21 October 1998: Dog Day Afternoon

Wednesday, 21 October 1998:

Dog Day Afternoon

Not a whole lot has been happening this week. I've basically had a wide-open schedule which I've filled by doing whatever struck me at the time as what I wanted to do.

Work this week has been pretty good. I've been continuing with my testing projects, which is not the greatest thing in the world, but I've been closing my door in the afternoons to work on it, and have made a lot of progress in this un-interrupted state. I should be done with the big project sometime tomorrow - then we just "get to" work on the problems I've uncovered.

Monday evening I finished up my APAzine and worked on my football picks while watching Monday Night Football (actually, while having it on in the background). It's a good thing I'm not really a football fan, or else I'd be upset at the lame game played by my hometown New England Patriots.

Nonetheless, I did in fact win the football pool for last week, which means I break even for the year, at least. Now to try for another week...

Tuesday I picked up the prints I'd had being framed, and figured out where to put them on my walls. I am just about out of wall space, which is pretty amazing considering I had just about nothing on my walls for the first four years I lived here. The prints turned out really nice framed, happily. The one with a lot of detail has low-glare glass on it and you can hardly tell there's anything over it at all. I wish I'd gotten that stuff for my large maps rather than buying them laminated before framing. Oh, well.

The World Series has been terribly depressing, as not only are the hated Yankees going to win, but the Padres have not even put up much of a fight, and what fight they have had they've erased with a bunch of lame plays. So I watched some of game three on Tuesday, and then went down to meet Karen at the coffee shop for a while. Came home to find out the Padres had lost again, so I haven't even bothered to listen to the game tonight.

Karen is working on finishing her Ph.D., and is rather harried and nervous, naturally enough. Not only is she in "trying to work on her dissertation" mode, but she's trying to figure out how to codify what she wants to do when she graduates in terms she can use while interviewing. Me, I like to build things and see them work, but she says she prefers to figure things out and solve problems. So we talked about that for a while.

I also finished the Bujold novel I was reading, Barrayar, the second of her "prequels" to the Miles Vorkosigan series, about Miles' parents. Although Barrayar won a Hugo Award, I didn't think it was a great book. Unlike Shards of Honor, it suffered greatly from being a lengthy explanation of the details of a lot of Miles' backstory, and it was told in a straight-ahead manner rather than in the interesting oblique way that Shards handled the Escobar invasion. Overall, I'd say that this is the weakest Bujold novel I've yet read.

Now I've started reading the third MYST novel, The Book of D'Ni. Based on the computer game (basically filling in a lot of the backstory), this trilogy is entertaining and even well-written in places (the plotting is a bit dodgy), and reads very quickly. As media tie-ins go, they're above-average.

Today I skipped out of work early to go see a 4:30 movie. I did go back afterwards and work for another hour, though; I'm so conscientious!

The movie I saw was Dog Day Afternoon, part of the Warner Bros. film festival I've been mentioning. It stars Al Pacino with a whole bunch of supporting actors none of whom were remotely familiar to me (well, okay, Charles Durning's name is very remotely familiar). It is apparently based on a true story of a bank robbery in Brooklyn in 1972, and is basically an examination of a hostage situation, particularly through the eyes of Al Pacino's quirky character.

Although apparently it is an original screenplay, it feels a lot like it was based on a stage play, since almost all the action takes place on one set, and there's a lot of dialogue and exposition. The humor runs to the black side, but not so much to make me cringe (I'm not big on black comedy). It's a good film, but not great, in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is.

Tonight, the SF3 social event was packed. Many people who don't usually show up were there, as were several out-of-town folks: A couple of former Madison fans, and a writer (Stephen Dedman) who's being edited by a guy in the group. (We read his first novel, The Art of Arrow Cutting, for the book discussion a year or so ago. Nice fellow; he's from Australia.) We spilled over onto a couple of side-tables, and I learned that one of the ex-Madisonians there is now in New Orleans, where I went to college. We didn't know each other, so we chatted about that for a while.

So all-in-all it has been a good week so far. Relaxing, productive, fun. I need more weeks like this!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)