Writing in coffee shops

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I don't think writing in a coffee shop or a restaurant is my thing. Maybe I need to warm to the idea. I get nothing from the random coffee drinkers around me, and I feel pompous typing away on my laptop in the shop. I don't even drink coffee. I've been typing away on my novel while lying in bed.
Movies and television reflect our collective subconscious. I think it happens by the very nature of the economics of mass entertainment.
So what's up with the smurfs? Little blue creatures that lived in mushrooms? An evil foe named Gargamel with a giant cat. One female smurf among a village of male(?) smurfs? Only now, with years of life under my belt and a mind which is just now awakening to the world do I see the smurfs for bizarre childhood mythology they were.
I bring up the Smurfs because they're mentioned in XXX. It's really an unfortunate title if you imagine all the customers who don't know what the official website is, typing XXX into search engines.
I was chatting with another transplant to Seattle about the city, whether or not she planned on staying, what her impression of the city was. We agreed that while it's a very friendly town, outwardly, it's not very inviting. It's a subtle note, a minor chord as opposed to a discordant chord, but I would say that it's more difficult for a mid to late 20 something to burrow into a social niche in Seattle than in a city like Chicago or San Francisco.
For example, you might be new in town and at a party, and standing around because you don't know anyone. How do others react to you? Or you might be talking with someone and suddenly a whole group of his or her friends come up and start chatting. Are you introduced? Do folks who know you're new in town try and invite you out with a crowd to try and integrate you into town? My roommate's pretty good about it, and there are a few others who've been great, but it does feel socially inert for an outsider. You have to work to keep yourself relevant.
Ah, to be in my early twenties again, partying away weeknights and weekends, collecting phone numbers and names like the Classifieds.
I say this because I looked into buying a house, and the financials don't really make sense for me right now. The transaction costs kill you so you have to stay with it for a couple years, four or five. And if you sell lots of stock in a year, beyond a certain level of income they start reducing the amount of housing deductions you can take. This is a tricky thing for me because I have a hard time settling down and projecting several years into the future. I may have to buy a house and rent it out.
Roddy leads the life I'd like to lead. He actually reminds me of myself, with his current passion for photography, which he studied himself as I did. You know you're speaking with a kindred spirit when you can look at someone's photos and the first word you say to him is Fuji Velvia? And you both know it's a rhetorical question, because what you're really acknowledging is that you both love the saturated colors of Fuji's signature slide film. He has some lovely ones.
I like tapping away on my Mac laptop, and its creative applications are definitely easier to use and more stable than those on the Windows side (digital music, photography, and video especially) but lots of web pages don't render properly in IE on the Macintosh. I'm going to try Opera, which on Windows was the fastest browser around.

Lord of the Rings DVDs

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From Comingsoon.net:
The Evening Post spoke to Peter Jackson about the highly-anticipated "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" DVD. Debunking rumors that there would be a 4-hour long version of the film, the director says that a DVD will be released in August, with a Special Edition to follow in November.
"I don't really want to call it the director's cut," he said about the Special Edition which will include an extra 30 minutes of footage not seen in the three-hour big screen version.
The extra footage wouldn't mean more blood and gore as some "Lord of the Rings" fans had speculated. "It's all drama. There is this thing on the Net about all this gory stuff I was supposed to have shot, but I didn't," Jackson adds. "We were going for a (censor's rating) of PG13 and you can't waste time shooting stuff that you know is going to get cut. It will tee everybody up before the release of The Two Towers (in December)."
The special edition DVD is also likely to include the first part of a documentary by Wellington film maker Costa Botes on the making of the $650 million project.
Always a bummer, in my opinion, to make people who are willing to shell out for the special edition wait a longer period of time to receive their copy of the DVD. Basically, it's a ploy to try and get those folks to buy both DVDs, because in this case they have plenty of time to finish and release both DVDs at the same time.

Googlewhack

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A web-based game in which you try and type in two words
in the Google search engine and return exactly one search result. Harder than you think. I type in "plasma goulash" and got 130 results, including a web page that included these lines: "... This feedback never arrived as the plasma storm disabled all communications from ... surface and in the corona. The goulash of forces interacting constantly in ..."
"Goulash of forces"?!?
It reminds of this game Jenny sent me an e-mail about, a derivation of the Kevin Bacon game in which you're given the name of two movie stars. You have to navigate from the page of a movie which stars one of the stars to the page of a movie including the other star by using only the "People who bought this also bought this" links.
The people who devise these games obviously have a bit too much free time. But it's also another way in which the web is a fun, ever-evolving resource.

Successful defense

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Yeah for Alan! He successfully defended his dissertation on Monday at Washington University in St. Louis. I like that terminology--defending your dissertation. He's been working on that for many years now. I know that I probably wouldn't have been able to pursue medicine for so many years. Medicine is a long haul.
There was an interesting article in the New Yorker last week about the need for practice to become a doctor, and the difficulty of providing the best health care for every patient while still providing residents with enough practice on medical procedures. Basically, the point was that health care is not equal for all patients, and that it has a lot to do with who you know. I'm glad half my classmates from school are doctors. Hopefully I won't have a resident checking me out when I break a hip when I'm 65.
I do mini defenses every day at the office. At least a few times a day, I have to defend my ideas. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.

Random

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I watch a show like Real World or Project Greenlight and think that any event can be edited to look dramatic, riveting. Life is a series of conflicts, and good editors just remove all the other parts.
I had a dream that was like Bonfire of the Vanities. I'm driving along with someone, maybe one of my sisters, at night. A crazy homeless guy runs in the path of my car. He wants money? To rob us? I jump out of the car, tell him to move. He attacks me. I defend myself, start punching him, and soon I've beaten him senseless. Flash forward. I'm arrested. I'm in court, trying to defend myself. How could I break the jaw of a poor homeless bum? I wish I had written down more of the dream this morning, when I still remembered it.
Rich pointed this out to me: next time the Garth Brooks commercial for Dr. Pepper comes on, watch carefully. There's a crazy old man wearing a red jumpsuit in the musical band that Brooks plays with in the commercial. That guy is off to the right side of the TV screen. He looks like a cross between Albert Einstein and Colonel Sanders, and he's bopping around like a freakshow. What is up with that guy? Why is he in the commercial? Why is he holding a newspaper?

Information exchange

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In most educated countries, the birth rate has dropped below the replacement rate, meaning that the overall population is shrinking. This is interesting if you think of reproduction as replication of strings of information, in this case those strings being DNA strands.
It was Stewart Brand who coined the phrase "information wants to be free". It recognized that people like to share secrets, and information spreads like a virus--these days we use the term meme.
In a sense, Darwinism should work with information of all forms. But it just works slower with reproduction of species. Evolution is simply survival of the most effective information strings (DNA) which produce a physical form most adapted to survival on this planet.
It's interesting to consider all of these forces converging. You have the more affluent, educated societies of the world beginning to contract as couples decide not to have kids. Birth control allows couples to indulge the genetic reproductive urge while avoiding the responsibilities of parenthood. Such couples are thwarting the propogation of the genetic information they carry. Where am I going with this? I don't know.
But I'll forge on anyway. Why is it that we're attracted to "beautiful" people? If we view the selection of our mates as a means of maximizing the chance that our DNA will survive and pass on to the next generation, perhaps we are attracted to so called beautiful people because we recognized, throughout our youth, the advantages that accrue to the beautiful. Our kids will certainly have an easier childhood if they are not unattractive in any noticeable way. As we all know, kids are cruel.
Perhaps it also explains why we are attracted to talented, successful people. Maybe it's why rock stars get all the babes. Their success is evidence of some advantage in their genetic makeup which we'd like to merge with our own DNA to strengthen it.
Then why do some women settle for the couch potato with the beer gut?
I'll diverge again. I remember reading this article in Wired by John Perry Barlow, in which he talked about how outdated patent law is when applied to the digital economy, where ideas are encoded in bits of 1's and 0's. When we exchange ideas, we are trading information of value without actually swapping currency. We've just removed that step from the equation. In the past, those ideas might be encoded as a widget which we'd then pay for with currency. Today, much of the information of value can be exchanged directly as digital goods, without that step of translation into a physical good.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I write my weblog and keep my website to pay for all the great information I receive from the web itself. Yes, I have just two dollars on my Amazon pay page (thx Todd and Mike!). But in a way, I should be paying back the web for being a hugely valuable asset to me in the past seven years.

All a heezy with the

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All a heezy with the sheezy


That's what it read on one of the whiteboards hanging
near the lift line at Crystal yesterday. Translated from
hip skiier speak it meant that it was an epic powder day.
For a ski day to be "epic," as Sang called it yesterday
on the drive up, a few factors must converge. First comes
the snow, lots of it. Second, it has to be cold enough that
the powder stays light, fluffy, instead of becoming wet
or sticky. Third, the sun has to appear up on high.
We were blessed with all three on Saturday.
I tried out my new snowboard, boots, and bindings for
the first time. I decided to go with strap-in bindings,
a soft boot system, for comfort and control. It all worked
out beautifully. The first few runs were a bit shaky as I
tried to adjust to the new equipment, which still needs to
be tuned for me a bit. But once I figured it out, it felt
great. This board is a 158, and I was riding a 163
before. The 163 was definitely too long.
Skiing and snowboarding are two sports where finding
the right equipment is absolutely critical to enjoying the
sport. I venture that half the people who give up either
sport or never learn to love the sports suffer from faulty
equipment fit or quality. I think yesterday was my most
enjoyable day of snowboarding yet, and the equipment
was key. No one should have to be cold, or miserable,
or in pain, when skiing or boarding. So, if you're out there
and had some unpleasant experiences with rental
equipment, try getting fitted at a specialty store with
clerks who know what they're doing.
I'm definitely a proponent of strap-in metal bindings.
Plastic bindings just aren't stiff enough, and the strap-in
system feels much more secure than step-ins. Like
clipless pedals in cycling versus clips.
Another reason to head out on epic days, besides the
sheer pleasure of being out in the sun on fresh pow, is
the fact that I think it's days like that when a beginner
can become an intermediate and an intermediate can
become an expert more easily than ever. I haven't had
a great powder day since two years ago, and I felt
like my skills in boarding were stalled at the intermediate
level. In fresh powder like yesterdays, even black diamond
slopes feel very manageable, and speed isn't nearly as
intimidating as it normally is.
For once, I felt like I could keep up with Toni, who was there
with me when I first picked up a snowboard two years ago.
She and Sang were fast enough to push me up and down
the runs. Now if I can just find a day when the slopes are clear
enough so that I can listen to my MP3 player on the way
down, I may just retire and become a slope slut.
All in all, an important day on the mountains. Now I'm
really hooked, and Whistler calls next weekend.

Osama Tezuka Yeah! Metropolis is

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Osama Tezuka


Yeah! Metropolis is out today.
Please go see it peeps.

Blue moon


I couldn't sleep until 1:30 in the morning yesterday because
I was feeling all congested and feverish. So I thought there was
no way I'd get up to lift this morning. I was dead tired.
For some reason, and this happens about twice a year, I woke
up wide awake at 6:00am and headed off to the gym. I have no
idea when or why this happens. Of course, as soon as I drove
about three blocks I suddenly felt like someone had set off a
napalm bomb in my brain.

Tired, my brother Brutal week

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Tired, my brother


Brutal week at work. Weeks like this make me feel an
old 28. I can understand why folks might wish to walk
away. What keeps you in the game? The challenge of it
all, the thrill of the chase, the idea of tackling the big
problem. You see some folks who have a job that doesn't
ask too much of them, it's something they've got down
pat, something that puts food on the table, gets
one by with maybe 9 to 5 hours. It's a gig, but not
the thing.
Maybe you're married, have a wife you love, kids to
put through school. The gutter is clogged, or maybe
the car won't start. That's the thing. I can see how one
might end up a middle manager at the age of 50,
shooting for that pension, or retirement.
Me? I don't got all that to distract me. The job's the
thing. Man oh man, it eats me inside out some weeks.
Big ugly problems that you obsess over, and want
others to obsess over, because you know it's the
key to everything. You dream about it, think about
it when driving (I ran a red light the other day as
I was thinking about a staffing issue). Sometimes it
seems so large and complex I'm not even sure where
to start when I sit down in the morning.
The key? Well, I don't have all the answers. I know one
thing, you have to keep moving, bite off small chunks
every day, keep momentum. Some days, if you never
get started, you end up paralyzed the whole day,
moving from one meeting to the next, answering e-mail
in between, waiting for answers. Those are the worst.
You go home feeling like an idiot. I've learned, the only
way to avoid that is to just throw yourself into it, like
jumping into the pool or the ocean. If you don't, you just
stand at the water's edge, dipping your toes in, because
it's too cold. Once you're in, it's cold, it's unpleasant, but
stay in long enough and your body acclimatizes enough
so that you forget the chill and build some momentum.
At the end of the day, maybe you still feel lousy. String
enough of those together, though, and one day you
realize you're halfway home.
To be a good husband, good son, good brother, good
manager, good citizen, good at what you do, whatever
that is. That's a ton. I don't know how some people do
it. I have enough of a hard time being good at one thing.
When, if, that all comes around, it will be serious business.
I think I'll have to choose then.
Finished setting up my home network. Now I've got
my laptop and my desktop connected to the cable modem,
and since my laptop has a wireless card I can lie in bed
at night and tap away. Haven't been in much of a mood
to write recently. But I have yet to find too much worth
a damn that isn't a real pain to get to. There's an article
in this week's New Yorker, about surgeons, and how
it's a matter of practice, becoming a good surgeon.
How they studied great pianists, architects, doctors, and
found that everyone seems to dislike the practice
equally, but the great ones are able to force themselves
through the pain. But once their careers are over, they
drop the practice just like that.
I'm still able engaged, still willing to take the punches.
But I've learned, for me, there is nothing in between. It's
swim in the deep end with the sharks, or roasting on the
beach. You won't see me hang on too long, or end up
a lifer in any one career.
The other thing? The mistakes I make always stay with
me. Can't shake them. Maybe someday I'll stop worrying
about those things in the past, and on that day I'll be
content to lie in the shade of a palm tree sipping a
martini watching the waves crawling up the beach
for hours on end.
I've been sick all week. Yuck, all clogged up with mucus.
Feels like I've run through two boxes of Kleenex. I have
no idea what's up, because I don't feel sick, just tired.
Maybe it's gone to my brain.

28 I've realized that the

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28


I've realized that the only way to keep my office warm is to
keep the door shut to lessen the draft from my porous
window. Probably something to do with pressure and
temperature differences. It feels like I'm working in a frozen
tundra.
Today marked the completion of my 28th year of inhabiting
this mortal coil. Coincidentally, I also completed my 500th
workunit for SETI@home, which equates to .59 years of
computer time I've devoted to the search for intelligent life
in this universe.
Birthdays in the mid-twenties all blur together. The most
remarkable thing about them is how many people actually
remember when it is. Some people remind other people,
but others, people who live hundreds of miles away,
or people in elevators, will wish you a happy birthday.
What else happened on my birthday? Well, the morning
after, Amazon.com announced its first quarter of pro forma
net profitability. Finally, people can stop cracking jokes
about Amazon being unprofitable, or worrying that we'll
go bankrupt. That got old a long time ago.
Spielberg announced that he will produce Indiana Jones 4
starring Harrison Ford and Spielberg's wife Kate Capshaw.

ABest--TheBest Abest is engaged! He

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ABest--TheBest


Abest is engaged! He announced it from Germany today.
Can't wait until he's back in Seattle so I can catch up with
him and Roswitha
I know they must be ready for marriage because they've
traveled together. That's the ultimate test.
Sadly, they're both resigning from Amazon, and soon I think that
there will indeed be something like five people left from when I
joined. I'm beginning to feel like the student who can't seem
to graduate from school because he keeps pursuing another
degree, and all his classmates have moved on.

Better than Crouching Tiger?? I've

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Better than Crouching Tiger??


I've had Hero on my list of anticipated films for a while, and
James just sent me a big Time article which has raised my
expectations even further. For one thing, the film's title
has been solidified. Early reports indicated that it was titled
Heroes, but now it's just plain Hero.
Why the hype?
The director is Zhang Yimou, the man behind Raise the Red
Lantern, Ju Dou, To Live, and The Road Home, among other
classics. It's his first martial arts film, but that didn't stop
Ang Lee from achieving success. And Yimou is ambitious:
like Lee, he aims to reinvent the genre.
The cast reads like the Asian Ocean's Eleven cast:
Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tone Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie
Yen.
The cinematographer is Christopher Doyle, who has done amazing
work with Wong Kar Wai, most recently on In the Mood for Love.
What's more, he gets the chance to film in 3 different thematic
colors, red, white, and blue, to represent the views of 3 different
characters.
Emi Wada, who won an Oscar for Ran, is providing costumes.
Tan Dun, Oscar winner for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, will
score the film.
For those who are not familiar with these vets of
Asian cinema, it's as if the entire group of celebrities who
did the Sept. 11 Tribute to America got together to make
a movie directed by Steven Spielberg.
The stable of talent in Asia at all levels of the film industry is
thinner, and perhaps that's the reason that we fans of the genre
are fortunate enough to see many collaborations b/t the stars
of that industry. It's much tougher in the United States to get
a whole bunch of big stars together on a film because of salary
and schedule constraints. And ego. In Asian films, we've seen
just about every combination possible. Well, Jet Li and Chow Yun
Fat haven't done anything together. Maybe we'll see that
someday too.

Puccini, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Dvorak Lots

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Puccini, Stravinsky, Bernstein, Dvorak


Lots of music this week. After Pink Martini on Tuesday,
yesterday I went with Andy and Jenny to see Madam
Butterfly. My first Seattle Opera performance. Thanks
to Jenny for that drink of civilized culture. I've never seen
this opera before, and I was surprised at how straightforward
the plot was. It was a tasteful performance which interprets
the original story in a straightforward fashion.
It's your basic romantic tragedy, though I did think, "This
girl is supposed to be fifteen, and therein lies the seeds
of doom. It's often read as a cultural commentary about Americans
invading other countries, falling in love with the people
and the place, bewitching all with our carefree ways, then
running off, having plundered it of some essential element
of its cultural soul. It's often played that way, as in Miss
Saigon. But hey, any guy marries a fifteen year old and
gets her pregnant, and I guarantee there's an unhappy
ending in their future. At least Pinkerton returns for the
child, though of course it leads to her suicide, which she
chooses for her child's future and to avoid the indignity of
returning to the life of a geisha.
Tonight Christina took me to Andaluca for a birthday dinner,
and I returned the favor by taking her to see the Seattle
Symphony as a late, late birthday present. The guest
conductor was Ingo Metzmacher, and the guest soloist was
Joshua Bell. The pieces:
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Bernstein: Serenade
Dvor

China Forbes and me

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Bean took me to the Pink Martini concert at the Showbox for my birthday. We met up with Wazi and Matt. After suffering through Black Angel, an opening act that never really opened, Pink Martini came on and I spent the rest of the night smiling and singing and dancing. I decided that they're the first choice to play at my wedding. Pure sugar. Anyone who can't have fun at a concert like that is dead to this world.
The best part? Lead singer China Forbes sang a song named Eugene, about a guy she met at a party in New York City, a guy who asked for her number, made out with her, and never called her. A guy named Eugene, with a skinhead friend. I'm trying to remember the whole incident. Maybe I was in NYC with Scott after he lost that bet to Dan and had to shave his head? He looked like a skinhead back then.
The second best part? I thought they'd close the concert with Brazil. Turns out that I was right, though it was the last song of their encore. Wazi claims it was because she and Bean
kept shouting for the song (on my behalf). That sounds good to me.
They certainly played enough amazing material to come out with a second CD, but until they do, pick up your copy of Sympathique post haste. Your next cocktail party is guaranteed to be a hit.

Balance The Segway human transport

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Balance


The Segway human transport device's most ballyhooed feature
is something which a human being accomplishes naturally,
and that is a sense of balance. The Segway does it through
mechanical gyroscopes. I'm not sure how the human body
does it, but I suspect we have programmed chemical triggers
that ensure that we don't starve, or sleep too little, or stress
too much. Our bodies come with some programmed settings
that it considers normal and healthy, and for the most part
our bodies uses all its powers to keep us within shooting
range of those settings.
But something that most endurance athletes know is that
to become truly good at something, you have to force yourself
outside those acceptable ranges, those comfort zones, for
long periods of time, until your body and mind recalibrate
and accept the new settings as normal.
Another things that's true is that it's also very difficult to
be very good at a lot of things. Geniuses tend to skew
off the charts on some dimensions of life while being
extremely deficient on others. Sometimes they choose
those areas of deficiency, and other times they seem to
have no choice. I admire the movie Pollock more
than A Beautiful Mind (though both movies failed, I thought,
to provide a deep insight into their main characters)
because the former admitted that Pollock was both
a great genius and a sometimes difficult husband,
while the latter steered clear of many of John Nash's
real-life shortcomings.
Generally, when I look back on my 2001, I see lots of
balance. I managed, for the most part, to steer clear of
any extreme, obsessive behavior. But maybe everything was
a bit too comfortable. Someday, looking back, I may not
remember anything from 2001. On the one hand, I cut
out lots of the silly extremes that one tends to embrace
in ones youth. On the other hand, the idea of being a
normal middle-aged adult bores me silly.
So in 2002, my one resolution is to embrace healthy
obsessive behavior. It could very well come from work.
My project list for the year is long, and in some ways
ludicrous. But in a good way.

Should be easier


I upgraded to the new RealNetworks RealOne player, and it
crashes over and over when I try and edit some of the information
about music tracks on my computer using the RealOne player
interface. I have no idea why. Maybe the upgrade wasn't
quality tested properly. Perhaps I've passed the acceptable
volume of MP3s on my hard drive that RealOne can handle
stably.
At first I thought this was one of those classic fables about
how market share is won and lost just so easily. Computer users
are lazy and just want something that works. Maybe this would be
one more competitor which would finally succumb to Microsoft's
endless patience and perseverance. So I switched over to using
the Windows Media Player to play my MP3s.
Nope. For some reason it skips every few seconds when I'm
playing music.
You'd think it would be easy to write software to play MP3s. All
I need is the ability to list all my MP3s, sort them and edit their
titles, and play them. All that other stuff, like skins and
visualizations, is just unnecessary gravy.
So you have these two behemoths, Microsoft and RealNetworks,
both on something like their 8th or 9th versions of their digital
music apps, and the most reliable and useful program I've found
thus far? Nullsoft's Winamp.

Fine, don't take my word for it


It's funny when some celebrity makes a very unremarkable
observation and gets quoted just because they're a celebrity:
Cruise's Advice For Snowboarders
Tom Cruise urges wannabe snowboarders to commit to three full days on
the slopes before deciding whether or not to take up the winter sport.
Cruise, himself a keen boarder, says too many people expect to get used
to the dangerous sport immediately - and get put off when they crash too
many times. He says, "I've got some friends that are surfers and they
say snowboarding is easier but you have to commit to three days. I've
had some crashes but I wear a helmet. You've got to. I've been skiing
for 20 years and I got a little bored with it."
Yeah, what he said. I took Michelle and some of her HBS classmates
up to Whistler this weekend. There's a moment, when you're cruising
down the mountain on your snowboard, the whole world spread
before you like infinite possibility, all of which you can see but choose
to leave alone, and Manu Chao is piping Me Gustas Tu into
your ear through your iPod, when you understand why it is that
people have vacation homes. The geographical separation of the
skihaus in Whistler allows me to leave behind work and all the
other worries which have spatially become associated with the
city of Seattle through simple daily reinforcement and proximity.

Shadow

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I put the plastic screen over my TV, so now I have to watch TV with all the light outs, otherwise the reflections in the screen distract me. With the screen on, and in the dark, the picture just looks better.
So tonight I lit a few candles I received for Xmas while watching The West Wing, and during a commercial I looked up and saw the shadow of a figure with his arms raised overhead stretched all the way across the ceiling. It was the shadow cast by a statue of a man with arms raised high, in triumph, I think. I bought it in Africa. In the shadow, though, it looks as if the guy is jumping me. Or perhaps he has his arms raised in surrender, as if I've drawn a gun on him. I can't tell.
Josh Lyman gets the girl in tonight's episode. I was following him carefully all episode. He makes up an excuse to go see Amy (played by Mary Louise Parker), she sees right through it, he starts to stammer through a speech about how he never learned what to do next after he started to like someone, so on and so forth, and then she kisses him. What? Is anyone that lucky? And what did Mary Louise Parker do to her hair? She turned into a babe. I am very depressed I never saw her in the New York performance of Proof. Yet another reason I should move to New York City.
David Chase needs to get his act together. No more Sopranos until Sept? Sheesh. Aaron Sorkin is coked up half the time and he's managing to crank out episodes every week. Now I just have 24 and The West Wing to watch on TV each week.
The Michael Jackson special is on in the background. That guy can flat out sing and dance. His duet with Britney makes her sound like a backup singer. Why'd he have to go and cut up his face? Before I die, I hope I get to see Michael Jackson and Madonna in concert. I think the only music acts I can remember that were hot when I was in grade school and still hot today are Michael Jackson, Madonna, and U2. Well, R.E.M. is still around, but I have no idea what they're up to.
Michelle is in town from HBS this weekend, interviewing with Amazon. We're going to head up to the house at Whistler with some of her classmates. My lack of a big car with four wheel drive finally catches up with me. I really should swap with Bill and give him the babemobile this weekend. Oh wait, he doesn't need it anymore.
I haven't seen Michelle for I'm not sure how long. It's strange, though. A few e-mails back and forth and it's like we're at Stanford again, prowling the dorm halls in our bathrobes and slippers, working on problem sets.
Mark and Howie have new flames at Andersen. I'm convinced it's all about volume and density, supply and demand.
I'm babbling on about nothing. I just enjoy typing on my Mac laptop. I always feel like I'm one of those movie hackers when I type on laptops. Cuz you know, in the movies, to break into some secure computer system, you just have to type really really fast on a laptop. Another thing I love about the movies? When someone writes something ingenious, it only takes another character a quick skim through the pages to determine that yes, it's ingenious. Like in A Beautiful Mind, when John Nash brings his work on game theory to the math chair at Princeton. He flips through about 140 pages in about 15 seconds and pronounces, "You realize this flies in the face of 150 years of thinking." Or something like that.
And class is always so short in the movies. Classroom scenes in movies always go one of a few ways:
1. The scene starts near the end of class. The teacher is talking and mid-sentence the bell rings and students start piling out. Meanwhile, the teacher is trying to shout out the homework assignment.
2. The scene starts at the beginning of class but the entire class ends about 5 minutes later. It's the 5 minute class period.
I haven't given up on my novel. I spent an hour tapping away tonight. I'll finish that damn thing this year.
Billy Jean, that's my lover...Billy Jean, that's my lover...she's just a girl...she says I am the one...

AFI Film Awards

in ,
Watched AFI's Film Awards show, the first ever, while cleaning my room tonight. It managed to finish on schedule, mostly because most of the winners weren't there to receive their awards (or weren't allowed to give a speech). For the most part, everyone played it straight--there was no host to fill time with jokes.
AFI's film of the year
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
AFI's actor of the year
Denzel Washington, Training Day
AFI's actress of the year
Sissy Spacek, In the Bedroom
AFI's director of the year
Robert Altman, Gosford Park
On a related note, one of the AFI voting committee members,
Roger Ebert, released his top ten films of 2001:
1. Monster's Ball
2. Black Hawk Down
3. In the Bedroom
4. Ghost World
5. Mulholland Drive
6. Waking Life
7. Innocence
8. Wit
9. A Beautiful Mind
10. Gosford Park
I haven't seen all of those films yet. I did see Ghost World, Mulholland Drive, and Waking Life, all of which were great. I saw Gosford Park but the showing was so late I fell asleep
in parts. A few of these movies only got released in L.A. and NYC at year end to gain Oscar eligibility. I hate when they do that. It means someone gets to see the movie before me.

Old Letters


I spent most of the day rearranging my room, moving things, tossing out old magazines and pictures. I made the difficult decision to throw out all the old Christmas and birthday cards and letters and postcards I'd saved up over the years. Some came from friends I had. Some from friends I still have. Some from former girlfriends. Family members. Business associates. Institutions. Newspaper
clippings from my mother.
Of course, I had to read each one before tossing it out. Amazing how we all used to compose long, hand-written letters to each other. E-mail has rendered it a dying art. That would be okay if we still continued to send each other long, thought-out letters. But instead, we have a series of short, episodic e-mails, many composed as events occur. Thus they often lack the longer-term perspective which the semi-annual letter contains. Contained.
Reading through all of those, I felt a flush of nostalgia. And the end of Cast Away was playing on HBO, and I felt sad watching Tom Hanks talk about finding his wife again, and losing her again. He's an amazing actor, because everything he does feels honest.
So I began feeling lovelorn, so I listened to Sting's rendition of "Someone to Watch Over Me".
I miss seeing people's handwriting, which conveys a person's craft, personality. In e-mail, lack of punctuation and capitalization passes for personal style. Emoticons, excessive use of abbreviations like IMHO or LOL. At least with hand-written notes, one could examine the handwriting even if the sentences were banal.
Yes, it's true, I didn't end up throwing out all of those old letters and notes. Some of them. I remembered why I had kept some of them in the first place.

3 more years for Mike


Disclosure is playing on HBO tonight. Funny, because Dennis Miller's character says to Michael Douglas, "Ten years from now, you'll need a forklift to get a hard on." That film played in 1994. Catherine Zeta Jones has 3 years of fun left.