Year: 2008

Wait a Minute, I Know Her

As I mentioned we are re-watching Firefly, we are now about 3/4 done, and had a eureka moment early on in the episode Trash. We meet for the second time a character named Saffron that “married” Mal and hijacked Serenity leaving it and its crew heading for a 26th century chop shop. This time she is married to one of Mal’s old war buddies and named Bridget. A fight ensues causing Monty to leave his bride behind in the clutches of revenge minded Mal. Bridgett, the smooth con woman she is, convinces Mal to bring her along because she has a surefire plan to steal a priceless artifact. As the intro credits roll I see a name that looks familiar. When Bridgett and Mal break into a house to steal the object, the owner walks in and recognizes Bridgett as his long lost wife, Yolanda. Despite her best efforts Yosaffbridge is foiled in her attempt to dupe the crew of Serenity out of the loot, mostly thanks to Inara.

Despite my recognizing the name and instantly recognizing who she was playing, I spent the rest of the show staring at her, sometimes I was sure that is who I thought it was and other times thinking no way. After watching the episode I hustled over to IMDB and sure enough it was Christina Hendricks, Saffron/Bridgett/Yolanda was Joan from Mad Men.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 36

Lockdown

Halfway done, Lockdown is episode #41 of 82 and appropriately it centers around John Locke. The off island flashback shows how John is totally locked to the whims of his con man father. After attending the father’s funeral he is shocked when a few days later the “deceased” shows up requesting help. He needs Locke to go and retrieve the money he stole from a couple of very bad dudes by unlocking a safety deposit box. On island, John has to enlist the aide of suspected bad guy Henry Gale, who he has unlocked from his cell, when he gets stuck under a blast door that automatically closes as part of the titular Lockdown. While trapped under the door he gets a brief glimpse of a strange map.

Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

Now don’t be sad….
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5hWWe-ts2s

We sat down to watch The Darjeeling Limited this afternoon, it was the final chapter of my Indian (Bengali) Trilogy from Netflix. The first movie was The Namesake which we watched a couple weeks ago. It was definitely not a “Hollywood” movie in that is was more of a slice of life, that of a first born Indian immigrant, than a flatulent based comedy or explosion filled action flick. We both enjoyed the movie and were rewarded with learning a bit about the Bengali culture. The second movie was Outsourced and it was more mainstream in that it was a romantic comedy, but it had a non-traditional happy ending. Once again we both enjoyed the movie and learned that although India looks like a magical and exciting place, these movies are as close as we want to get.

When I popped in the DVD for The Darjeeling Limited there was a short movie that proceeded it called Hotel Chevalier labeled as Part 1, so I opted to start there. After watching about 5 minutes of it, I jumped ahead to the actual movie remarking, “I hope the movie is better than this.” After 11 minutes we both looked at each other and said simultaneously, “I guess not.” I hit eject. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

We started the weekend by watching the the first four episodes of Season 3 of Boston Legal.

Denny Crain: Denny Crain!

The actual legal work on this show is laughable, but the humor in the William Shatner/James Spader parts more than makes up for it. After the loser Darjeeling flick we decided to pop in a disc of Firefly and watched a couple of episodes.

River: Two by two. Hands of blue. Two by two.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 35

The Best Mr. Miata A Man Can Get

Downtown Aiken is quiet at 7:45 AM on a Saturday morning, but that was about to change, the Master?s Miata Club was coming for breakfast and the sounds of hundreds of buzzing sports cars would soon be bouncing off the empty walls. Well, maybe tens of cars with raspy exhausts. Ok, a few two seaters zipping around. Actually one Miata coasting quietly to a stop in front of the Sugar Magnolia Cafe.

Today was the November edition of the MMC monthly breakfast and nobody came, Donna and I were unfazed and ate a delicious meal. I had the French Toast and she had the Eggs Benedict.

Roger Sterling to Joan: Aren?t you even going to have any of this? Look, we?ve got Oysters Rockefeller! Beef Wellington! Napoleons! We leave this lunch alone, it?ll take over Europe.

Post title courtesy of The Advertising Slogan Generator.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 34

The Federalist Papers

Normally in my circle of office mates, the conversations that fill up the large gaps between actual engineering work consists of sports or movies or food, but with the recent presidential election there has been a lot of chatter about politics. In a recent discussion my immediate supervisor asked me where I kept my copy of the Constitution so he could prove one point or another. I replied that I didn’t have one, but could Google him up one if he desired. He said, “Never mind, I’ll go get mine.” “You have one?” I asked. He said sure, it is in the back of my copy of The Federalist Papers.

Now I’m sure I must have learned about these papers somewhere in my admittedly dodgy educational experience, but couldn’t come up with what they were. He came back and handed me a normal sized paperback, that seemed substantially weighty (like Krispy Kreme doughnuts) and was full of 85 letters to the editor sort of essays, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay in 1787-78 to explain the need for and explain why the state of New York should ratify the proposed Constitution.

To say that deficiencies may be provided for by requisitions upon the States, is on the one hand to acknowledge that this system cannot be depended upon, and on the other hand to depend upon it for every thing beyond a certain limit. Those who have carefully attended to its vices and deformities as they have been exhibited by experience or delineated in the course of these papers, must feel invincible repugnancy to trusting the national interests in any degree to its operation. Its inevitable tendency, whenever it is brought into activity, must be to enfeeble the Union, and sow the seeds of discord and contention between the federal head and its members, and between the members themselves.

That is but a small excerpt from #30, Concerning the General Power of Taxation, and now I can see why the book felt so heavy.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 32

The Whole Truth

Episode #40 of 82 is about Sun & Jin and their pre-crash attempts at having children and their post crash discovery, in spite of doctors telling them they couldn’t be parents, that Sun is pregnant.

Oh Goody

At work a big chunk of the productive part of today was spent staring at nearly worthless PC. Half of everything that most people need to do their jobs and one major item, email, are controlled through servers in New Jersey and it seemed like maybe somebody parked their truck on the network hose and didn’t realize it. Started sometime mid morning and after lunch we got partial connectivity back and received this email:

From: Xxxxxx, Xxxxxxx [INDAUTO/ASCONUM/FP]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 1:08 PM
Subject: NETWORK OUTAGE

All Employees:

Our Datacenter is still experiencing network problems as a result of several outages by our local telecom carrier. We have failed-over to a backup link and will continue to work on restoring the primary link. We are severely limited in bandwidth so please suspend all non-work related web/internet activities until our primary link is restored. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any questions, please call me at the numbers listed below.

Xxxxxx Xxxxxxx
Manager, Network Systems

The highlighting is just as it came from the sender. My favorite part is the red letter words, “please suspend all non-work related web/internet activities” because I could swear that every employee has to sign off on a computer usage policy that expressly forbids using the net for anything non-business. I’m thinking that because this manager has to remind us not to use it for non-work, that perhaps he must think it is OK in other times to use it that way.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 32