Things that might be decidedly odd…

Nishi Ginza Station

Marc, his friend Sara Jane and I went to see ‘Nishi Ginza Ekimae’ (English title: ‘Nishi Ginza Station’) last night at the Northwest Film Forum. It’s part of a series entitled “A MAN VANISHES: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura” which is a retrospective of Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura. The film was a bit strange but funny in a kooky Japanese cultural way. The movie is about a man who has repeated day dreams of being on a desert island with another woman. When his wife and kids go on vacation for a couple days away, he considers having an affair but wackiness quickly ensues.

Highlights include a hilariously simple flashback mechanism for the day dreams, an odd theme song by Frank Nagai (for which the movie was a promotion vehicle–it was sung three times in the movie as required by the producers) and rarely seen Japanese blackface.

Leopard on My Macbook

So after a fairly lengthy but easy upgrade process, I have Leopard running on my Macbook. It’s pretty shiny and nice I must admit, but I need to explore more of the features.

Upgrading my iMac is next up, but I need to finish up some work work (remotely logged in through VMWare Fusion) on that machine first or reboot this machine into Vista. I suppose I should try out the released version of Bootcamp on this machine, but there’s something tragic about booting into Windows just after loading a new version of Mac OS X.

Fedex Truck #2

Yeah! Another truck just came and delivered the package.

Now, I just have to wait for the backing up of important stuff like my photos onto my laptop!

The driver told me that this was the last Leopard package he was dropping off today. So either I lucked out by still getting it or didn’t luck out by having to wait the longest

Fedex Truck

Why do they torture me so?

The truck sat here in front of my apartment building for a while then drove off. No leopard package still

Fedex is Pissing Me Off

The copy of Leopard (the new Mac OS 10.5) I pre-ordered was supposed to be delivered this morning by 10:30am through Fedex. However, last time I checked the tracking information on my package, it says “8:42am, delivery exception, future delivery requested” and the estimated delivery date has been shifted to Monday.

There’s no door tag, so they’ve not attempted delivery. I called Fedex up, but I think the guy on the phone only confused me more. He said it was loaded onto a truck this morning and that they still have until 10:30am to deliver the package. He then mumbled something about this being “an Apple promotional thing”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Ugh, I’m starting to think I should have just joined the mob trampling at some Apple store instead of having it delivered to my doorstep.

Days

It occured to me today that I’ve probably lived in Seattle longer than most other cities I’ve lived in over the past few years. I busted out Excel to do some rough calculations on it. I even made some fast quick style tables, but HTML export doesn’t work particularly well for pasting into WordPress. Anyways, here’s the plainly formatted information:

Note the third column which represents the date I’d have to stay in Seattle until to get an equal number of days. I’ve bolded the dates which are in the past. Hence, I’ve lived in Seattle longer than those cities.

It also surprises me that I only lived in Berkeley about two years longer than I lived in San Clemente (4.5 years vs. 6.5 years), but I even have three years to go in Seattle before I surpass Berkeley.

Unique Thing about Seattle #3,723

Having waves crash over your car while driving and it not indicating serious disaster.

I left work early today since the weather report is calling for high winds (up to 50mph gusts). The bridge I normally take (BTW, longest permanent pontoon bridge in the world) gets shut down in high winds. Even by about 2:45 it was already serious backed up with everybody trying to get over the bridge before closure I’m guessing. Instead I took I-90 across, which probably took just about as long but I find myself being less irritated when I’m not sitting in bad stop-and-go traffic the whole way home.

For those not familiar with area, all of the bridges crossing the lake into Seattle are floating bridges which means they sit directly on the water. Because they float, if there’s turbulence in the water, the bridge actually moves quite a bit. It’s really bad to get stuck in traffic on the 520 bridge in particular since the movement can make you seasick. Because the wind was blowing from the south, there were decent sized waves crashing over cars going eastbound whereas I was going westbound and just got to watch it happen to others. It’s happened to me a few times too and is not uncommon in general, but I still think it’s fairly novel. It’s odd to have to turn your windshield wipers on for water splashing out of the lake onto your car.

A couple of cool pictures from the WSDOT website:

Foliage

One of the few things I like about commuting to the eastside.

Sent from my iPhone

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Bobo goaded a group of us into going out to the bars last night, although it’s not like he had to try very hard to convince us We tried to start at Pony, but they were charging a $5 cover there because of some sort of performer. I wasn’t interested in paying $5 to get into an ordinary bar. Instead, we headed to the Bus Stop for a bit, it being one of the other bars that’s slated to be torn down to make way for new condos. After one drink, we departed for underwear night at the Eagle, which was our intended featured destination of the evening. In particular, Marc had never been there on underwear and was curious to watch the spectacle I think. The Eagle is always good for people watching, so I generally enjoyed myself.

This morning Marc and I went for brunch in Leschi. Afterwards we took a short walk, part of which was through Leschi Park, where I took this picture of some pretty Fuchsias.

Still Here

Yikes, it’s been about a week and a half since I last blogged. Not a whole lot has been going on, but I guess I’ve been keeping myself busy with work, hobbies and seeing Marc (not necessarily in that order).

Lately, I’ve had this weird insomnia where I stay up late and don’t really feel tired until I make myself go to bed. I’ve been keeping myself busy with overhauling the OutVentures website for about a week now. I think that’s keeping my mind busy later into the night than usual, which in turn causes me to not wind down as early as before.

It’s nearly 3am, so I should probably go to sleep soon.