One of those days that was frustrating from the standpoint of my little life--then I hear that Keely's in the hospital, after the heater at Tom and Joanie's shut down, after the ice storm that brought the power line down across the road down their hill (though the road was impassible under two inches of ice anyway), after Tom broke his leg skiing...they are way too lovely a family to deserve a shit rain of these proportions. Barb's feeling under the weather too, a tenacious cold. And Vicky's in the middle of chemo. So I recognize my little sense of failure at not getting a large chunk of my programming assignment^* working by deadline and worries about friends maybe and maybe not on the move must be put into perspective. Anyway I reacted by going to class anyway, and by starting TODAY on the next assignment so I can kick ass the rest of the quarter.

This class, rocks, by the way. (Not sure if that link's publicly accessible.) Kelvin's pretty amazing--he can get really into talking about threads⁺, at 9:00 at night!^# I think he's the best enthusiastic teacher I've had in that madhouse.

Tonight's viewing: True Romance (dir.) Like every movie I've seen written by Quentin Tarantino, this has some truly great bits and some truly horrible ones. I really liked Patricia Arquette, thought Christian Slater was a little too cool for school, and enjoyed watching Brad Pitt and Gary Oldman playing a major pothead and a psychopathic drug courier respectively. (And Chris Walken and Dennis Hopper and ... !) But in true Tarantino style, the violence is completely stylized, edited for maximum enjoyment, which seems uncomfortably close to porn to me. And Tony Scott sure knows how to cut videos, but I did get annoyed at the shootouts ripped off from John Woo, and from music and woman's voiceover ripped off from Badlands, a kajillion-times better and weirder Natural Born Killers movie. Satie just doesn't sound like Tony Scott's kind of thing (cf. the soundtrack to Top Gun, etc.). Markie's review:**

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^*Geek footnote: Writing the world's dumbest command-line shell in Java and writing a shell script that works like find -R in Linux.
⁺Nongeek footnote: They're like little parts of a program that all can run at the same time.
^#Kelvin says he stays up late and pokes around in Java .jar files just to find out that's in them

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