Leopard is going to be sweet! Spaces will give some much needed built-in multi-desktop functionality.

Oh, and all of this can run on your Mac Pro, drool…

Had some time this weekend to watch a few movies inbetween my stints of coding.

First up, Just Friends with Ryan Reynolds in the lead role. I am a pretty Reynolds fan (come on, Van Wilder, can’t do much better than that) so I had somewhat high expectations for this movie. I wasn’t disappointed. Most of the movie was pure humor with only a few places being kind of dull or slow. Reynolds didn’t let me down, he was witty and even had some of the Van Wilder aura about him.

Then I watched The Big White with its whole slew of names, from Robin Williams to Giovanni Ribisi. It is a dark comedy similar to Garden State or I Heart Huckabee. I got a few laughs out of it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And last but not least, I saw Talladega Nights. I enjoyed it, but it was not as good as I thought it would be. It was another one of these movies where the point of the movie is kind of lost to make room for the humor. There was a lot of poking fun at southerners and kind of at Christians, but most of the subtle jokes were left for the right-wing with shots being taken left and right. I don’t necessarily mind this except for the fact that we are so bombarded with politics in this country that it’s a little a frustrating. Everywhere we turn there is someone else’s political agenda being shoved down our throats, it’s just getting old, no matter who it’s directed at.

My days have become filled with meetings. Some meetings discuss topics that play little or no role with anything that I am involved in while others cover very important topics.

What really gets me is that I am marked as “required” to attend these meetings, just like everyone else, yet, half the people never show.

The most entertaining meetings are the ones that go past their scheduled time but nothing gets accomplished in any of that time. It’s to the point now that meetings take up around 80% of my time, leaving little time to do any of my actual work. I have seen some people doing things to combat their lack of time by blocking off sections of their calendar with events marked “my time” and making themselves unavailable. Maybe that’s what I need to do.

Today I made my first huge purchase as an “adult”. I bought a used Nissan Altima from Carmax. It only has 27k miles so it was definitely good find.

Compared to my Bronco the ride is completely different. It is much smoother, very quiet, and more responsive. I will have to get used to it as driving my truck had very few blind spots but the Altima has a few.

So far I am glad that I bought it. I needed something that was better in the fuel mileage department and actually had a working air conditioner.

This crisis in the Middle East has befuddled me. Not so much the crisis, but the reactions that people and countries are giving.

Death in any situation is sad, however, people need to think about what is at stake here. Israel has to uphold their values, which is that they do not negotiate with terrorist and they get their soldiers back. The deaths that have occurred while tragic were caused by Hezbollah. They are known to locate their areas of operation within heavily populated civilian areas in hopes to discourage air strikes. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and the Lebanese people do not understand that they are the source of Lebanon’s current situation.

If Hezbollah returned the soldiers and stood down from firing rockets into Israel, we would see this crisis come to an end. Yet people blame Israel and accuse them of overreacting. What? What would other countries do? Russia, in its current fight against the rebels in Chechnya are known to go in and wipe out entire blocks of neighborhoods, yet no other countries complain. Blows my mind.

I am flipping through the channels right now and there is a show that is about who’s the best dancer, who’s the best singer while you watch their real life, who has the most talent, and who’s the best rockstar. What gives?

It used to be just American Idol and that was fine, now it’s just a lot of crap spanned across multiple channels. I stopped on “The One” just to see what it was about and of course they were doing a poor job of paying homage to a classic. They were singing Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time” and it sounded alright, but that’s not the point. The song is a ballad, and was meant to have the electric guitar behind it with the full “symphonic” band playing along. These shows performing these songs just don’t the music justice.

And people wonder why we are inundated with crappy music. It’s because of these shows. People think they’re producing great artists but all they are doing is giving us more canned music.

Now a girl is on this show and she has a decent voice but she’s wearing a skimpy number and I think the whole point of her performance is to get some T&A on the screen to draw in some viewers.

ugh…

I have found it very hard to get things done at work when I have other, more important things on my mind.

It’s not hard to do the work, it’s hard to just stay focused and not be distracted by thinking about whatever it is that is more important.

That’s part of the reason for lack of updates as well as the fact that I’m just busy.

Ok, you don’t have to turn it off, but if you are sitting in a group office and your phone is on vibrate have the decency to pick it up when it rings. When you pick it up, either take it out of the room to answer it or silence the vibrating feature if you want to ignore it.

It is very frustrating to be concentrating on something and have someone loudly answer the phone or worse, just let it keep ringing.

There are a few things that I am in need of to make the home office “complete”.

1. Dell 20.1 Flat-Panel Monitor
2. Seagate 100GB Portable Harddrive
3. Apple Wireless Keyboard
4. Logitech Notebook Mouse

That’s really all I can think of right now. I’m sure there are small things but they can wait.

When DVDs first came on the market, the beauty was that you did not have to fast forward through previews for other movies. It seems like times are changing. I just put in The Matador and had to wait through ten minutes of commercials before I could watch the actual movie. I tried all of the ways around it, fast forward, channel step, etc. and nothing worked. Just one of those annoying things that really gets underneath your skin after a while…