The Old Year

It's been a great crazy year. Jen and I got married in February. We ran a marathon in May. I found out that we are having a baby and found out that I'm losing my job on the same day in December.

Next year is going to be just as eventful. I can't wait. Happy New Year everyone.

Chicago Pizza

Chicago Pizza, originally uploaded by nervda.

Yesterday, we had lunch at Gino's in Chicago. It's one of those dark funky old places where the walls have been written on in Sharpie and the pizza's deep and filling. It's strange, we grew up in a city that my brother calls a suburb without the city. Everything's prefab and franchised. I never realized that Pizza Hut was copying something from somewhere. I just assumed the Pepsi corporation invented the red checked tablecloth, I suppose. Silly me. You can't get pizza like this in Boston.

Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago

Our friend Joe took Jen and I to Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry yesterday. Joe and Jen both grew up in the area, so they knew that place from a thousand field trips as children. With some of the exhibits, very little has changed. In the physics section, the displays were powered by twenty five year old TI 44/9As.

These things were so old that Joe and had forgotten how to hack in to the BASIC programs that were teaching us about the laws of conservation of mass and energy. I wonder if they were loading the programs from cassette tape.

The computer imaging exhibit has a glassed in server room, and Joe and I were noticing the age of the machines. Most of them were old 1994 era Macintoshes. It kind of makes me wish I had the money and time to build modernized exhibits. It was a nostalgia museum for us, but science museums should be for kids. It should inspire them to become scientists. It's sort of sad, really.

The Windy City

Jen and I are staying with her mom in Chicago for a couple of days. It's a great city. We've been thinking about moving to a cheaper city long term. Boston is so expensive. I can't imagine the amount of money that we'd need to make in order to raise a family in Boston. I love Boston, aside from the expense, it's nearly a perfect city.

Chicago is a much cheaper city and it's got a great vibe. Minneapolis is also on the list. I don't think we could handle living in a red state, and I want to stay in a city. I want our child to grow up in a diverse environment.

Anyhow, we're gonna do some sightseeing today. It's too cold even for New Englanders to see anything outside today, so it's gonna be a museum day, I think.

I always forget that my great grandfather actually lived in Chicago in the late 1800's. He was working on the railroad (yes, all the livelong day.) I'd like to see something about that part of history here at the museum.

Happy Christmas.

We're having a baby! Read all about it on our new blogs: Eating for Two and The First Born.

Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve yo. Sorry for getting a little fake street sound there. You get like that when you hang out long enough with the Jess. It doesn't really feel like Christmas to me yet, but then again, I have spent the last 28 Christmas Days in Florida. White Christmas? You mean beach sand, right?

Jen and I are having our first Christmas as a married couple here in Boston. We've put up the traditional Christmas rosemary bush, as you can see on the right. It's gonna take us all morning to open the presents. Then we're going to have some friends over for dinner and wassail and have figgy pudding, or whatever it is they do in those songs.

Despite being a lame duck at work, I'm actually working right now in case some nutjob decides that they need technical support at 3 in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. They can terminate me, but they can never say that I didn't step up and take on the crap tasks.

For your holiday enjoyment, here are some links to seasonal tunes:

Tijuana Xmas
This is awesome peppy early 60's Mexican horns arrangments of Christmas tunes. You MUST check out "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"

"Fairytale of New York" by Pilate
This is a cover of one of my favorite Pogues songs ever. "You're bum. You're a punk." "You're an old slut on junk." "Happy Christmas, your arse, I pray God it's our last."

But it turns around. "You took my dreams from me, when I first found you." "I took them with, babe. I kept them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I've built my dreams around you."

Glengarry Glen Nervda

In the movie Glengarry Glenross, Alec Baldwin is sent down from corporate headquarters to a local real estate office to motivate the salesman with a contest. First prize is a Cadillac, second prize is a set of steak knives, and "third prize is you're fired."

I just got third prize at work. (Actually, I'm still working until January 7th, and then they're giving me six additional weeks worth of pay.) It's been a crazy 5 year ride at the large unnamed software company where I work. We I started there were 35 people in the department. There are 6 left. I suspect that somewhere there's a corporate mandate to turn over the bottom 10% every year. (They teach you that at some whacked business school, right?) The first two years we were hammered by layoffs that turned over the bottom 75%. Then one guy was let go in 2002. We thought it was an anomaly. Then another guy got let go late 2003, but he was clearly becoming belligerent with customers. But it's the third one that makes a pattern clear.

When you cut and the department is fat, the weak members of the herd are easy to clear away. When you are so lean and keep cutting, you start to lose meat and bone.

But I don't have any hard feelings. If I had to pick one of the staff to cut, it would have been me too. The guys left on staff are passionate about their work. They're willing to crank out the overtime hours and study on their own. Me? I'm punching the clock. When 5PM rolls around, I'm finished. I have a life outside of work, thank you very much.

So it's time to start looking for new work. I think I'd like to get out of the software industry. It's hard to advance when everyone has the same skills. There are only so many middle management openings that they can create to promote people to. I'd like to work in a business as their web/database admin. I'd like to be on the dialing end of a tech support call for a change.

Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire is one of my favorite films of all time. I love the poetry of it. The first half has no plot really, it's a mediation of the internal lives of the everyday people in 1980's Berlin. It's told from the point of view of angels, who can watch and hear everything. They are in this world, but not of it. They can't feel warm nor cold, pain nor joy. The second half starts when an angel decides he wants to know what it is to be human, to be in love.

What I find interesting is how much of what we as a society believe about angels is not from the Bible. Nowhere does it says that when we die that we will become angels. Those who have accepted Christ will be granted eternal life, but not as angels. I'm not Bible scholar. I'm not even practicing, but as I recall, the angels were a separate race from man, employed by God as messengers and soldiers. This link provides an interesting overview of what the Bible says about angels.

What I'd like to know is where DO we get these ideas about angels? Is it Highway to Heaven, or Touched By an Angel, and why don't superliteralist Bible groups take us to task on this?

International House of Flying Daggers

We saw The House of Flying Daggers last night. It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful looking films ever made. Every single frame is art gallery quality photography. The action is over the top. Besides the amazing martial arts that you would expect from Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, director Zhang Yimou uses digital effects to show arrows in flight and the flying daggers in the title.

Where the movie breaks down a little bit, is the story. It's over the top in an operatic sort of way. There are double and triple crosses. Deceptions on top of deceptions. The love triangle that brings the film to its bloody climax seems hard to believe. The movie has spent its resources on the lush visuals, and not on the narrative that explains the dynamic of love. Why is Jin in love with Mei, besides the fact that she's hot and knows kung fu? I don't know. As far as I can tell that's why Leo loves her too. Even so, this film is much more coherent than Zhang Yimou's last film, Hero.

Halfway through the film, I realized that this was a movie adaptation of the Chinese martial arts novelettes that my father constantly read when I was a kid. I couldn't read a single word of them, but I remember the cover paintings. I kept wishing that just once, I'd flip open the book and it'd be a comic book that I could make sense of. There always seemed to be a man in flowing robes riding on a swift horse while brandishing a broadsword. Looking up on that screen last night, those covers had come to life.

It also occurred to me why all the old kung fu movie dialogue is composed of the fighters naming their moves. Before there were kung fu movies, there were kung fu novels. You had to have that play by play in the text. Finally when the movies were made, people could see these moves that they'd read about for all these years. That's why my father (who knows no kung fu) was able to name all of my moves when I performed some routines for him.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquistion!

The New Yorker Online has two pieces on Monty Python this week. They're making a Broadway musical based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, called "Spamalot"

Hank Azaria, who's in "Spamalot," put it well. He went to a prep school in New York somewhere. He said something to the effect that Monty Python sort of made it O.K. to be smart. They rewarded you, I guess, for having studied in history class. To be able to take that kind of material and completely make it ridiculous was something that nobody else did, or does, really.

That was definately me and my friends. We were in Math Club for God's sake. Our sponsor really sort of wished we were a cool club like the Exchangettes or something, so she had us build a float for the Homecoming Parade every year. We were playing the Orlando Evans Trojans. Dave Latz, John Sage and I somehow talked the others into building a Python inspired 8 foot tall Trojan Rabbit for our float.

It was completely bizarre. We built the rabbit out of stolen forklift palettes and cable spools. Actually, the palettes were borrowed. We returned them to the place we stole them from (a bit worse for wear, I'm sure). I really wish we had a picture of the thing. It was splendily absurd, and I've never talked about it before. Ah, the shame of being a geek. All hail Python!

If I were only driving through Hong Kong in a red convertible

I love the old John Woo movies from Hong Kong. My brother and I watch Hard Boiled damn near everytime we're home for Christmas. One of our favorite moments is singing the instrumental soundtrack for a scene where Tony the undercover cop working as a hit man is driving to a hit in his red convertible. This is the song we sing. It's not even really that good a song, but damn do we love it.

First lines pt. 2

So what if it's been three months since the first opening line. Here's another one:

Despite her best efforts, Virginia had fallen in love with her demons.

Happy Holidays, lardbuckets

This year, the large unnamed software company that I work for gave us all very lovely winter jackets by Marmot. They have the company name embroidered on the front and they cost a pretty penny. The cheapest price I found for this thing on the web is $249. Usually, I don't wear company freebies, as they're usually crappy t-shirts or what not, but these bad boys are nice.

Here's the thing, a good number of people went home empty handed. We had plenty of jackets, but not the right sizes. We'd run out of XXL. We're a rapidly growing country if you know what I mean, and we're not really doing anything about it. We pay it lip service, talk about going on Atkins or Weight Watchers, but the ones who follow through are few and far between. It's especially evident in this industry where we work long hours sitting on our butts in front of a computer screen.

All the new hobbies are sedentary ones. Gaming? Yup. Tivo? Yup. Knitting? Yup. I remember being a kid and watching wrestling with my grandmother and thinking that these men were giants at 200 lbs. Now, that's a reasonably normal sized guy. Scary. How much will the next generation weigh?

Keep this all in mind when it's time to make resolutions, ok?

Fear does not exist on this blog, does it?

The world never ceases to amaze me. They're making a musical from the Karate Kid. I strongly recommend that you download the song "Wax On/Wax Off". It's a prime slice of funk. You think I'm kidding? It's headed straight for my iPod, baby.