Slaves Against the Machines
I took a vacation day this past Friday to do some last minute Mother's Day shopping, and catch a matinee of Mission Impossible III. I'd checked my computer calendar at work and I didn't have any meetings that day. There were a few today, but I'd e-mailed PDF files of my designs to my team on Thursday to review prior to the meeting. I worked a little late Thursday as well, to stay on schedule and even get ahead in some areas, anticipating other meetings my computer told me were on the horizon. I spent significant time in Photoshop, refining the type for the title on a book jacket I'd designed, adjusting the bevels on the letters and individually tweaking the kerning, the space between each individual letter. Once I was satisfied, I called it a week and went home, where I consulted Fandango to ascertain the movie times and determine my schedule for the next day. I remotely logged in to my e-mail at work, to set my “out-of-office assistant”, an automatic reply to anyone writing me to let them know I wasn't there, but would return on Monday.
Friday night and most of Saturday were a blur, thanks to AdventureQuest, an online game I recently discovered. Weather.com told me it was going to be cloudy all weekend, so I had no problem staying in my room with the curtains drawn. Hours elapsed after my mom told me it was sunny out and I should take pictures of some of her flowers, but when I finally ventured out there had actually been a break in the weather. Sunday night after going out to dinner I juggled watching new episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy with finishing Walk the Line on DVD. It was the story of a musician who endured a childhood tragedy with his brother, to go on to greatness and overcome addiction. That might sound like Ray, but the music was different as were the names and actors. All kidding aside, I enjoyed the movie a lot, thought the casting was perfect, and loved the music. My foot is still tapping. When I finished the movie, I took a drive to the post office to return it, along with On the Waterfront, so Netflix could send me more movies. There was so much on television last week, including the season finales to Smallville and My Name is Earl which partially conflicted, so I had to tape one of those shows. It's a miracle I managed to watch other movies like Rope and Chicken Little and turn those around to Netflix too.
When I got home Sunday night after driving to the mailbox, I sat down at my computer to compile this week's Phantasmic Links. I also logged in to my work e-mail to turn off the automated message saying I wasn't at work. I noticed I'd received something sent on Sunday from the head of the company's tech department, and though I got out of the habit of reading work e-mail on my day's off years ago, curiosity got the better of me. The missive spoke of a server outage, a hardware problem so cataclysmic that any changes made on Friday would not be reflected, possibly lost forever, and that our files had been restored from Thursday's tape backup. I stupidly smiled at my luck, that this tragedy affected a day I wasn't there, and that my work would all be intact. Of course™ when I arrived at work this morning, I found the most recent files on the server to be from WEDNESDAY. I back up all my page layouts to my local workstation, but I soon realized my Photoshop work had been lost; those files are simply too large to copy to my desktop. Between meetings, a good portion of my day was spent recreating work I'd done already and it was after 4 before I could concentrate on the things I planned for today. It could have been much worse though, as a lot of my coworkers don't back anything up themselves, and lost far more. At one point I mistakenly joked with one of my friends in the tech department when he walked by: “You're not hiding?” People tend to blame those guys when things go wrong and I'd be afraid to leave my office too. Justifiably, my poor taste elicited an outburst of, “Hiding?! When I was here until TWO AM on Friday trying to save all of your files?” I might have lost a few hours, but I didn't have to lose a Friday night.
Most of the time I have a point to make, but tonight I'm in a seemingly random mood. My television watching was delayed 20 minutes tonight due to the Presidential address, but catching up at work led to me getting to the gym later, and subsequently home later, so the extra time helped. I had to tape the How I Met Your Mother finale while I watched the Prison Break finale, and then I watched the tape during intermissions of 24. This maximized my time so I could get to a tape of last night's Sopranos, and now at nearly 1 AM, I'm wrapping up yet another daily post to feed the internet as I must do. I should get some sleep, as my computer calendar lists yet another meeting tomorrow. Life can be tiring, but we should be glad we're not slaves to our technology like the characters in the Matrix.
That would be bad.
posted by MCF at 12:49 AM
9 Comments:
Did you like MI:III? I thought it needed more Simon Pegg.
Also, this is probably why I didn't like the Matrix. It makes you think scary, deep thoughts.
Curse you for linking me to the Adventure Quest game. Fie on you.
Yeah right ;-) I'm looking forward to the direct neuronal interface so we won't have to carry all these gadgets around with us. So cumbersome.
I liked MI3 better than MI2 and enjoyed it for the action-packed popcorn flick it was. Hoffman was great, though I wish they didn't have his "I'm gonna find her...I'm gonna hurt her..." speech in the trailer. I guess it was too good not to include but it would have been great to see that fresh. If there was more Pegg, more people would have criticized Abrams and compared him to Marshall on Alias. I think I liked the movie because it FELT like a GOOD episode of Alias from the earlier seasons. Since the original Mission Impossible series was probably an influence on Abrams, if anything he's going back to the roots of the spy genre rather than copying from himself.
The movie also had an excess of trademark Tom Cruise Running. Read more about that phenomenon here and here.
You exhausting multi=tasker!
You sure do provide a lot of links
Ok, then you'll have to be the one to fill me in on what happened on the How I Met Your Mother finale. I saw part of it, but tivo didn't account for the scheduling conflict.:(
HIMYM finale spoilers:
Not sure how much you did see, so I'll recap the whole thing. Ted decides he does want to be with Robin and, recalling the blue French Horn he once stole for her, his new romantic gesture is to wait in her apartment with a string quartet, all of whom are playing blue instruments. He gets her spare key from Lily, so when Robin finds that she locked her keys in the apartment, she calls Lily. Lily tells her to try knocking and has to cut her short because Marshall has played the answering machine and learned that Lily was accepted for that 3 month art fellowship that would conflict with their wedding.
Back at Robin's, she knocks and Ted opens the door. She has to use her bathroom first and one of the string guys is vocal about Ted promising them Pizza. She comes out, they have a talk, and she says it won't work and she's going camping with Sandy(Alexis Denisof) from the station, who recommended her for his old job and now that he's leaving, she can't use the "I don't date coworkers" excuse.
At the bar, Ted is miserable. He and Barney walk off from the table and Marshall says "Unpause?" In a voiceover, Saget explains that Marshall and Lily could pause and resume fights at any time. At the bar, Ted sees the weather on tv and with a crazy gleam in his eye, tells Barney he's going to make it rain. This leads to an hilarious slapping match. Ultimately, Ted's dumb plan is to find this girl Barney slept with who studied Native American culture, specifically rain dances. He convinces Barney and they meet her at the college library. Barney's ex is played by Amy Acker, and at first she's reluctant but then asks Ted if the other guy is a jerk and agrees. Joss Whedon fans might percieve this as an in-joke as Acker and Denisof's characters were romantically involved on Angel.
Back at the apt Marshall and Lily are fighting. She says she never would have taken the fellowship, just wanted to see what she was giving up. He doesn't understand, and maybe they shouldn't get married. As soon as he says it they look panicked, and both say "pause!", admit they're starving, and head out to a restaurant.
On the roof Ted is dancing like an idiot, Barney is shaking his head, and Acker is confused. She studied textbooks but never actually SAW a real raindance, so has no idea if Ted is doing it right. Stubborn, Ted won't give up.
Back at the apt. Marshall and Lily have returned and are still fighting. In tears, she tries to pause again but he says no, they have to work it out. She continues to sob "pause" and leaps into his arms, kissing him passionately. "Baby, this is a great use of the pause function!" he says as he carries her into the bedroom.
On the roof, Acker has left and Ted is doing anything but a raindance as he leaps wildly, Barney continues to be skeptical and Ted loses it, shaking his fists to the heavens begging that Robin HAS to be with him and crying "Come on!!! Come on!!!!!" Suddenly, there's a crack of thunder and it starts pouring as Barney sarcastically says, "Oh come on!"
The song This Modern Love by Bloc Party plays as we see footage of New York in the rain and a reporter explaining how a sudden wind shifted the storm back in from sea. We see Barney and Acker watching the news in the bar as she turns to him and they start making out. Ted runs to Robin's and shouts for her to come down and apologizes for making it rain but she has to come down. They go back and forth "you come down!" "no you come up!" "No Robin, you HAVE to come down here!" She runs from the window, looks around, sees the blue french horn and in that moment makes her decision. She opens her door, and there's Ted soaking wet. "I was going to come down" she begins. "I know" he says, as they crash together in a very Ross/Rachel first kiss moment. In a voiceover, Saget tells the kids that's how he ended up with Robin as the story cuts to him leaving the next morning. He gets in a cab all happy as the song continues to play, and the voiceover talks about fate and the universe and balance as the cab pulls up to his building and his expression changes from joy to "oh no..." There, sitting on the steps looking crushed, is Marshall. In his hand, he turns over Lily's engagement ring. Ted sits down next to his friend and puts his hand on his shoulder to comfort him, as the show ends and the credits roll.
Tune in next year, Mondays at 8 on CBS....
Wow! Thanks for that. It was only a half hour? I feel like I missed so much:)
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