants to charge me $800 for two youtube videos I streamed yesterday, when I thought it was going through my wireless LAN. (It was reviews of StreetFighter 4 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, btw.) Or they want to strong arm me into signing up for a data plan.

She had a hard time following how the fact that I had remote desktop connected to my desktop through its local IP address earlier (and that the apparently worthless settings on windows mobile say that my data connection is disabled) made me think that this youtube application was streaming through my LAN. I told her I didn't want the data plan, so she backdated a cancel order on my data connection, and she thinks that will automatically cancel the charge. She said that if not, "they" are going to make me sign up for a dataplan which they can then definitely backdate. We'll see. I'm supposed to check back in a month.

Kate: I KNEW you were going to put that quote in your blog!