Category: Uncategorized

Last night, we watche a popcorn action movie with Michael Douglas once again hanging around the White House, this time as a Secret Service agent. I just described The Sentinel, and there’s a reason why I’d never even heard of the movie before. But at least it keeps moving, and it’s not too long. Metacritic score of 48 shows that mediocrity is well earned. But after two heavy movies in a row, this was about right. 😉

If you haven’t seen In the Line of Fire, watch that Secret Service movie instead.

We’ve had Mystic River out from Netflix since late April. Friday night, we finally made time for it. I was looking forward to this movie, perhaps too much, since I didn’t love it.

The opening scene, which ripples through the rest of the story, is ominous: one of three boys is abducted and sexually abused for four days before escaping. What’s not clear is why this event also disrupts the lives of the other two boys even decades later. The interactions between the three of them are broken, and that’s plausible. Yet it feels a bit overblown.

Strangest part is the brief vignette at the end, where Sean Penn’s wife — previously in the background — comes out with a rip-roaring endorsement for Penn’s criminal actions because he’s defending his family. The tone isn’t surprising in this film, but the voice is.

Metacritic score of 84 is too high.

We were looking for a lighter movie on Thursday evening. Little Children wasn’t it.

Still, a worthwhile movie which I’d add to your future DVD queue, without worrying about seeing it in theaters. This is a character story, centered around the affair between the mother of a small child with the father of a small child: both adults are the caregivers.

It’s not a visual extravaganza, but a tale with funny moments in the first half and crunching, near-tragic moments in the second half. Watching people’s marriages teeter isn’t my idea of fun, but there is humor in the small moments all the same. I’m not surprised to learn Little Children was a book first. It feels almost like a play, in a positive way.

Metacritic score of 76 might be a little high, but not outrageous.

Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case is another romp through a South Florida sprinkled with, ahem, characters. You’ll never have so much fun reading about an obituary writer. 😉

New York Times article about marathons, in preparation for this morning’s race “Everything You Know About Marathons Is Wrong.” The fear of dehydration and hot weather is overrated, and cramps don’t happen because of improper fueling. Unclear how certain this science is, but matches my experiences more.

“We completely changed the way we treat patients,” Noakes said. “All we do is have them lie down and put their feet higher than their head.”

Postmarathon collapse, [Timothy Noakes, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town] added, “is a benign condition.”

“Just lift their legs and you will help the majority of patients,” he said. “That’s all you need to do to make most people recover very, very quickly. You can infuse as much fluid as you want, and you will not get the same response.”

At work today, Mac OS X Address Book just blanked at some point. Hundreds of contacts gone. The Treo still had the information, so I carefully checked Missing Sync (which I use to sync the Treo) and made sure it was set to Synchronize, not Overwrite Handheld. Mistake… there was no setting for Handheld overwrite Desktop, and Synchronize picked up the blanked desktop settings as the “newest” information. Doh!

End result? Empty address book. Hundreds of contacts gone. And, of course, my latest backup of this information is several months old, from when I left CNET to join OpenDNS.

So, if you email me, please take the extra step to include your info beyond the email address: phone, postal, company, etc. I’ve got some reconstruction to do over the next few weeks.

This isn’t like declaring email bankruptcy, where it’s liberating to start over. It’s maddening and a reminder (again) about not just backing up, but doing it religiously in multiple places.

So, if you keep everything digitally, put a copy online somewhere, too. If you still use paper (like the wife), maybe it’s time for some photocopies stored in an envelope. Avoid this particular glitch, if you can.

It’s been six weeks since my last time on the track, and seven weeks since I last did 800m repeats. Yesterday morning, I joined Billy in the early morning at Kezar once more, and put in six 800m pieces, with 400m jogging between each one (plenty of rest).

We didn’t go after it early…the first few were conversational, literally. I pushed on the penultimate one, for the second lap. Then, after a shorter rest than before, I tackled the last one on my own.

In order…
3:15
3:13
3:10
3:06
2:55
2:47

The speed work is important to me right now, since my next scheduled race is Thanksgiving morning, when I do a one mile race, followed 30 minutes later by a 5K.

As noted on the OpenDNS corporate blog, David Pogue learned about OpenDNS, gave it a try, and loved it, according to what he wrote on his NYTimes.com blog today:

My wife and I are totally loving the new speed. Don’t tell Open DNS [sic], but we even would have paid for it.

Back in the day, I bought and read at least one entire books of Mac tips written by Pogue. Pretty nifty to have the combo of Pogue and the NYTimes tout OpenDNS.

I spent 90 minutes doing my civic duty with the absentee ballot this evening, and I’m not quite done.

While I’m not going to share my votes, I will say that the lingering indecision is on Proposition 87 (the tax on California oil production to spur alternative energy sources) and on the competing (?) flood control bond measures 1E and 84. Also, I still need to make the up/down vote on the various judicial nominees, about whom I know nothing and recognize not a one. At least all the various school board officials, for instance, have a candidate statement in the publicly provided documents. I suppose the judiciary is supposed to avoid campaigning, but leaving the judges a cypher beyond their name and the position itself isn’t contributing to an informed process. (Update: Found bios of the judicial candidates.)

My recurring disappointment, though, stems from the inability of elected officials to actually represent us in this democracy. Making decisions about several billion dollars in bond measures is not my idea of a rocking Saturday night. Nor do I think the state of California or city of San Francisco are being well served. I don’t feel educated or informed or competent to judge the needs, or the match between the problem(s) and the proposed solution(s). Each individual measure would probably reward further study, but…not going to happen. And I would stake money on my decisions being more considered than most. (Not necessarily right, but more considered.)

I want elected officials to be forced to make the tough decisions about where the state or city spends its money, rather than foist the unpopular task of spending money (and having a vote on your record as “for taxes,” for example) back onto the voters. Maybe I’m too optimistic, but they are paid to discuss, debate, and otherwise evaluate these matters.

Oh well. I am grateful for absentee ballot availability, even for those (like me) who will not be absent on voting day. Even if I knew my votes going in, this process would take a minimum of 10 minutes at the polls. If you want into the booth undecided…oh boy. Voting lines must be brutal! I’m glad I haven’t seen them in years.

Remember…you really have no right to complain if you don’t vote. I’m voting, so I can complain about the process and the outcome. Please vote.

On Monday morning, I had finished my previous book and was “stranded” on the plane without anything else to read, I raided the boy’s backpack for one of his new birthday gifts: The Twenty-One Balloons.

What a fun tale. Written in 1947 by William Pène du Bois, Twenty-One Balloons won a Newberry Medal the following year for “Excellence In Children’s Literature.” (The boy is six now, so I wasn’t going to pull Dickens or even Clancy from his backpack.) I never came across this one in any of my other reading: child, youth, or adult.

The matter-of-fact style for a work of fiction, the effort to ground its few “sparkling” (you’re groaning if you know the story or read the links above) central fictions in the real world… all are appreciated. The illustrations, from the author, are not special, but fit the earnest, interested tone throughout. This is only an hour or two of your reading life, and it would be well spent.

Earlier in the weekend, I flew through the other additions to the boy’s library. My excuses were that I wanted to be ready to answer questions about what he was reading, to make sure he wasn’t headed down some inconvenient paths a bit early, and to gauge his reading skills. But those are just excuses!

Both The Fantastic Mr. Fox and James and the Giant Peach are from Roald Dahl, a favorite author for almost his entire range of writings. I don’t know when I read these two as a child, but these are certainly short. In fact, each is much shorter in reality than in memory. I wasn’t as disappointed with a re-read as I was with the first in the Narnia series, but I’ll have to honor my fears about Danny, Champion of the World.