Friday, July 8, 2005

Banana at home for pre-breakfast. Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Prepped minor web updates to faculty page. Migrated Ena's e-mail from itsa (UNIX) to Exchange—no problems. Lunch: leftovers from dinner last night. Migrated Mike L's address book. Met with Cindy. Notified Mike L that his new e-mail account was working. Made faculty page changes live. Joel, Cindy, and I interviewed another candidate for Melissa's position. Minor update to the entering students find a place to live page. Patrick got the iPod working yesterday by returning it to the San Francisco Apple Store and they exchanged it for one that works. In the process of transferring music to it with ml_ipod, we found that many of our ID3 tags needed cleaning up. It's the equivalent of discovering a couple hundred loads of laundry that needed washing. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftovers, two macaroons from Le Bon Gateau: pistachio and hazelnut. Watched Team America on DVD. Our comments afterward: stupid, absurd, gross, sometimes very funny. I think I enjoyed it less than Patrick did, and it disappointed me to see it so politically empty except for a few well-placed jabs (such as the opening scene). Maybe I just wasn't smart enough to get all the jokes. Why did one character sound so much like Cartman from South Park? Why did almost all the characters sound like the same person was doing them? (Because it's true—Trey Parker did voices for a whole lot of the characters.) I was also very disappointed that they reused the Montage song/joke from a South Park episode, which I had seen/heard/enjoyed already twice before. What comedy professional reuses old material? That's boring. I liked seeing the puppetry work, and I kept trying to figure out how they set scenes up, and I was constantly amazed at how easy it was to forget I was watching puppets rather than real people. I thought the music was tedious but tolerable—nothing much new over South Park TV, really. On the bus lately I've just started reading Bloom Magazine Spring 2005 (Volume 2, Issue 1) and for whatever reason I just can't seem to get into any of the fiction. The stories aren't that interesting to me.