Rob's blog of posts

The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations – Mara showed me this one. It’s completely brilliant, and painfully true for any freelancer.

Transforminators – I think I’d rather see this film than either of the films it’s mashing up.

Mad Zac’s Post Apocalyptic Adventure – SORP Films‘ submission to a jelly company’s commercial contest. The fact that it didn’t win is a sticky fruit-flavored crime against humanity. Zac explains the whole thing in the beginning, or you can skip ahead to 2:28 or so to get straight to the ad.

Henry Rollins vs. Iggy Pop – Rollins discusses trying to out-rock Iggy. Hell of a story if you’ve got 20 minutes.

Hyperland – Douglas Adams (yes, that Douglas Adams) and Tom Baker (yes, that Tom Baker) star in a 1990 fantasy documentary about interactive and interconnected information, including hypertext and the emerging Internet.

Twitter is fun so far. I take back one or two of the bad things I’ve said about it.

In unrelated news, Grey and I went to Borders yesterday. For some strange reason the book-lookup kiosk decided to display her picture.

http://twitter.com/rob_t_firefly

All the cool kids are doing it, apparently. It’s been on TV and everything.

I can’t yet say whether I’ll keep using this or not. We shall see!

I just completed a very short-term temp assignment; they only needed me for half-days yesterday and today.

I live on the South Shore of Long Island, and the gig was located up toward the North Shore. Public transport on Long Island is generally serviceable if you want to go east or west, but for travel north or south you’re stuck hopping, zigzagging, and transferring from line to line in a bizarre parody of Frogger. And the connections are crap, especially during rush hour.

In strictly linear terms, as the chronometer flies, my commute was about two hours more than I was actually present at the job.

I’m now ready to stretch out, have some ice cream, crank up a bunch of Barney Miller episodes and call it a freaking day.

Walking down a store aisle with my mom earlier today…

Me: Oh look, Aerobed mattresses. Those are what Aerosmith sleep on.

Mom: Actually no, they don’t sleep, they just drink and do coke. And when they want to lie down, they go to rehab.

Me: …

Thanks to cutbacks, my day job of three years and seven months ended today.

So, here’s some classic Doctor Who. This short but sweet scene from the serial “Remembrance of the Daleks” has been going through my mind a lot lately. It begins with the Doctor entering a cafe, stressing over something he has to do to resolve the story’s conflict. The Doctor takes a seat as an affable Jamaican called John appears behind the counter.

John: Can I help you?

The Doctor: A mug of tea, please.

John: (fixing the tea) Cold night tonight.

The Doctor: Yes, it is. Bitter, very bitter… where’s Harry?

John: Visiting his missus. She’s in hospital.

The Doctor: Of course… (smiling quietly) it’ll be twins…

John: Your tea. Sugar?

The Doctor: Ah… a decision. Would it make any difference?

John: It would make your tea sweet!

The Doctor: Yes, but beyond the confines of my taste buds, would it make any difference?

John: Not really.

The Doctor: But -

John: Yeah?

The Doctor: What if I could control people’s taste buds? What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference, to those who sell the sugar, and those who cut the cane.

John: My father, he was a cane cutter.

The Doctor: Exactly! Now if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter.

John: If this sugar thing had never started, my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African!

The Doctor: See.. every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge, rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision… the larger the waves… the more uncertain the consequences.

John: Life’s like that. Best thing, is just to get on with it.

That’s good advice. Roll on the job hunt!

Star Trek was pretty fun. I like how they specifically declared this new Trek an alternate timeline from the original, so those like me who actually dig the later series can have those continue in our own personal canon, and yet started something completely new and interesting in the TOS vein.

And it had a Beastie Boys song in it. Captain Kirk listens to friggen Beastie Boys!! That alone is enough for me to declare it totally infallible canon in my head.

For the devoted classic/Next Gen Trekkies out there, I totally recommend the prequel comic miniseries Star Trek: Countdown. It takes place some years post-Nemesis and features old Spock, Nero, and the Next Gen crew during the events leading up to the whole time travel plot of the film, connecting everything up nicely timeline-wise. To those who don’t like what the new film does to canon, you can still dig the comic as the “real” state of the actual Trek timeline which Spock leaves in order to instigate the film’s events.

I spent yesterday evening at the Doctor Who New York pub meet. It was lots of fun, they’re really a great crowd and I’m glad I got the chance to meet up again. There also happened to be a couple of special guests in town; I got to chat with Clayton Hickman and Gareth Roberts for a bit. Nice guys!

A lady at the meet was wearing a t-shirt with two Greek letters on it. Someone asked what it meant, and I didn’t know until I read it aloud: “psi phi.” I thought that was pretty darned clever.

Tonight Grey and I are going to see an obscure little film about future aliens or something. I wonder if it’ll be popular at all.

Yesterday, I was mowing my lawn with an electric mower. It overloaded the circuit breaker, so I had to go down into my basement to reset it. The basement light was on the blown circuit, and my breaker box is in the darkest corner at the end of a cramped corridor, so I grabbed the first light-like thing from my shelf – which just happened to be a toy sonic screwdriver. I used its soft glow to illuminate my path and locate the correct breaker.

It wasn’t until I flipped the switch and lit up the basement again that I realized; I was in a dark and dusty old corridor, poking around a piece of electrical equipment with my sonic screwdriver in hopes of fixing it, and it worked. I’d even unconsciously extended the sonic bit before using it!

I would say I didn’t spend an extra few moments after that gleefully sonic-ing a few random parts of the breaker box before closing it up and getting back to my yardwork, but that would be a damned lie.

(x-posted to doctorwho@LJ)

Some photographic images translate especially well, with very little meaningful data loss, into emoticon format.

For example, this one is:

[:-{     {:-V     >:-[

Last week, my best friend Grey became really ill (in the biological malfunction sense, not in the good 1980s rapper sense.) Please send her your best get-well-soon type thoughts.

I put Epic Girlfriend Nicky on another plane home last night. That does not get easier to do, but the limited time we do get to spend together makes it all worthwhile.

Friday night was NYC2600. It wasn’t the same without Grey, but we did have fun. There are lots of new faces at the meetings these days, which is awesome.

We hit some garage sales this weekend. I bought two copies of Windows 95, complete with manuals and reg codes, for $2. Nicky found a handheld GPS unit from 1995.

Via Hulu, Nicky reintroduced me to the wondrous bucket of WTF that is the original American Gladiators. Especially the first season, back before they discovered production values and protective measures, and still employed a cosmic being called Malibu.

Speaking of sports, Lost City has a really insightful post on why sports are no longer doing civilization any favors. I really can’t help but agree with much of what Brooks writes; while sports can generally be a neat source of excercise and recreation for kids and adults, I really cannot find much reason for the bloated modern institutions of professional sports to go on existing, at least in their current form.

“Whose Slide Is It Anyway?” is a neat karaoke-inspired game often seen at hacker cons. Players are given an audience and a random pre-prepared slideshow, with which they must improvise a talk.

I played for the first time at Notacon 6. Here is my performance, during which I failed physics and slandered snowmen.

I’m still working on my Notacon review, I’ll have that done sooner or later.