Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

Okay, so here I am, updating from the open WiFi network in the house in BelAir.  Housesitting is weird - there's nothing much that I'm responsible for, there's no one to talk to, and the space is unfamiliar.  The upside is that it's actually a very comfortable place (i'm not always comfortable in places this far outside of my pay grade) and there's a pool.  I've managed to drag a lounger out into the sun (none permanently live in the sun, oddly) and I'm finally settled  enough to get into a routine.  I'll be doing some writing here for sure, as well as plenty of reading.

The other day I was thinking about the number of new things that computers can do for us and how far we've come just in my memory.  Today's remniscence is of my freshman year of college.  MP3 became widely known about then, and music came down in size fivefold, to about "a meg a minute."  That was like a magical number.  You could suddenly store music for playback later on your computer.  Mine was a Pentium 75mhz machine with 8mb of RAM and a 1.275gb HDD.  that's 1275mb.  I have more than six times that much RAM in my workstation now.  Anyway, the first players were so bad that you couldn't multitask anymore (that's what Windows95 promised, afterall), and when they released an update to WinAmp, we could suddenly listen to music while typing our papers.  Now, we didn't download music, really - how would we have done that - but we could upload and download from our online useraccounts on the "gl" server.

Tangentially, at the time, I was only dimly aware of the fact that the account on the "gl" server was actually access to another machine.  I knew we all had folders there and that most of them were closed off, but that was about as far as it went.  No, wait, I also knew that I had storage space that I controlled that wasn't on my computer, but I never really lept beyond that into anything like the "cloud" everyone's talking about today - in my mind, that space was just for web stuff.  I have been storing things in the cloud for a long time, but so has anyone with a clue - it's just been recently that people figured out that by giving the thing a buzzword and selling it, we might create a new business.

Anyway, none of this is important at all - I just was thinking about it, and maybe, with as much as i've already forgotten (where did we get MP3s to listen to?  Did we even, or was it just novelty?), I'll lose more of these memories soon, too.  Maybe they're worth forgetting, too.  I dunno.

Okay, so this is the caprese that we made last night.  The picture isn't really a winner and the bread isn't here (it's just about to come out of the oven), but it's pretty representative.  Those are home-grown tomatoes, as you might expect, and the mozzarella was good, but not great.  I'm not sure I can define what makes a mozzarella great, but this didn't quite have that thing.  Of course, it was plenty good enough for my pathetic palette, I'll tell you what. Also, we dipped the bread (covered in hand-chopped garlic, of course) in the olive oil, only I also buttered it. That's probably overkill, but health be damned.

Casey pointed out that this wasn't actually a very healthy dinner, but I'm not so sure. I mean cheese has a ton of fat, but can't there be good-for-you fat once in a while? And haven't we yet debunked the myth of the bad-for-you carbs? I mean, what ever happened to the carb-hater guy anyway? He's friggin' dead. Anyway, I digress. Tonight I'll cook lean steaks and we'll eat raw beans or something to make up for it.

Okay, enough about food, I'm off to house-sit. Larger picture of the food after the break.

Okay, so the drought ended this weekend.  I went from zero movies ever in my life to seeing four in just under 24 hours.  What the hell.  Anyway, here's the rundown.  And before you ask, I'm conditionally for the Michael Vick thing.  The oceans of grayscale here are almost limitless, and the man's level of play will go a long way in my mind, as will his continued involvement in animal cruelty prevention programs.  Anyway, let's get back to this.  In order:

Dead Snow
Not as good as I'd hoped. The previews made it look spectacular but the execution wasn't nearly as great as I'd hoped.  It was like the filmmakkers watched Evil Dead and copied it, not understanding how things have changed in the last 25 years.  There was a lot meta going on there "Fortune and glory kid, fortune and glory..." but it wasn't enough to make it awesome.  I had hoped, but no.

Zardoz
What a flick.  The picture of Sean Connery that's been floating around Facebook got Kevin interested, and he managed to get a copy running on the XBMC (awesome, BTW).  It was spectacular.  Awesome in the original sense of the word.  The Speedo with the dual bullet bandoliers and the knee-high boots, all in red?  I smell a halloween costume, right?  Anyway, go see it.

Julie & Julia
I haven't read the blog or the book, and I don't have a lot of interest in doing either, but it seemed like the movie really whitewashed Julie's opinion of Julia.  If the movie were all there was, the crazy foodies wouldn't have felt the need to savage the blogger to save the cranky old chef.  If the chef is cranky.  I don't know.  My mom said it made her want to host dinner partys but not cook Childs' foods, but I kinda liked that cool thing they did with the fish.  If only they used more tomatoes.  I have a couple more coming due this afternoon, so I'm taking applications.

District 9
Oh what the hell.  Everyone's lauding this thing as the greatest sci-fi since The Matrix which was the greatest sci-fi since Star Wars, which means you should definitely stay away from the sequels.  The special effects were great, some of the best I've seen, but  that doesn't get the story moving faster or give the apartheid-again plot any more punch.  I don't know.  Didn't hate it, but it wasn't great.

The rest of the weekend was pretty fun, too.  Went to the beach, did some drinking at the Dime and generally relaxed in between taking in all those movies.