Comparative Reality

I think that most sane people can agree that this...

Robert Zemeckis just can't get enough of his 3D motion capture, and clearly no film or concept will elude his grasp. According to Variety, Zemeckis and Disney are in the middle of a complicated deal that will allow them to remake the Beatles' psychedelic cartoon Yellow Submarine.

...is stupid and pointless. But here's my suggestion: We need to let Hollywood get this out of its collective system. I propose that we force Hollywood to spend the next few years remaking EVERYTHING in 3D. You know that someone wants "Wizard of Oz: The IMAX 3D EXTRAVAGANZA!" But they shouldn't stop there: Go for "Jaws 3D" (it's totally going to work this time!), "Gone with the Wind"...hell, "Citizen Kane" is begging to be remade in 3D. Preferably, 3D CGI.

"The Seven Samurai"? 3D-AWESOME!

No matter how pointless it would be ("12 Angry Men"; although who could disagree that the movie would be SO much better with a CGI Henry Fonda, maybe with a Jar-Jar sort of wackiness, and fully 3D and IMAXed Ed Begley?), we have to force them to make these movies. Get them all made, and then burn all of the copies and bury the ashes.

We've got a big backlog on Netflix, so we're good for a few years. I'd just rather get all of this over and done with at once, instead of the continued insult of one or two remade, "re-imagined" loads of crap each year. Just like taking off a band-aid, let's just do it all at once, quickly, and not prolong the suffering.

Sure, it'll be painful for a little while, but, trust me, it will make things so much better in the future.

At least until they start making "reality movies."

So, with 18 tasks lined up for the final week of non-workdom, how did I do?

Well, the results aren't bad: 14 of the 18 tasks are done, 2 more are half-done, and I added a few more to the list. For example, "research ceiling storage options for the garage" led to "install ceiling storage in the garage." Which took a fair amount of time, since I like to measure, measure again, check the measurements, measure again, check the marks, measure again just to be sure...

And then I screw it up, anyway. This time, the supports aren't at perfect 90-degree angles from the ceiling, but I was able to correct most of the discrepancy when I installed the shelves. It holds my weight, at least, so I'm calling it good enough.

The two completely undone tasks are "interior paint touch-ups" and "clean the attic." The latter task had to be postponed because it was in the 90s all week, and I just never got around to installing that industrial air conditioning system in the attic.

Fixing dings in the walls and marks on the paint can wait until we decided whether we're going to do some remodeling, and/or repainting some of the walls. Which might be in another few years, but it will probably be another year before it bothers me enough to think about it again.

And I'm much closer to being able to park my car in the garage again.

Sometimes, you see something and you just cannot believe that it's not a joke. You keep watching, because you're certain that there's a punchline coming.

For example, this commercial, for a "limited edition Michael Jackson lithograph." It starts off wrong, and gets worse from there.

I think it's assortment of gently smiling Stock Photo Male/Female Suburban White Middle Class actors who are building shrines to Michael Jackson that really creep me out. Was I supposed to build one? Do I need to clear out a corner of the house? And are my Regulation Michael Jackson Mourning Red Roses on the way?

Obviously, I missed the announcement. I bet I thought it was just another telemarketer and hung up on them. Fortunately, these clever entrepreneurs are here to help!

Actually, it's a monster.com oddness. Here's the story:

I received a box of paperwork (and swag!) for the new job. I spent a chunk of time this morning filling out various forms, and then decided that I should probably shut down the automatic job searches on Monster and other job sites.

I changed my status at Monster from "Please look at my resume and talk to me! PLEASE!" to "I am an anonymous technical writer, but you can attempt to communicate with me. I'll probably ignore you, though."

(Note that those aren't exactly the descriptions that Monster uses. )

In the past 30 minutes, I have received email and phone calls from three recruiters (for contract positions, though, and two were for the same job, but one recruiter messed up the location).

So I went back and changed my status on Monster to Private. Which, in theory, means that no one can see my resume. We'll see if that works, but it looks like being coy gets your resume much more attention.

Last night, I noticed that the outlets in the upstairs bathrooms weren't working.

"Ah," I thought, "We must have tripped a circuit breaker!"

Except that the lights and fans worked, so that didn't seem likely.

But, lacking any better explanation, I went down the garage, anyway. I turned on the garage light, and, for extra illumination of the breaker box, I turned on the light hanging over my workbench. Or I tried to.

"Ah," I remembered, "I unplugged that light before we went on vacation."

So I started to plug it in, and noticed that the Reset switch on the GFCI outlet was popped (I'm guessing that I accidentally hit the Test button when I was unplugging stuff). So I pressed it back in, plugged in the light, turned the light on, and discovered that all of the circuit breakers were right where they should be.

I grabbed a small nightlight from the downstairs bathroom, and went upstairs to test the outlets again.

And they worked. Because, of course, all of the outlets in the upstairs bathrooms are connected to the GFCI switch in the garage.

Yet again, the people who built this house manage to confuse and annoy me. And, yes, I really do appreciate how unlikely it is that I even discovered this "feature" of my house.