2007

2007 was a HUGE year for many reasons, including personal, professional, historical, technical, financial, medical, political... Big things happened in 2007, and large gears were set in motion that will affect events in the future.

Here's to 2008, and to brining forward the best of 2007, and leaving behind the worst.

Wow. Wow...

A cat under the tree

Merry Christmas!

Cat, with bandage, in car

This is Bruce, bandaged up and on his way back to our place after six nights in the hospital.

Yesterday morning, Clara and I made the decision to put him to sleep, all things considered- but when we visited him, he clearly wasn't ready for that. So, he's now back with us, very tentatively on the mend, and we've got an intense routine of meds to follow over the next several days (including setting him up with an IV for fluids once a day).

What a Christmas miracle.

Bruce, Clara, and I are grateful for everyone's thoughts and prayers.

Bruce (the cat)

Our little guy was diagnosed with diabetes a little while back, and has been in the hospital fighting some kind of internal illness since this past Wednesday. The biggest problem- ironically- is that he is refusing to eat.

I'm sending out the call to all of the cat and animal lovers out there: Bruce needs your happy thoughts.

Eat, Bruce. Please.

Proud of myself

I just created the following Automator action, which I saved into my Downloads folder as an app. It's now available to me in my Leopard Downloads stack icon, ready to run (and work its magic) with a single click. Net result is one click deletion of everything in my Downloads stack, which I find very handy because that folder fills up regularly and I never want to hang on to its contents longer than a day or so.

If you create something similar, make sure the region that's highlighted in the screenshot below contains the name of your home folder.

Finally, I really need to do something about my Blogger template so that it doesn't cut off large images such as this one. Here's a direct link to the screenshot for anyone interested.

"No one's going in the kitchen until I know what's happening."

So much of my thought time is spent looking back and trying to remember, as best as possible, what things were like when I was young and most things seemed magical. The idea is, if I can remember those things well enough, perhaps I can reclaim a bit of that magic and harness it for creative purposes- and perhaps a little bit of additional peace and calm in my regular world as well.

Plus, looking back is cathartic. I have grown to understand why old people seem to do it so often.

For the most part, these glorified memories hover somewhere in the 1980s, and many of them are tied up in the movies of my youth: the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, ET...

This afternoon, I sat down and for the first time, watched Poltergeist from beginning to end. I'm not exactly sure why I've never done this before. It's probably because I am a big pussy and for some reason, the younger me had made the assessment that this film was the most horrifying movie ever made.

But wow- it's a good movie, and absolutely part of the Spielberg cannon (apparently he de facto directed the movie, though Tobe Hooper got the credit- the web has a ton of lore about this). And it's also right up there with ET in showing, better than anything else, what my childhood looks like in my mind's eye.

The houses, the cars, the way the people dress and look, the way the kids' rooms are decorated (healthy doses of Star Wars paraphernalia)... the overall tone of "contemporary" life as portrayed in Poltergeist and ET speaks right to the heart of what I remember my magical life being like.

I guess another way of saying this would be that when Steven Spielberg was at the point of his life that I am now, he was making movies that captured the wonder and imagination (and the mundane details) of what the world was like to me when I was as old as his childhood protagonists.

I don't know if I actually made my point there, but I've got a lot of sentimentality tied up in Steven Spielberg. And Poltergeist is a pretty solid exhibit of all of this. I suppose that's my point.

Flashback

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,953915,00.html

Star Wars (A New Hope) deleted scene

Wow- I didn't think there was major deleted footage from the original Star Wars film that I had never seen before, but I guess I'm wrong.

Whoa...

Two cool things I observed today:

I was in a deli this afternoon, and while I was paying for my sandwich, I noticed that there was a computer screen behind the cashier that was showing live video feeds from several cameras in the shop. There were little grids of red lines that followed the moving hands of everyone in each of the windows- the people making the sandwiches, the people pulling goods off the shelves, etc. It was the like the facial recognition feature in some of the newer consumer cameras- tuned for theft-related activities. Very cool.

I've been using Mac OS X Leopard's Time Machine to backup my home laptop, and a few times over the past week, I've taken a look at the Time Machine System Preferences window, which displays the time of day the next hourly backup will occur. Usually when I looked there was a time listed- occasionally, there was not. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why sometimes there was no upcoming scheduled backup, until I realized that my laptop was not plugged in. I plugged it in, and a time for the next backup appeared. Unplugged the laptop, and the next backup time disappeared. So Time Machine is smart enough not to backup a laptop when it's running on battery power (which would drain the battery substantially). Very cool.