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Entry tags:
- ddr,
- food,
- pop-culture,
- work
(no subject)
Today I finished the first and largest stage of what should be a big and exciting contract and delivered the result to the customer. That means slightly less deadline pressure in the immediate future, which is good. The project itself wasn't bad; the schedule was somewhat demanding for the variable task of debugging an OS on novel hardware.
I can use some free time, because DDR Extreme (US) is supposed to make it out to our hinterlands any day now. The living room has been cleared out in preparation.
It'll also be good to have more time to think about cooking, and to push along the process of getting a gas stove installed. It puzzles me that both the price I'm paying and the price in Consumer Reports are higher than the listed MSRP.
After the project was "delivered" (bah, Comcast uplink speeds), we went out for dinner. The restaurant, Judie's, was described by a review book as "aging gracefully". It certainly had a lot of 1977 still going on, mostly unashamedly. My feelings were mixed. What was a gustatory revelation in America in 1977 is not so exciting now. My dish was decent (lamb shank), though I'm not sure they know about flavors other than salt. They also claim to be "home of the popover". But in my heart, the home of popovers is the Jordan Pond House. I would like to go there again, but I hear that it is no longer as nice as my memory of it from 1983.
Finally, we went to see a movie - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was overdone, but I enjoyed it. It was so pulpy that it hurt. Retro-future is totally my genre of choice (see also my fascination with the Wasteland and Fallout games). The really evocative bits were towards the beginning - The movie went quickly enough that there wasn't time to dwell on any of the ridiculousness that went on, even beyond the things that are part of the pulp genre.
I'm willing to forgive the "ignite the atmosphere" bit, because the Manhattan Project actually worried about that for a while - the idea occurred to someone that a nuclear reaction might trigger a worldwide chain reaction, and much frantic math had to be done before they convinced themselves that it wasn't going to happen.
At any rate, I have to go reread The Gernsback Continuum now.
I can use some free time, because DDR Extreme (US) is supposed to make it out to our hinterlands any day now. The living room has been cleared out in preparation.
It'll also be good to have more time to think about cooking, and to push along the process of getting a gas stove installed. It puzzles me that both the price I'm paying and the price in Consumer Reports are higher than the listed MSRP.
After the project was "delivered" (bah, Comcast uplink speeds), we went out for dinner. The restaurant, Judie's, was described by a review book as "aging gracefully". It certainly had a lot of 1977 still going on, mostly unashamedly. My feelings were mixed. What was a gustatory revelation in America in 1977 is not so exciting now. My dish was decent (lamb shank), though I'm not sure they know about flavors other than salt. They also claim to be "home of the popover". But in my heart, the home of popovers is the Jordan Pond House. I would like to go there again, but I hear that it is no longer as nice as my memory of it from 1983.
Finally, we went to see a movie - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was overdone, but I enjoyed it. It was so pulpy that it hurt. Retro-future is totally my genre of choice (see also my fascination with the Wasteland and Fallout games). The really evocative bits were towards the beginning - The movie went quickly enough that there wasn't time to dwell on any of the ridiculousness that went on, even beyond the things that are part of the pulp genre.
- Polly's role as a reporter gives her an initial reason to be where she is, and to have a camera, but the role doesn't really have a conclusion.
- Why does the newsreel voiceover say that the world is dependent on SC's merry band of mercenaries? As we later see, the UK at least has some pretty hard core military operations going on.
- When the group discovers the mine, there's a spherical building there (nice 1939 reference with the spike), but it's totally ignored.
- The idea that the whole thing has been run by robots/AIs for decades seems farfetched even by the usual standards, and it steals the chance for a real confrontation.
- If there's one Badass Robot Chick, who actually seems kind of clever and problem-solving, why not more of those, instead of the various big clunkers? (I have to admit that I was disappointed that that didn't turn out to *also* be Frankie, in some kind of double-agent move).
- Why does a doomsday rocket have escape pods? To escape at the destination, whatever that is, I suppose...
I'm willing to forgive the "ignite the atmosphere" bit, because the Manhattan Project actually worried about that for a while - the idea occurred to someone that a nuclear reaction might trigger a worldwide chain reaction, and much frantic math had to be done before they convinced themselves that it wasn't going to happen.
At any rate, I have to go reread The Gernsback Continuum now.