Things that might be decidedly odd…

Recent Movies

In the past week or so, I’ve watched a variety of movies. A while back, I watched Kids. Now, I remember hearing years ago (maybe when I was still in high school even?) that this was a disturbing movie. Being into disturbing movies, I thought I’d give it a go. I was very disappointed and found the movie really boring and generally uninteresting. However, I do finally understand what the term “yo boy” means. New York accents just rub me the wrong way somehow. Oddly, southern accents used to the same thing, but after being exposed to those for a while, I’ve actually come to find them charming. At the same time though, the New York and Boston accents (and similar) grate on me more than ever. While the linguist in me wants to appreciate the diversity of speech pattern, the insensitive asshole wants me to punch them and say “learn how to fucking talk, you idiots!”.

I also watched Todd Solondz’s Storytelling. I thought it was ok, but I just didn’t get into it. I have to say I’ve enjoyed the other films of his that I’ve seen much more. Welcome to the Dollhouse is of course classic. I thought Palindromes was pretty ok, not amazing but better than Storytelling. Happiness was actually the first film of his I saw. Back during my sophmore year of college, this girl I knew through my physics class who was roommates with one of my friends from high school got a bunch of us to go. I was totally unprepared for that film and walked away fairly disturbed. I’ve since seen the film again and the shock value was considerably less I guess.

I watched two movies while in transit (if you recall, I had a lot of free time on my hands). The first was Before Stonewall, a documentary from 1984 and gay life before the watershed that was the Stonewall riots in 1969. It’s very well made and holds up well being over 20 years old now. Interestingly, I returned this film on Saturday to a mailbox in Chicago O’Hare airport that did not have scheduled pickups on the weekend. Still, the movie arrived back at Netflix on Tuesday morning, which means the post office must be smart enough to return them to the nearest distribution center.

On the way back, I watched Eating Out. I liked the movie a bit, but the end pissed me off. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything. In these kind of movies, the guy always gets his girl/guy. The problem is that the girl the straight boy gets with has no redeeming qualities. Not only is she manipulative,obnoxious and generally unattractive but she very harshly calls the straight boy’s roommate and good friend a loser to his face! Yet, they still get together. Ugh. Lots of male eye candy (some of it full front nude) perhaps partially redeems this movie in my eyes.

Last night, I watched John Waters’ Hairspray. I’d seen it before, but I still liked it quite a lot. It’s certainly his most accesible film–could even be called a “family film”. It’s Ricki Lake’s (we share a birthday with Bill Murray and the twins from Seventh Heaven) breakout role in fact. I mean, come on, any movie with Divine, Jerry Stiller, Sonny Bono, Debby Harry (of Blondie fame) and Ricki Lake is bound to be at least a little interesting.

Bank Frustration

This afternoon, I took a break from a bug I’ve been working on for nearly a whole day now to run some afternoon errands.

Recently, I decided that I was going to close my Washington Mutual account. First, it took like 2 weeks for them to open the damn thing. Then they screwed up my online banking access, which resulted in the creation of a new online account. Somehow, I still continued to get annoying “you have a message waiting, please log in” messages for the original, “disabled” account. When I opened the account, I remember ordering checks at some sort of reasonable cost. A month later and I still hadn’t received any, so I called them up. They wanted $20 for one box of checks! Highway robbery if you ask me. To top things off, recently they started offering a new, much improved free checking, but only for new customers. Us old customers continued with the old plan, which as far as I could tell was in all ways inferior to the new one.

When I moved to North Carolina, I opened an account with Bank of America thinking that it would make it easier to find ATM machines in CA and NC. Things got off to a bad start when the check (which they printed and mailed with my bank details) for the opening balance bounced, leaving me with a negative balance and the requisite fees (although they did waive them once I complained). I’ve just had terrible luck with commercial banks. They seem to just rip you off as often as possible even though they get to hold on to your money and invest it.

Before I closed the WAMU account though, I went over to First Tech, which is the credit union we have through work. I’d looked into their accounts before, but decided their rates sucked about as badly as commercial banks. Why is it that NC State Employees’ Credit Union can give me 0.75% on my checking, 1.5% on savings ($25 minimum balance) and 4% on money market ($250 minimum) while First Tech gives no interest checking (unless you sign up for the account with a $500 minimum and still receive a wimpy 0.5%), 0.5% for savings and for money market you basically need at least $2,000 to get a paltry 1-2%? Anyhow, they did have a free checking account, so I opened one of those. The ATMs are all over the place at work and they do participate in the Co-Op network (free ATM usage at most other credit unions) which is something NCSECU doesn’t do.

After I opened the account, I went over to WAMU and closed the account. It was probably the easiest and fastest transaction I’ve ever had with them, which really just shows how pathetic my banking experience with them was. For most things, I’m just keeping the NCSECU account, but it’s nice to have a local bank for free ATM usage and bank services like getting rolls of quarters.

Back Home

Also, I did get back home safe and sound. Better yet, there were no delays or snags in my flights back. I got home around 1am and still made it to work this morning. Being Wednesday, it was a long day, but fortunately it’ll be a short week for me, having been out of town for Monday and Tuesday.

Work Video

While eating dinner tonight at work, we watched this video on the new Office 2007 UI. If you want to know what I work on, this pretty much explains it. Check it out and learn.

NC to Alexandria

I did get on my flight to Chicago on time and in first class. However, it was about 1.5 hours late which caused me to miss my connection. I then got rebooked onto a 4pm flight that was supposed to get me into Raleigh at 7pm, but I managed to luck out and get onto an earlier flight through standy. I really didn’t think I was going to be able to get on when they made an announcement requesting 3 volunteers to get bumped 20 minutes before departure. In the end, I think at least one or two large groups missed their connection or otherwise didn’t show up because I heard “final boarding call …. X party of 4 … Y party of 5″ a few times before they started calling standby names. By 12:30 I was on the ground in Raleigh–about 20 hours after my original planned arrival time or 29 hours after arriving at SeaTac (the first time).

After picking up my rental car at the airport, I met up with Steve and John over at Panera in Durham to make some conversation and grab a very late lunch. I went back to Steve’s aftewards and took a much needed 2 hour nap before heading over to Mellow Mushroom in Durham at the American Tobacco Project for pizza with everybody I had originally planned to eat lunch with that day. Here’s a pic Steve took of everybody:

From there, we went to . Nobody we knew won anything, but Aaron, Brad and I got our picture taken with the MC Mary K. Mart. She’s scarier in pictures I think, but in that Divine/West Virginia sort of a way:

My fourth major social event of the evening was my fashionaby late appearance at a CS grad student party at Tynia, Mike, Todd and Sasa’s house. I got to talk to just about everybody I wanted to see, which was awesome. At 2:30, I left the party to crash at Sarah and Jason’s. It must have been 3am by the time I went to bed. I slept until 1pm and still felt a bit groggy when I got up. I hadn’t slept more than 2 or 3 hours at a time for several days. The three of us and Jeff T went for a very late brunch (if you could even call it that) at Elmo’s in Carrboro just like old times.

Upon arriving back at Jason and Sarah’s, Jason and I played this board game Carcassonne. Even with just two players, it worked quite well. It was both simple and fun, unlike a lot of other board games out there today. I need to pick up a copy some time. I ended up sticking around for dinner (yummy eggplant parmesian) there with Nico and Jeff T eventually joining us too.

I took off for DC around 9pm and got to the hotel here in Alexandria around 1:30 or so. The first room they put me in wasn’t really complete. The pillows were laying on the beds in a pile without covers. The guy at the front desk didn’t seem to believe me for some reason, but he gave me another room anyways.

I just finished up putting the final touches on my slides. Tomorrow, my plan is to get up, eat some breakfast, practice my talk and then give my talk. Hopefully, I can grab lunch with some people I know from UNC and/or MPI before heading back to Chapel Hill later in the day.

Sometimes I Hate Air Travel

Forwarning: I’m still Seattle not Chapel Hill and at home not living it up east coast style.

During Christmas 2004, I missed a 6:30am-ish flight and ended up sitting on standby the entire day. Not wanting to repeat that with my 6:18am flight today, I stayed up all night. The cabbie came at 4 and I was at the airport by 4:30. The flight was on time actually, although it was completely full. I promptly fell asleep I think even before we took off. At some point, I was jarred awake by a bump but quickly fell back asleep. Soon I heard over the PA that the plane was returning to Seatac. Later I found out that some sort of turbulence from a jet in front of us had caused engine problems manifested in a loud boom and visible fire. I was sitting in the window seat right over the wing with the suspect engine yet I slept through the whole thing.

Eventually we got back to the gate where we sat in the plane for another 20 minutes probably. Then we had to deboard. Then we waited until about 10am at which point the flight was cancelled because the engine had sustained damage. Being spring break time, all the other flights were totally booked. I called American on my cell phone and they wanted to put me on a flight tomorrow morning at 8:30am that would get me to RDU at 9pm. Being that I need to go to DC Sunday afternoon, getting in that late would be a total waste of my trip to NC. So instead I waited in a 3 hour long line to get rebooked.

So now I have a seat on the United red-eye to Chicago followed by a connection in DC before getting to Raleigh around 11 ish tomorrow morning. I’m tired in that I didn’t sleep properly last night and certainly won’t again tonight either. Yeck. What a mess!

Slides

It’s about 4am and I just finished off the latest version of VR 2006 slides. Yeah! Now to catch some sleep before a big day of work tomorrow.

Vereinigte Deutschsprachige Kirche

On Sunday, I walked over to Keenan’s where I was meeting him to carpool over to Mike and Tara’s to play board games. On the way, I noticed there was a self-described “Deutschsprachige” (German-speaking for those who are not) UCC church right across from Cal Anderson Park. Anyhow, tonight I remembered I had seen it and decided to see what I could find online about it. They actually have their own website. It’s a 120+ year old UCC church founded by German immigrants. I get the impression from the website that they still run services in German. Right in the heart of Capitol Hill. I’m very intrigued.

Board Games, Work

On Sunday I met up with various people from work and their wives to play board games. The game we ended up playing was called Robo Rally. Basically, each player programs a robot to perform movements in pursuit of the goal of reaching several flags. However, there’s nothing electronic about the game. The instructions are given on cards that are randomly dealt. There are lasers, conveyer belts and even pits where if you fall in your robots is destroyed. It was a pretty fun game actually. Most of us grabbed dinner over at the Claim Jumper part of the way through (I hadn’t been there in a long time) before returning to finish our second and final game.

I got back home at around 11:30pm (I left at 1:30) and proceeded to procrastinate completing my VR 2006 slides. Eventually, I got myself motivated and did the slides, emailing them off to my old advisor at around 3am or so (I think).

On Friday morning, I only had about 10 bugs to work on, but by the middle of this afternoon I was up to about 32. First, a whole bunch of changes in several areas I now own came down the pipeline. Next, I got some Excel stuff because Keenan has been temporarily moved onto another area that desperately needs more man power. Then, my coworker Jared who left the team to transfer to a new position in Research gave me some of his remaining bugs too. Hence, it’s been quite a stacking up of work all of the sudden.

What makes things worse is that I’m going to be out of town Friday through Tuesday. Originally, I thought next Tuesday was going to be a big deadline for getting all of this stuff done, which therefore would mean the deadline was effectively Thursday for me. Fortunately, there’s actually another 10 days or so to take care of everything, which is helpful. Still, there are several things I want to get done this week before I leave.

Well, it looks like my build is off to the races, so it’s time for me to head back home. You might be thinking, why is he still at work at 11:30pm? Well, I started working from home today at noon after the late night, drove over to the east side around 1:30, went for a swim and then arrived at my office around 3pm. Hence, it has been a full day, but not as full as it might seem (:

A/V Goodness

After my last post, I drove up to Best Buy for the now nth time to pick up a working DVD player. I ended up buying one with HDMI out since I now have a TV that supports that. I also searched around the store for a DVI to HDMI converter that would allow me to hook my laptop up to the TV, but they only had the male version, not the female one I needed. At some point, I’ll pick one up online or something I guess. Since traffic on I-5 was a nightmare, I took side streets backk. What’s up with bad traffic going south between Northgate and downtown on Saturday night?

It also plays CDs containing divx and mpeg movies. I have a few old CDs of movies laying around, so I decided to pop Pink Flamingos in as a test while I made dinner. It actually worked pretty well. The quality isn’t all that amazing, but it was still pretty cool that I could just the play the disc directly on the TV. I haven’t seen Pink Flamingos in a while and had almost forgotten how low budget it is and how simply outrageous it must have been in 1972. It would be a cool thing to see at a midnight showing sometime.

After dinner, I actually got around to watching Y Tu Mamá También. I liked it, although somehow it wasn’t exactly what I expected. I really liked the contrast between the life of privilege lived by the kids and the everyday existence of normal people. So many little elements reminded me of my trip to Nicaragau. I’m a bit more excited to be going back to central America after seeing the movie.

Next up on my agenda for tonight is Coming Out, the first and only gay-themed film made in the former East Germany (it premiered the night the wall came down). The reviews I’ve read seem to be sorta mixed, but if nothing else it’s a unique artifact of a place and time now long gone.