Pretty good. The plot gets a little simplistic in the end but there are quite a few moments of suspense that make up for that. It doesn’t hurt that Nicole Kidman is easy on the easy as well as a good actress. I’m sure the other gallery says the same for Sean Penn.

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To date, I’ve written over 60,000 lines of C# code for UCLA ACCESS. This doesn’t include ASPX, Javascript, or CSS. Nor does it include DB design, UI design/layout, or anything else, like the first alpha intranet-only version which I almost 100% scrapped and rewrote from scratch.

But whoa… that’s a lot of C#.

How is a judge considered activist when a judge is assigned a case to preside?

Something to think about before opening your mouth.

Finally all the pieces were around for me to start messing with Thunderbird, the big piece being IMAPsize and Thunderbird’s ability to import Eudora folders.

And now? Now I have a continuous personal email archive in mbox text format beginning January 1, 1995 all the way to the present, except for an unfortunate incident that wreaked havoc on many of the emails from May through October 2003. It’s not so bad since from late 2000 on most of my emails are pretty boring anyway. I’ve quarantined them to their own mbox file and am manually trying to rescue the pieces, though it’ll be slow going and there are close to 400 emails in it.

There are also several BEN and BOL email archives from before 1995 (BEN being the account you could get from the UCLA library for email before Bruin On-Line showed up, and the BOL archives are from when I was using QMC).

Ten years of email.

Hooboy.

Gods, no wonder I’m crashing in a food coma… didn’t realize Powerade had corn syrup.

Sleeeeepy.

Fun movie, but it was pretty much like Shaolin Soccer, only this time it was all kung-fu, which made it… well, less fun.

I have Shaolin Soccer and God of Cooking on DVD, but I doubt I’ll add this to the collection.

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I liked it. Very much a comic book projected on-screen. The acting was cardboard-like, the dialogue literally lifted off the comic book (no one actually says “”yeesh”", but they do in this movie), and yet I enjoyed myself.

I especially enjoyed Mickey Rourke’s Marv — the ticket price is well worth his story, and Elijah Wood as the antagonist along with Jaime King as Marv’s muse (and the only actress in the entire movie who fit her character and acted it) make this by far the best of the three stories presented.

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Happy birthday, mom.

Three shorts dealing with eroticism, by Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Wong Kar-Wai’s, The Hand, was superb. Soderbergh’s Equilibrium was great, but I’m too dense to identify it as erotic, and so not sure why it’s included in this collection. Antonioni’s The Thread of All Things? Well… I personally thought it was crap.

To be honest, I much more enjoyed an old Skinemax favorite from my teenage years, Secrets of Love: Three Rakish Tales, which has the same setup, three erotic stories, only this film was much more sexy. And as a testament to it being “”high”" art versus “”soft”" porn, the stories were adapted from Marguerite de Navarre (probably one or a combination of stories from the Heptameron and called “”The Spanking”" in the movie), Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (not sure which story, but here called “”The Pupil”"), and Guy de Maupassant (no idea what story, called “”The Greenhouse”" in the film).

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Caught a Sunday matinee of this, mostly out of curiosity. Ended up enjoying it. Going in with no expectations helps, but it’s just your basic light-hearted romantic comedy with a slight twist concerning fan obsession.

Ah, but you are perhaps wondering what I think of this version compared to the first theatrical version starring Colin Firth? Probably not, since most people don’t realize Nick Hornby’s book was made into a movie prior to this one, but I’ll give you my thoughts anyway: I liked the first one better.

This is not a “”typical”" reason. The reason is more that Jimmy Fallon’s character, as Sun pointed out as we left the theater, is actually quite likable and would easily have found someone were it not for being a bit crazy about the Red Sox. Thing is, sure, that’s fine, but Colin Firth’s character? That one was a bit darker, more bitter, more emotionally-charged in high hopes and low expectations. Further, while Fallon sports boyish charm, Firth appears to be simply a boy, with the charm and the innocence that are seen in an adult as being tactless and self-centered. It’s a much more compelling character to watch.

So yes, fun movie, but I don’t plan to buy this one when it comes out on DVD, satisfied that my Nick Hornby movie adaptations collection already has a Fever Pitch I’d watch over and over again.

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