“Be Back Before Dawn”

Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal.  To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2003/12/

Buffy Season 5 is much more dark and sad than the rest of the Buffy season. Added bonus: the guy who plays Burgel in the movie Kafka plays a sort of feeble bad guy. I would say it ends on the ultimate cliffhanger because they knew the show was being mothballed on the one network and did not yet know it would be picked up by UPN. I am not entire sure if it really is the ultimate cliffhanger, though. The Alias season 2 DVD's cliffhanger is pretty big, as well. Still, I think Buffy might just win. Also, I found the lack of ANY real incidental music in the Buffy episode “The Body” incredibly discomforting. And you know — they did that on purpose. I am sure of it!

Today was all about XML Schema Definitions, Document Type Definitions, and XPaths. And that is all I am going to say about that. It was also about project timelines. Connolly: they may want to pull you back to work for a little bit to contract for this Australian project. If they do, please say “yes.” I don't have the time to mess around with this stuff. Added bonus: if you work on it on your own time, after-hours, you'll be on about the same time as them because of the timezone differences! 😉

Feedle, being the natural early adopter that he is, pointed me to some really cool laptop batteries. They are external batteries–about the size of a small laptop–but they have huge capacity. Basically, you sit your laptop on one (like a placemat or something), and connect it up to the power port (there are little adapter cables for various laptop models). You then get zany amounts of power. For instance, his Powerbook get about 12 hours out of this battery. (Plus the several hours in the standard battery). Today, I ordered the one with twice the amp-hours as the one he picked up. It will be here before the trip down south. In theory, I could sit at Diedrich's for a day or two (and run into everyone as they come and go) without a recharge. The other cool things is that there is no crazy special charger cable. Your normal laptop cable will recharge the Überbattery in a few hours.

There is something magic about the proper removal of latex gloves. You use one gloved hand to remove and crumple one glove into the palm of the other hand. You then take the free hand to remove the second glove, turning it inside-out around the soiled, crumpled glove, giving you a perfectly clean crumpled ball with all the nasty bits on the inside and not on your hands. Whether it is for something as simple as dying your hair, something as advanced as a biology lab, or something as serious as an autopsy, it is a novel, ingenious way of removing gloves and keeping clean. I bet some ancient Japanese origami masters spent years puzzling over this until they finally arrived at the correct answer. This, of course, completely discounts the fact that latex gloves did not come into common use until the 1960's. But still: it is fun to think about ancient paper folding masters pondering the many ways of removing gloves without getting ick all over yourself.

Posted in: Dear Diary Television Work

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