Cap'n John's Blog

On my birthday...
Tuesday, August 31, 2004, 02:33 p.m.

A residentially-challenged, lady-of-the-streets dropped trou in front of a coworker and I and squirted a stream of water (with additives) towards the traffic traveling along 6th Street.

We had dinner at The Elephant Bar in West Covina for the fourth time this month.

We once again received fantastic service at The Elephant Bar, but unlike the previous three visits this time John Edward saw a caterpillar (a live one) in the greenery that accompanied Liz's Pad Thai w/ Chicken.

For finding the lucky caterpillar we got Liz's Pad Thai free of charge (although she didn't eat any of it after we found the caterpillar) and we received $25 of Gift Vouchers for the next time we visit The Elephant Bar.

Liz's parents brought us a Siamese Fighting Fish (SFF) which they allegedly got from a neighbor (who apparently has moved already so they can't give it back). I put it in the tank with our 3 fantail goldfish (3FG) and after a short period of adjustment, the SFF flared his gills and starting picking a fight with the 3FG who are easily twice his size. No, he didn't get his scales kicked. The 3FG were like "What the f**k? Dude! Take it easy! OW! OK, I'm outta here." Needless to say it was the SFF who was the one who was really out of there and back into his little jar. Now maybe if I'd left the SFF in the tank, he would have established his dominance as Leader of the Pack (school) and been content with knowing that he was the toughest fish on the block. But these are fish we're talking about. Five-second memory span and all that. I think Mr. Psycho SFF would have been repeating his behaviour every time he looked at one of the other 3FG. "Wait a minute!" he'd think to himself in a fishy kind of way. "I haven't seen that fish in this tank before! I think it's fin-kickin' time!"

Did you know Siamese Fighting Fish can actually breath air? Real air, that is. Not that Oxygen stuff you find bonded to two Hydrogen atoms in water, but air like you and I breath. This is why you will find SFF tucked into little cups in Walmart. Because they can breath air, so they don't need their water oxygenated or filtered as heavily as other fish. They don't have to be kept in 20g tanks with filters and all that stuff. Also if you keep twenty SFF in twenty little cups, they're not gonna go beating the hell out of each other like they would if you put all twenty SFF in one 20g tank. I think I'll bring my SFF into work and keep him here on my desk. In a bowl of water of course...he'd start to smell after a while if I just kept him on my desk.

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It's my birthday
Monday, August 30, 2004, 10:45 a.m.

And my wife cleverly pointed out that the internet is almost as old as I am ;)

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Few & infrequent updates
Friday, August 27, 2004, 02:06 p.m.

A couple of weeks ago I spent an entire Friday sorting a 3-foot high stack of paperwork into its correct folders, of which I have approximately fifty. I then followed the "how to eat an elephant" theory; taking the very first file from my cabinet drawer I began getting it organized, which didn't take long as it is a new file and only had a small amount of paperwork. Once it was organized I moved on to the second file and proceeded to get it in order.

Monday morning when I came in I took the newly arrived mail from my Inbox and filed it straight away into the correct folders. I then continued getting my files organized, one by one, all through the day. When I came in Tuesday I followed the same gameplan. First, sort the incoming paperwork, then continue organizing folders, one at a time; after all, that's how you eat an elephant - one bite at a time ;)

If any newly arrived paperwork was destined for a file I'd already organized, rather than just toss it in the folder I would process it according to S.O.P. Of course paperwork for files which are still not yet organized (and there's still quite a few of them) just gets tucked into the folder until it's time to organize that particular project.

Once upon a time my day was spent in active procrastination. If coworkers needed help then I'd help them, and damn whatever I might be doing at the time. Coworker needs backup at a site visit? I'm there! Coffee time? Just call me Mr. Java!

Now, I have purpose. I am not yet completely in control of every one of my projects, but I'm getting there. I continue to empty my Inbox every day, sorting the paperwork immediately. I'm staying on top of current inbound work while slowly but surely reeling in the work that's built up over the last few months while I worked on a huge report for a V.I.P. Sure, I wasn't doing my work, but I was doing a work-related project, and it was for a V.I.P. too. Thus do we procastinators rationalize not completing our assigned work. We perform work-related activities which have little relevance to what we really should be doing. Helping a coworker with a computer problem is one of those. I have computer skills, seriously wicked computer skills, and my coworkers know that so I'm usually one of the first people they turn to for help, and I'm glad to help them out. See, I'm doing work-related stuff...but it's not my work.

I still continue to help my coworkers out, but now I have a gameplan when I return to my desk; I actually do my work. I no longer look around for something else to do so I don't have to think about the 3-foot pile of paper in the corner of my desk. This pleases me and not because the 3-foot pile of paperwork no longer exists. It used to concern me that others could work, while I did not. It worried me that I thought of myself as Dilbert's Wally. It really worried me that others might see me as Wally. Now I know I'm not Wally. And no, I'm not Dilbert either ;) I don't think I'm anyone from Dilbert. I'm a guy who comes to work and does what he's being paid to do. I'm a guy who goes home at the end of the day feeling good about himself because he didn't spend the day procastinating, but really worked. And now it's time to get back to work. I want to get one more project completely organized before I leave for the day and the weekend.

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The Pavers have been laid
Monday, August 23, 2004, 09:05 a.m.

For about two months we've had a 1-ton bag of sand in our garage, and another 1-ton bag of sand sitting on a pallet of 600 pavers in our spare parking space. For two months Liz has been nagging at me to lay the pavers in our backyard. Last week my friend Drew asked me if I wanted to play golf this past Friday. I said I'd love to, but I really should lay the pavers instead. Drew offered to help; now that's a mate for you.

So Friday, Saturday and Sunday were extremely busy. Late Friday evening I pierced a 1" PVC pipe running alongside my sprinkler system. Now my sprinkler system was already disconnected, I'd disconnected it myself, so I wasn't worried about any water pipes. In fact just a few minutes earlier Drew had asked me if I was positive the pipe he was about to hack into and tear out was disconnected, but here was a second PVC pipe not attached to my spinkler system with water in it. I knew it had water in it because the water was blasting out of the hole I'd just put in it with the pick and was shooting over our 5' stone wall.

This was actually a good thing to happen because on Friday night I discovered how to turn the water off to our house, which is always handy to know but didn't help in our situation. I also discovered that night, after turning off the water to the front unit and bringing the lady of the house outside to investigate, how to turn off the sprinkler system to the entire complex, which did help my situtation. It's not something I'll need to know for my spinkler system, because I no longer have one, at least not until I install a new one, but if I ever become HOA President (which I suspect is a possibility) I just might get a call one day from one of my neighbors wanting to know how to turn off their house's water, or how to turn off the sprinkler unit because they've put a hole in a pipe like I did ;)

After two trips to the hardware store (we bought the wrong sized connector sleeve on the first trip) we had the puncture repaired and it was off to the Elephant Bar for a late dinner. We got the same waiter as last time and incredibly he remembered we'd been there before. Sure we'd been there twice before, but he'd only waited on us one of those times. Drew and I played a game with him by ensuring that we always needed a refill. It wasn't a game at first, we were just so bloody thirsty that the first couple of trips he made to our table we always had an empty glass waiting for him. Later we continued the game by making sure that when he brought my refill Drew needed one, then by the time he'd brought Drew's refill I'd drained my glass and needed another refill.

Saturday we continued working in the yard and Saturday night we hit The Outback Steakhouse for dinner. After laying pavers all day we had a serious thirst. Now our waitress at The Outback had her game on, and when we needed the first refill just seconds after she'd placed our first drinks on the table, she came back with two refills, that's two each. Now while she took our dinner orders I drained one of the glasses, and by the time she'd returned I had the second glass empty as well. Now I said she was on her game, and she was. Instead of bringing us fresh glasses, she just stopped by with a pitcher and filled us up. I don't know how many glasses I drank that night, maybe 8 or 9, not sure, but man was I thirsty.

Sunday it was back to work. We'd completed the 10'x10' area, just had to do around the tree and then it would be time to get onto the smaller 12'x2' area. We started on that, worked out the pattern to use, and halfway down realized we were getting low on pavers. We thought about two patterns, chose one of them, and ended up with exactly 8 edge pavers left over. No full pavers, the last full paver was placed in the last gap. We had exactly 8 edge pavers left over out of 600 or so. After pouring the sand out onto the pavers and sweeping it into the grooves, gaps, nooks & crannies between the pavers, out of 2 tons of sand, we had just one small cart load left over. The sand is going to settle into the gaps, and rain (or a good hosing) will help it settle some more, so that left over cart of sand will mostly be used as well. I was actually doing pretty good up until the last leg, the sweeping of the sand, and that was what did my back in. I'm a little sore this morning, but the pavers are finally laid and the yard looks great.

Drew, once again, thank you so much for your help. Without you, there'd still be two 1-ton bags of sand and 600 pavers sitting in our front yard.

Man, am I glad to be back at work ;)

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MoCap Boxing
Monday, August 16, 2004, 03:57 p.m.

MoCap is short for Motion Capture; it's a technique being used in a lot of video games (Mortal Kombat) and some animation studios to make their characters appear more realistic by having them move in more realistic ways. MoCap Boxing is an arcade game produced by Konami, which probably means nothing to you if you're not a video game freak.

If you've played MoCap Boxing, however, it means a lot to you. At Dave & Busters on Saturday night I strapped on the 2-pound gloves and went three rounds with the MoCap Boxers, and I'm still freaking sore today. It's not like you actually get punched, but my lower back muscles are killing me from all of the ducking and weaving I did avoiding my computer opponents. Yes, you actually use your entire body to play MoCap Boxing. You dodge punches by actually dodging, ducking or weaving, and you hit your opponent by actually throwing punches with your own hands inside 2-pound gloves. Sure, it's gimmicky, but it's a hell of a lot of fun, and one hell of a workout to boot.

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The weekend (in its entirety)
Sunday, August 15, 2004, 10:12 a.m.

I got up Saturday morning and started clearing up the baby's room because Liz wants the double-bed in John Edward's room, and JE's single bed to go into the baby's room. I had the matress from the double-bed in JE's room when I noticed the sheet-type thingy underneath the box matress was coming away from the frame so I decided to tack that back on before putting the bed back together...I don't like the word 'putting', it's too much too like 'putting' as in Golf, I think it should be 'puting' but then that conjures to mind the pronunciation of 'pooting', so what are you gonna do?

Anyway, after switching the beds over it was time to put together the set of "Ikea" drawers for the baby' room. Liz loves Ikea, I love putting their stuff together. JE had his swimming class at 10am as usual so I told Liz if she took JE this time then there was a good chance I'd have the chest of drawers put together by the time she got back. That didn't happen. I did have the cabinet built by the time she got back, but the six drawers took me quite some time to put together.

We convinced JE to have his nap in his "new" double bed, as despite having his single bed in his room he'd previously been sleeping on a feather matress on our floor next to our bed.

This week was Drew's birthday so I called Xinh to see if she wanted to do something tonight for him, but she'd already visited him that morning and wanted to bum around at home and watch the Olympics. Can't blame her, Liz wanted to do the same.

Drew and I ended up having a guys night out at Dave & Busters at the Ontario Mills Mall. We got there around 7:30 and put our name down on the waiting list for a dinner table and were told it would be about an hour and a half wait, so we played video games until our name was called out. We had a lot of fun playing the various shooting games, including Deer Hunter where we got to shoot lots of bears :) All the fun of shooting bruins without the hazard of claws, teeth and thousands of pounds of enraged grizzly bears. We also got to shoot raptors and T-Rex's in the Jurassic Park shooting game.

After dinner we went to put our name down for a pool table, there was only about 30 people on the list ahead of us. In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to have put our names on the pool table list before we ate dinner. Two hours later, around midnight, there were now only about 25 people on the list ahead of us. We decided to call it a night and head home.

I did get to see Drew's new GPS in action on our way to & from D&B's. Not that we needed it coz we knew where we were going, but it was pretty damn cool. When we left D&B's it was a simple matter to tell the GPS to reverse the directions and home we went. I totally need to get one of those for Liz.

When I got home I noticed JE's bedroom door was open and when I stuck my head in, he was fast asleep in the double bed. Yay! We have our bedroom back. We watched the Olympics until about 2am before going to sleep. I was dreading JE coming in at 7am like he has been doing, but it was almost 9:30am before he finally got me up. Wow! I went to sleep at 2am and still got 7 1/2 hours of sleep!
JE has been hooked on GCN's Animal Crossing the last week or so, so we've been playing that all morning when I suddenly realized that I now have a Gameboy Advance, and it occured to me that maybe, just maybe, I had a GCN/GBA gamelink cable in the closet, and I did! So we hooked the GBA up to the GCN and launched Animal Crossing and finally unlocked one of the other little bonuses in Animal Crossing only available to those dedicated Nintendo freaks who are prepared to spend extra money for extra Nintendo gear. The cheapest bonus is available by buying a second GCN memory card and creating a town on that memory card, then with the two cards inserted in the GCN one can catch the train at the train station and ride it to the other town. A bonus now available to us that we have the GBA is that all of the old 8-bit NES games which can be found and played in Animal Crossing can be downloaded to the GBA for portable playing. Unfortunately one cannot save these games in the GBA so if you switch it off or the batteries run out, you have to load the game back into the GBA's ROM. You can however put the GBA in sleep mode when not using it, and then the game stays in memory. With the new GBA SP (which I have) I can even recharge the GBA's batteries at night so I never need to turn my GBA off if I don't want to...of course eventually the rechargeable batteries will die but that hopefully won't happen for a year or two.

Later that afternoon we took JE swimming at Liz's parents' place as their condo has a swimming pool, and ours does not. We tied a pool noodle around JE's chest again which gives him relative freedom to swim around. Don't sweat it, I still pay close attention to him, but with the pool noodle providing him bouyancy he can swim by himself. He can also jump into the pool from the side and while he does go completely under the pool noodle pops him back up to the surface within a second or so. He comes up spluttering and trying to wipe the water out of his eyes coz that's his pet peeve, but he's become so much more confident in the pool compared to this time last year. The only problem is he doesn't swim so much as tread water. If I can get him onto his stomach he kicks his legs like he should, but left to his own devices he gets around the pool by treading water. We were in the pool for quite a long time too, during which JE repeatedly climbed out and jumped back in again from the side. We were all little prune babies by the time we finally got out.

Afterwards we took Liz's parents out to dinner at a Chinese buffet where Liz and her mom had an eating competition, or so it seemed. They certainly got value for their money last night. JE ate quite a lot too, and not just pepperoni pizza. He also decided he wanted fruit, so Liz got him a plate of watermelon and canteloupe. Then his grandpa got him a chocolate ice cream. It's funny, they have a soft-serve machine, but the ice cream dispensed by the soft-serve machine is not soft-serve. It's your regular butter-milk style ice cream that you might expect to get in a tub from the supermarket.

That was pretty much the weekend.

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It's been a while
Wednesday, August 11, 2004, 08:54 a.m.

It's been a slow week plagued by computer problems, as is the way of things. We didn't do much this past weekend, a bit of shopping on Saturday morning but it was too bloody hot to do anything. John Edward cracked me up when we put him in the car and he made the observation that the car is "bloody hot", kids can be so cute :) Liz says he picked that up from her, but Liz picked it up from me so I'm gonna take the credit here, ok, partial credit then ;)

Liz was napping (or resting in bed) on Saturday afternoon when I noticed a peculiar, rather nasty smell, which I tracked to her monitor. It had gone into Energy Save mode, where the monitor goes completely blank with not even the screen saver present, so I jiggled the mouse and when the screen came back on it was all nasty & blurry. I turned the resolution down which improved the screen somewhat, but it was still blurry in the middle. To top it off the DVD drive in my computer has stopped working. It's not so much that it's not working, it's just not reading any discs I put in it :( The Bios recognizes it, it's there in Windows Device Manager, everything looks fine but when I pop in a disc, I hear the drive spinning and trying to read the disc, but for some reason it just can't do it. I solved the monitor problem by switching our two monitors over, for some reason Liz's monitor works ok on my PC and mine works fine on hers (well it did, but now it's getting a little blurry on mine). I still haven't solved the DVD problem though, I'm afraid I might need to buy a new DVD drive :(

We mostly bummed around the house all last weekend. Liz wanted to go out for dinner on Sunday so we went to the Elephant Bar and once again, the service was excellent. I don't know whether they only hire experienced, enthusiastic wait-staff, but all of the waiters I saw were very attentive to their customers. In a country where a 15% tip has almost come to be expected regardless of how crappy service you receive, to find a restaurant with waiters who really work for their tips is greatly appreciated. JE enjoyed the Elephant Bar as well, and even ate a few Calimari strips. How many 4 year-olds would try squid? Not many if they knew what it was perhaps, but we told JE it was like fish and even said it was like Squidward (from Spongebob Squarepants) and he still ate several pieces. What a little trooper!

That was Sunday night, and the rest of the week has been work, work, work. Tonight, however, is IBEW Local 11's Annual BBQ which is always a huge blowout and something I've been looking forward to all year :)

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Tuesday, August 3, 2004, 03:27 p.m.

The following entry contains numerous SPOILERS regarding M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. To view the entry, do a Ctrl-A which will highlight the hidden text, or a left-click & drag over the blank space which will also reveal this blog's entry.

SPOILER BEGINS HERE
To start with, despite how it was marketed, The Village is not The Sixth Sense nor is it Signs. It's definitely not Unbreakable.
It's not really even a horror movie. What I believe it is, is a commentary on the gradual breakdown of today's society, and that the reason for that breakdown is due to the very people with which we live. Any attempts to escape from society and its negativity are futile, because if you take people with you to create a new society, you take along the very problems from which you are trying to escape.

The Twist is not that the village actually exists in today's era but is removed from modern society. It may appear that way, but I believe M. gave us so many hints during this movie which revealed that fact, that it could not really be considered A Twist like when you discover Bruce Willis' character was actually a ghost. Yes, Sixth Sense provided clues towards that end, but they were not as obvious as those in The Village.

Noah was always laughing at "those of who we do not speak" because he knew they were not real. I doubt the elders told him what was going on, but given his propensity towards jokes it probably didn't take him long to figure it out. He may not have been playing with a full deck, but that doesn't mean he wasn't smart.
Some of the elders were not wearing late C19 clothing like they should have been if the movie really was set in the late 1800's. The date of birth and death on the tombstone at the start were just to throw you off, but there were far more little hints during the movie which dispelled that notion.
Hurt, Weaver and the other adults did NOT do a terrible job in this movie, they did NOT do a terrible job of delivering their lines; that was all intentional. Try to remember that they were actually playing characters who were trying to talk as if they were living 100 years before their time, and weren't very good at it, their characters were not good at acting that is, Hurt, Weaver and the rest were all exceptional actors.
Ok, so why did they continue to talk "that way" when they were on their own? For the exact same reason none of them would go to "The Towns" for medicine or supplies. They'd made a pact to live a secluded life, and they were trying to remain as true to that as they could. They spoke "in character" when they were on their own because to not do so would jeopardize their plan. What if they were speaking "normally" and were overheard by someone not in on the secret? What if several people overheard them? It would be exactly the same as if someone saw them donning or removing the silly monster costume, which looked silly because it was a "home made" costume. Get the point? Was Ivy blind? Yes she was, but she could still see some people's auras. Not so unusual, a lot of sighted people can't see auras. Who's to say you need "sight" to see auras. What color was Lucius' aura? Who cares!
If Ivy is blind, how could she run to the stone in the forest? Most people who lose one sense experience a heightening of the rest to such an extent that they appear to posess a sixth sense, they have an awareness of their surroundings which belies their lack of sight. Watch a blind person in their own home. They can unerringly walk around their home without bumping into a thing. They'll walk straight through a doorway and turn a corner without hesitation. They can open a cupboard and take out a cup, then open the fridge and get out a carton of milk, fill the cup with milk then return the carton to the fridge without missing a beat. They know exactly where everything is and they can navigate their home as easily as a sighted person. If you get up in the middle of the night you can usually find your way to the bathroom and back to bed without switching on a light or kicking anything. Ivy's ability to quickly go (ok, run) from a location she knew well to another location she also knew well, along a route she had travelled often, is not that unbelievable.
If Ivy was blind, how come Ivy knew she was touching one of "those of who we do not speak" just by feeling its claws? She wasn't always blind, so she must have seen one of them before she lost her sight. That's a key point in the movie. Her father would not go to The Towns to get medicine to save her sight, that was a sacrifice he made by sticking to the Oath the Elders all took; just like none of them would leave to fetch penicillin for Lucius. Instead they sent the blind girl who could not see the reality of the outside world, and thus could not tell the rest of the village about it when she returned.
What about M's reflection at the end, and his character obviously seeing the Park Ranger remove the penicillin and other drugs from the cabinet. Duh! He knew what the Ranger was doing and why he was taking the drugs. He didn't necessarily know they were for Ivy, but he knew that The Village was in the Walker Reserve and that someone from The Village needed the drugs.
Stop trying to pick holes in a movie when the holes are very easily explained if you'll pay attention and think instead of being critical and picking holes.

Yes, I enjoyed this movie, very much. Unlike the rest of M's movies, this one was not about the twist, in fact the twist was hardly a twist at all. This movie was about a group of people who'd all experienced tragic loss of family members due to the evils of modern society, so they wanted to remove themselves from that in order for their children to grow up in a peaceful environment. If there was a twist to this movie, it was that in order to create a safe and peaceful environment for their children, the Elders have to surround themselves with fierce, dangerous creatures (albeit imaginary) to prevent their children from discovering the truth about the outside world.
A secondary twist is that despite their best efforts, evil still exists within The Village. Noah's jealous stabbing of Lucius is M showing us that you can run from the evils of society, but you can't hide. Eventually they will catch up with you. That's not to say Noah was evil, he just enjoyed playing jokes. No, he didn't think he was playing a joke on Lucius when he stabbed him. That was symbolic of the pain and betrayal inflicted upon him by someone he considered to be a friend. Lucius had hurt him, and in his simple way he wanted to hurt Noah in return. An eye for an eye. I believe Noah meant Ivy no harm at the end of the movie, he simply wished to play a trick on her and scare her. Remember that he thought the whole idea of the monsters was hilarious, he was almost always laughing whenever they "attacked". I honestly thought the scariest part of the movie was when Ivy enters her room and Noah is standing in her closet in that weird pose, and he's got that maniacal grin on his face, and he doesn't move a muscle but his eyes just follow her. THAT FREAKED ME OUT!
The stabbing of Lucius was another of The Village's many clues. Check out the knife Noah uses. It's a very common k-bar type knife used by the miltary. It is certainly not a Jim Bowie style 1800's knife.
The problem I believe most people have with this movie is that they went into it thinking it was going to be a monster/slasher movie, and it wasn't. A lot of people also think The Twist was that the movie is set in modern times, which pails into comparison to the Sixth Sense's twist. But that is hardly the real twist as there were too many clues throughout the movie giving that away. I doubt M even considered this to be a twist movie like his others. I think he simply wanted to show the irony in the parents having to scare their children in order to keep them safe, and how despite their best intentions to shield them from harm, tragedy still struck. Because her father refused to leave and get medicine for her, Ivy lost her sight. Despite their living a sheltered life, Lucius was still stabbed and almost killed by a jealous rival. Finally, Noah actually did die because he was pretending to be a monster created by the Elders to scare their children. This movie is a hell of a lot deeper than a lot of people give it credit for.

END SPOILER

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August 2nd, and another weekend
Monday, August 2, 2004, 03:53 p.m.

It was an interesting weekend, which started with John Edward once again not getting up at the crack of dawn but sleeping until at least 8am. Yay! I got up and got him breakfast and we let Liz sleep in until it was time to get ready for JE's swimming class. He is doing a lot better now too. He�s nowhere near as scared of the water as he used to be. That afternoon we went to a church friend's birthday party. They had a pool there and JE and I went in. I tied one of the pool noodles around his chest like they did at swimming class and he had a blast. He even went on their water slide, of course I made sure he kept the pool noodle around his chest. I told him before he went down that he would go under, that I�d be there to catch him at the bottom but that he'd still go under the water. He still wanted to go down the slide so I let him, he came down the slide a lot faster than I expected, and he didn�t splash down quite where I expected either. It took me a second or two to get to him (or maybe time slowed down and it just seemed that long) but the pool noodle stayed around his chest and he popped up coughing and spluttering with a mouth full of water. To his credit, while he didn�t want to go down the slide again he still stayed in the pool for another half an hour or so; brave little guy.

After the party JE went home with his grandmother. Liz and I went home and ended up watching the remaining episodes of the third season of BBC's Coupling. Turns out I�ve also been watching some of the fourth season episodes on account of...
HIDDEN SPOILER
There�s no Jeff, but there is some new guy who�s hooked up with Jane and has also become drinking buddies with Steve and Patrick.
END SPOILER

We finally got to bed around midnight, but at least we watched all of Season 3�s episodes. Now we can send those CDs back and get some more movies from Netflix. Such as�"The Thing"??? Why are we renting The Thing? We�ve both seen it, I�m sure we have. I�ve seen it at least a couple of times. Maybe someone just wants to see a young Kurt Russell ;) We�re also expecting "The Dead Zone" and "X2: X-Men United".

Sunday I rolled out of bed around 8:30 (I think) and realized I had to go to the 7-Eleven to get my coffee, coz I�d used the last of the beans the day before. I figured I might as well get a paper while I was at it, and seeing as I was making the trip I checked if Liz wanted something, such as a breakfast sandwich. She did, so instead of walking to the corner store I now did the typical Angeleno thing and drove the car. Not quite as bad as Steve Martin in "L.A. Story" where he drives next door to visit his neighbor, but getting there. After breakfast, while waiting for Xinh to arrive, Liz tricked me into cleaning the stove top. Sneaky wife, I don�t know how she does it.

Once Xinh arrived and we�d all donned red (or maroon, or burgundy ;) it was time to go and see M. Night Shyamalan�s "The Village". If my attempt to make my Coupling Spoiler invisible works, then I�ll post a commentary on M�s latest movie.

After the movie we had lunch at "The Elephant Bar" in West Covina, which was an excellent choice. Liz and I have gone past it many times but never eaten there until this weekend. We were seated in a booth in the far corner of the restaurant and despite our remote table location still received excellent service from Conor, our waiter.

We dissected The Village a little more over lunch, then headed home because Xinh wanted me to check out her 26 Things photographs. On the way home we added another 1 to her collection; I think that meant she then had just 3 of the 26 to acquire.

After Xinh left I went shopping for a new video card for my computer, because Vice City is eating my old card alive. I bought what I thought was a pretty decent card and at a good price too, stopped at Liz�s parents� house on the way home and picked up JE, who�d been swimming with his grandpa in their pool. When we got home my mission to install my new video card was postponed when JE wanted to use my computer to play his Clifford game. I figured now was as good a time as any to reinstall Windows on his computer, which was a fix Chris suggested when he was here and which also appears to have worked. Remember how I said in a previous post that no computer upgrade goes easy? I was right. The reinstall of Windows was deceptively easy because I ran into major problems trying to replace my nVidia MX400 card with an ATI 9600XT card. Serious problems, which culminated with my computer refusing to boot with the new card installed. I spent maybe an hour on the phone with my brother-in-law trying to work things out, and gave up around 10pm. He�s optimistic we can get it running�I�m glad one of us is. The only problem is he�s in Australia and so is unable to do any hands-on work, it all has to be phoned in advice. I�m confident of the hardware side but I suspect if he was there doing it with me, this upgrade would go a damn sight smoother. On the negative side, I visited the forums at my board�s manufacturer�s website, and I discovered they recommend formatting the hard drive when replacing an nVidia card with an ATI card. Sure, like I should have to completely erase every single thing on my hard drive, then install Windows from scratch, just because I want to upgrade video cards. I�ll reinstall Windows, but I�m sure as hell not formatting my hard drive.

Bedtime!

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