It’s no “Shaun of the Dead”–and no “Lives of Others” either….

I was sooo looking forward to “Hot Fuzz,” but I walked out not really feeling like a fan. I totally loved “Shaun of the Dead”–saw it several times at the theater and bought the DVD–but this just wasn’t as enjoyable. It had some splendid moments, but I don’t think it’s worthy of repeat viewing.

Or maybe it’s because we went to see David Sedaris the previous night. He was so funny that I thought I was going to urp–truly painfully funny.

WebEx report

OK, so the day of the WebEx was a smorgasbord of emotions. Stage fright and its companions kept trying to take over, but concentrating on creating a lesson plan for people who use PowerPoint all day every day about using PowerPoint standardization features while creating my first PowerPoint presentation was deeply amusing and satisfying.

Getting the desktop ready for sharing was interesting–gave me motivation to clear off unused icons and tidy up toolbars (like hiding the MySpace button in Firefox). I couldn’t find a way to turn off the Jerusalem weather forecast that slides up periodically, but decided that it would be diverting more than distracting.

So then I got to the office an hour early, cleaned up the presentation a bit, opened all the application files I would need for demonstration, closed down all my IMs and such, logged onto the WebEx for the folks in remote locations, and plugged my laptop into the projector for the folks in the conference room with me. All was going exactly as expected, and I was so tense I thought I was going to vomit.

But as the projector took over the laptop’s display, everything went straight to aych ee double hockey sticks–probably because the projector didn’t like the aspect ratio of my display.

more odds and ends

Ich schnitt mich die Haare. (I have a vague recollection that reflexive is important when you are doing things to body parts, but the model sentence I recall is about combing myself the hair.) Not a lot, but enough that people might guess that it was a new style.

Say “Happy Birthday” to Rodney when you see him. He’s one of my dearest friends, but we’ve never even been in the same country since we met….

a third, two books and a restaurant

NYT recommended “The Hoax” quite strongly. It was interesting and entertaining, but I’m not sure that it’s terribly important–unless you just want to re-visit that time in history. As it was when I was transitioning from intermediate school to high school, I’m not sure that it would be my first pick of the moments, but interesting nonetheless.

When start re-reading Harry Potter? How about Saturday when the weather that didn’t suit my plans? It’s much faster the fourth time through, but I picked up on some interesting details that I missed in previous readings,

small excitement, two films

A friend of mine is on imdb.com now: Daniel Adrian It turns out that you have to pay to have a photo with your listing, which I suppose explains why there are so many pic-less entries in imdb.

“Childern of Men” is very good. I wonder how different it would be for a non-parent to watch it, as it really brought up all sorts of mothering memories.

“300″ is also quite good. It brought out all sorts of aggression in me, to the the point where I very nearly threw a glass at the people sitting next to me who didn’t respond appropriately to being shushed repeatedly.