Six minutes to go...

...by the clock until the store opens.

I finally got OpenOffice and the rate spreadsheet installed on the newly configured 'alice', but could not find the network PCMCIA card I'd set aside for the machine in Drew's area. All in all, not a bad job of attacking yesterday's priorities.

About 4:12 pm (so I guess you can scratch the 'about'), I heard a call over my scanner to the effect that the fire was contained. (I remember the time as it is always announced at the end of every exchange with the dispatcher.) It was a surprise to me, as I would have expected more radio traffic regarding something like this.

At about 5, Drew came by and we went over to the Pagosa Springs Golf Course to hit some balls off the driving range. It's been years since I've swung a club, so I tried to take it easy, but I sort of can't help but try to tear the cover off the ball once I draw the club back in preparation for the downstroke.

I paid the price. My shoulders are killing me.

OTOH, I figure if I can learn to moderate my swing, a bucket of balls a day for about three weeks will do me (and my heretofore nonexistent golf game) a world of good.

Time to go open the store... it's 8 am on the button.

Cheers...

Progress: The opposite of Congress...

I got my appliation for a duplicate certificate of title back from Texas. It seems the thing must be signed by the lienholder. I called said lienholder, and it turns out that I will only be allowed to possess the title after I've paid them their due. The procedure for getting the title to the county is a bit more complicated than I expected.

If I'd have known that, I wouldn't have sent the application down to Texas via FedEx, or at all, for that matter.

* * *My vocabulary failed me the other day. I'd been going through life with the idea that 'erstwhile' meant something like 'earnest and hardy'. Instead, I come to find out it means 'former.'

* * *Galina and I watched the second half of the original Get Carter, starring Michael Caine. If I'd ever seen the film before, I must've forgotten doing so, because it seemed all new to me last night. Not only new, but much, much more vital than the made-for-the-MTV-generation remake a little while ago starring Sly Stallone.

I'm thinking this film cuts the same place in the timeline, approximately, as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs. In this 1971 flick, Jack Carter may look like a reasonable guy, but it's all a veneer to cover pure savagery. When Caine exacts revenge, he doesn't kid around: he stabs one fellow, throws another off the top of a parking garage, shoots someone sent to "bring him back," doesn't blink an eye when a woman is drowned in the trunk of his car, overdoses another woman and plants her naked body in a pond on the premises of an enemy, and finally clubs a man to death with a shotgun. Ye gods. I don't remember Stallone getting anywhere near as riled, though I'm sure he, too, exacts a price from the baddies in the remake.

* * *An article on Slashdot hints that advertisers may abandon the 30-second commercial in favor of embedding commercials in medias res, or in the middle of the action. The idea here, according to the summary on Slashdot, is that if a character in the story you're watching is shaving, a window will pop up in some quarter of the screen and deliver a quick commercial for a razor.

This is probably a viable way to combat new technologies that allow viewers to circumvent commercial breaks (though when I was a kid, it was easy... the commercial, after all, was there to allow you to go to the bathroom :^), but I sure as heck won't like it.

It will, however, affect the television industry in two basic ways. Just as magazine photographers must compose images to allow for the insertion of titles, etc., TV cinematographers will have to (or ought to try to) shoot action in such a way that the commercial doesn't cover up something important. This ought to be pretty easy.

The second change will come as a result of writers having to "write in" some action that makes an advertisement plausible, though this may have unintended humorous side-effects (or limit the scope of sponsors). After all, can you imaging having to write dialog into, say, Xena: Warrior Princess that would allow a smooth segue to a commercial for, say, a product to combat yeast infections? Or a scene that is conducive to a Fruit-of-the-Loom commercial during, say, the Drew Carey Show? Yikes.

With that imagery in mind, I take my leave.

Cheers...