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hi. i hesitate to tell you this, my good friend, but i will continue anyway. when i was 19, and windows 95 was released, i ran down to the university book store and purchased a copy PLUS a copy of Windows 95 Plus™ solely based on the experience of playing a 5-minute game of MS Pinball. Truth. I am a whore.

ok, so i kind of sort of failed in the camera reduction thing. i mean, i did manage to sell three cameras and two lenses, but with the resulting cash, i also managed to buy a D200 and a new lens. i still only have one camera now, but i guess it wasn't the exact same strategy that i was originally shooting for. oh well! guess i will have to learn to live with it somehow.

I also watched Mulholland Drive this weekend. It made absolutely no sense until I read this. As a result, my opinion of it improved quite a bit. I'm not sure I'd want to watch too many other movies that require extra reading in order to properly grok, but this one I can go out of my way for.

Shortbus was an ultimately unsatisfying movie. It had me for about half of the movie, and it had some engaging scenes, but I felt the ending totally failed to deliver. The vignettes of different couples (and non-couples) obviously went somewhere during the course of the film, but where to is fairly ambiguous. If it was all woven together as mere observation without moral, it might have worked, but the tone of the whole movie feels like that of profound statement. If it had anything profound to say, I missed it. Is that my fault, or John Cameron Mitchell's? 

Update: Man, reading some of the reviews of this movie around teh intarnets (particularly on imbd) is kind of depressing. Most of them focus completely on the sex scenes, and about the "controversy" of including them in the movie. By the time I had gotten home, I had actually forgotten that there were graphic sex scenes in the movie at all. Obviously, the sex was what I had mostly heard about before going to see it, but afterwards, it wasn't what was on my mind, I was mostly trying to parse the ending. I don't know if it's just that I'm jaded, but in a movie basically focused on the characters' sex lives, it didn't seem out of place. I'm sure it was played up and as much as possible in the press in order to generate buzz, but since when has that been unusual?  All I wanted was for all the story lines in the movie to come to closure at the end, and I don't think they did. That would be the only thing I hold against this picture.

I am thinking of selling all my cameras except for two: one digital, one film. I'm think I am getting too obsessed with equipment, and I need to pare it down to just the essentials. I want one compact 35mm rangefinder, for black and white, and my Canon S3 IS. Yes, that means selling the Bronica SQ and the Nikon D70. Both are extravagant and invite too much attention/lust. I know it is something that I will probably regret from time to time, and I know I will probably capitulate somewhere down the line, but I think it might be beneficial to have to just work with what I have for a change, and not worry about what I could or should have. I am thinking it over, and probably won't decide until the new year.

I went to the local bookstore today to try and purchase a copy of H.S.T.'s Hell's Angels, since it is one of those books that I had started a while ago and never made it all the way though and I am ashamed of this fact. I was looking for a normal, compact trade paperback book, the kind that we are all familiar with, sized around 7"x4". All I found was a larger format book, around 8"x5". Looking inside, the text is larger and more spaced out, looking like what they usually give grade school kids so they are not intimidated by lots of small type, or old people who have bad eyesight. I can only imagine focus group testing with "average" Americans done by publishing agencies, complaining about how hard books are to read, demanding larger, friendlier type. I put down this new book, and promptly went to the nearest used bookstore to look for a normal trade paperback with nice yellowed pages and a dated cover design. In other words, a normal book.

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Windows, Mac, Linux - What's your preference and why?
Submitted by ramblingsbymark.

Should I answer this question? I probably should, because I complain about the issue enough. My answer: All three. And on an almost daily basis. Why do I complain about it so much? BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL JUST COMPUTERS. One won't make you a better user than anyone else by merit of it's operating system or hardware alone. More annoying, maybe, but if you want to become better, the only thing that matters is what you do with the fucking hunk of shit. I hope everyone knew that already, though.

one year for halloween, i was lee iaccoca. another year, i was a terrorist.

that is all.

How many computers do you have in your house? 
Submitted by Foomper.

Shameless geek bait!

surprisingly, only 2. and it's two only if i bring home my iBook. it would be three if i had my shuttle at home, but being employed by a stingy startup, i had to bring my own equipment into work back in the day.  they should be able to afford to buy me an actual work computer now, but I don't think it is a priority on their list. that's ok, though, since i don't really need another computer in the house.