Been too long since the last entry...
To start, here's a line from Julianne from yesterday:
"You were mad at me before I began yelling at you!"
We're
sooo looking forward to her being 17 instead of 7... assuming we survive the intervening decade. Nathaniel's over his viral bronchitis turned strep throat, but Barbara is suffering through it right now.
Progress on our goals is mixed. We switched over to Verizon DSL and got rid of the digital cable, DVR, and RoadRunner service for a savings of about $90 a month - and untold savings on the mental health side - but some of us are still watching whatever broadcast channels we happen to get while stubbornly refusing to admit their addiction. Me, I'm doing fine without TV, and when the next season of Battlestar Galactica starts, I'll get by with episode downloads from iTunes. In the meantime, there's NetFlix and all those Kurosawa movies I still haven't seen.
Speaking of movies, I finally saw
The Searchers.
Meh.
So many people have lifted from it that it's hard to appreciate John Ford's visual language, and it comes across as only slightly less unenlightened than other westerns of that time.
I've never been much of a John Wayne fan - I've never been able to get past the jingoistic
The Green Berets - but I have to admit that in this film, he was playing more of a villain than a hero. It was interesting to see Monument Valley, but it was the supposed
Comanches speaking Navajo - they say "yah ta hey" at one point, a Navajo greeting, and many of the extras are very obviously Navajo - that eventually killed it for me. Also, the teasers for the movie included on the DVD were kinda creepy, with Gig Young ogling a very young and pony-tailed Natalie Wood.
On the work side, Pegasus celebrated their 15th anniversary Friday evening, which was kinda nice, with a saxaphone player, an open bar, and good catered hors d'oeuvre from
Amici's. John Elton and Stephen Martucci showed up, and Jack gave a nice speech going over the history of the company. Unfortunately, Chris gave me management advice toward the end of the evening, which kinda killed it for me. I like Chris and Jack a great deal, but they're both reactive, which is a big reason I have one foot out the door.
I have a meeting with TEKsystems tomorrow morning, and hopefully I'll find I didn't botch the Brainbench C# test as badly as I think I did. It was much harder than Kforce's ProveIt test, which is good, but it was kind of a kick in the rear to remind me I have a way to go before I can call myself an expert. I'm still working on the MCPD certification track, and once we have some free funds, I'll start investing in some of the Microsoft online coursework.
I gotta say, though, I think I will never,
ever get as jazzed about anything to do with Windows and Microsoft as I do with a
Steve Jobs speech at WWDC. <sigh>
