The last few weeks have gone by in what serems like a breeze. Let me see if I can sum up the events in my life between now and then:

Tested for my license twice and passed on the second try, getting a large yellow sheet of paper which worked as a license until I received mine in the mail. Why they don’t just print out the license on the spot is beyond me, almost every other state and university on the planet prints them off while you wait. At any rate, I’m now an officially licensed Minnesota citizen.

Went apartment hunting, because they are raising my rent at Cedars 94 and I just can’t justify living there anymore. After looking at approximately 20 apartments, and calling about 40 or so, I found a nice one-bedroom apartment for less rent than I am paying now, but is south of where I am - farther from the university. However, it is on the Light Rail line (literally it runs right outside the complex), so the ride to school is still not too long and it is convenient. There are less “community” amenities, but I never really used any of the ones at Cedars anyway. The ride to school and back home will be longer - hoping to use the time to get some reading in regularly. It’s only 12 minutes to downtown by LRT - something which makes me very happy, and also a short ride to the Mall of America when the rest of the line opens in December.

Speaking of the LRT system, I rode on the sunday of opening day for a little bit just for fun with Di. It was packed (of course) but seemed to go smoothly. The highest speeds are on the part of the line which I’m moving to, which is beneficial to me of course. The system seemed to handle a lot of passengers well, we were crammed in there. Some people remarked that if it can’t move this many people, how well will it work as a mass-transit service - They should be reminded that in normal operation, more people would be leaving the train at some stops.

Di decided that she is going to move from her apartment in with a friend, which will save her a bunch of money but lose her some private space. Also she got fired from her job for no reason by a domineering bitch, gotta love that. Bad timing too - she put in her applications right before the 4th holiday and of course had to wait until this week in order to get responses. The good news: she has lots of interviews and places which want her to work for them. She’s taking it very well, and I’ve been trying to help when I can. She’s my sweetie and I hate it when she’s depressed or stressed more than normal.

Teaching classes is okay, I’ll probably post about it in another post since I have these nice categories now.

Preparing Future Faculty is progressing nicely - we are getting into creating a syllabus, filling out your CV, things like that which you just don’t get anywhere else, but are expected of you as faculty anywhere you will start as a professor. It is really a very useful class, everyone who is planning on being a professor should take it. I hope I can take the practicum next semester.

Been eating out too much, and it shows on my scale and my wallet. Need to stop by buying groceries and cooking my own meals. Watched a lot of movies with Di because it’s summer and that’s what you do in summer. Reading some good books.

Watched: 06/25/04 AMC Southdale 16 Score: 7

I went on opening day to see Fahrenheit 9/11 with Di. It was a good thing that we bought our tickets online in advance, because it sold out almost every showing at the theater we went to - there was a line outside the door when we were leaving. While I’m glad that lots of people are seeing this movie, I came out of it lukewarm. It wasn’t all that entertaining, and didn’t present any information which I didn’t get from other sources already.

Michael Moore’s second big “documentary” movie (the first being Bowling for Columbine) tries to make some sense of what the government is thinking after the 9/11 attacks. There are many different views, picks on, and defenses of this movie on the ‘net already, so I think I’ll just stick to what I felt in my gut right after seeing it.

Fahrenheit 9/11 seems, as best, hectic and disconnected. There are good facts in here, somewhere, but I’m not sure where they are. Moore starts with the election, which he insinuates was turned by family ties at Fox, and goes on from there to Senate tapes from which House members plead for the contest of the election. I would have liked some followup on this, some interviews or statements from Senate members at the time on why they wouldn’t contest the election, but Moore presses on.

He’s just a couple steps from the 9/11 attacks, in which we watch the debris falling and the president as he sits stunned at the news of the attacks at a photo opportunity for 7 minutes. Honestly I’m not sure what Moore is trying to bring across here, because if I was the leader of the country, I might just sit there for 7 minutes trying to think over the situation. If it was a half hour, an hour, longer, I would expect some action, but 7 minutes? Please. If his point was the inaction, Moore could have contrasted this with our vice-president Dick Cheney’s quick action of ordering planes that did not respond shot down.

From here, he goes on to criticize the war on terror, the absense of troops in Afghanistan, and the entire war on Iraq. There are issues I have with some of these as well, but I’m getting tired so I’ll talk about the other part of this movie: the emotional part. Moore of course finds a connection in his home town of Flint, MI with a son who was lost in Iraq. This is disheartening, and there are hundreds of stories all around the country. There may be a point in this, but all it did was tug on the heartstrings for me. A sad story, but lives have been lost over worse things.

I came away from this movie wish-washy about it. The movie seems like it tried to address too many issues and was fragmented. It is obvioously biased and I don’t know why we as liberals aren’t calling Moore on it. We complain about how the “Fair and Balanced” reporting of Fox is hurting the american public, but can’t hold a movie with equally obvious slant to the same standards. I give it a 7, because it’s a great collection of things that are otherwise scattered, and it’s emotional message drives home well.

Watched: 07/02/04 3:15pm AMC Southdale 16 Score: 10

Going into the theater expecting something good, it turns out I was underestimating this movie. The special effects are great, the plot is great, and the ending is great. Can you guess what adjective I would use to describe Spider-man 2?

Taking place 2 years after the end of the first movie in the timeline, Peter Parker is now battling with a new enemy: doubt. He has issues keeping up with being a crimefighter and a student at the university. Mary Jane has began her acting career (performing in The Importance of Being Ernest, hint, hint) and Harry Osborn has taken his father’s place as head of Oscorp. Of course this movie wouldn’t be complete (or true to it’s comic book roots) without a new villian, and Alfred Malina delivers a great performance as Dr. Otto Octavius.

Spider-man 2 is at the same time funny and profound, and the audience develops an empathy for the characters throughout the movie (even the villian). This doesn’t mean that they skimped on the effects - they are used more in this movie than in it’s predecessor, but at the same time they are almost seamless.

Director Sam Raimi takes this sequel to the box office record breaker farther than Spider-man, both in plot depth and character development. He has shown the world that sequels can still be better than the orignial, and wraps it all up in a truly enjoyable 2 hours. See this movie this summer. On the jamuraa scale it gets a well-deserved 10.

I switched to WordPress for my blog recently. So far I have been very happy with it - I can update via the web or through a blog updating client. It has everything I really want in a blog, plus more - it even has an available plugin so I can post stuff to livejournal at the same time (hi LJ people!). Spent most of the last few days categorizing the old entries in my LJ and my older blog in WP. I’m going to change the look of this page, but for now it will have to do. I am only missing one major thing that I want my blog to have: a “I’m reading this book and I’m X of the way through it” plugin, which I have seen on other people’s sites (they use blosxom or pyblosxom I’m pretty sure). I’m thiking of writing the plugin myself (they don’t seem that hard). Really the only downside to WordPress is having to install MySQL for the database.

Planning on posting 3-4 entries later today, after I figure out the layout thing.

picked up from planetDebian of all places..

Viewing Date: June 4, 2004 (Technically - 12:01)

I was long anticipating this new installment to the Harry Potter movie saga started by the firsttwo movies. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban carries on the story by taking the third book to the big screen. A warning to readers: I am a big fan of Harry Potter so don’t expect this review to be unbiased, or not filled with spoilers.

The adaptation to the screen is particularly well done, I believe. They left out parts of the book which aren’t particularly important to the story - you don’t need to know details that Harry discovers about the trial of Sirius or the other dropped hints of the book. They left in possibly enough in order to figure out who the real culprit of the crime was before the end. The hints for other mysteries are a little less clear. I got the feeling that there is considerably less kitch left in the movie as in the book - people who read the book and wanted to know some things because they were in previous books didn’t get those parts into the movie.

The acting wasn’t incredible, but they are still kid actors, so I don’t expect too much from them. The directing was superb - the movie had a good pace, keeping the audience interested. Special effects were used more sparinly throughout this movie it seemed, but that may have been simply because there wasn’t that many scenes like the Quiddich matches in the previous movies.

Overall I thought the movie was excellent, and if I got the chance to see it in the theater again I probably even would splurge for popcorn and a drink to enjoy with it. On my review scale it gets a 7.

Viewing Date: May 30, 2004 The Day After Tomorrow is the required summer disaster movie of the summer. Made in the fine tradition of Deep Impact and Armageddon, I went into this movie expecting nothing but special effects and another interesting look at how the world could end for all of us, and of course it will be avoided at the last minute.

This time it is the effects of global warming, which incidentally, causes the rapid onset of a new ice age. Of course, in the movie it all happens entirely too fast with very little scientific explanation for why it happens - the closest they get is that the desalinization of the oceans screws up the north atlantic current, making all of that warm equator water not go north and causing serious weather problems, including huge hurricanes on land which insta-freeze anything that is in the center.

The director or writer in this movie tries entirely too hard in order to get the audience to care about his characters. The mad scientist who predicts it has a son who goes to New York which is (surprise, surprise) in the path of a big storm. So is his wife, who conveniently works in a cancer ward for children. Look everyone, it’s a little kid with cancer! You have to care about him! The only way he could have made it more obvious would be to put a shipment of widdle cute puppies on it’s way to the storm driven by a cadre of third-world children hoping to sell them for money to save their baseball field in the south pacific. It’s okay though, because I wasn’t expecting a great plot from this movie.

What I was expecting from the movie was good special effects. Unfortunately the movie didn’t deliver very well. Sure, they had the ocean rising, and Los Angeles being destroyed by tornadoes (which I was almost cheering at), but the main destruction wasn’t accompanied by a requirement of all good special effects: large explosions. The only explosions in the movie are the crashing of three helicopters, which shouldn’t have exploded anyway because they crashed due to their fuel freezing. Now that I think about it they may not have exploded at all.

Errors in the movie are numerous I am sure, but I just sat back and vegged out after I saw the cancer kid. The movie is remarkably horrible, even for such a low standard as a summer disaster movie. Don’t go see it, even if it’s playing in the cheap seats the day after tomorrow, or on DVD the tuesday after next. I give it a -10.

Well, today I was hoping to get a new license, my first Minnesotan one. Di and I walked to downtown, where she had some stuff to do. We walked downtown and when we got to Block E we took the skyways. We stopped and browsed around Barnes & Noble for a while and then walked the skyways to the Hennepin county government building downtown.

It was there, in a huge government building in the heart of a large metropolitan area, that I found out that I need a birth certificate in order to prove that I exist or something, and I need to go to one of the suburbs in order to take the written test. I find it slightly strange that I can’t get it done in a large building downtown. I also find it annoying that they can’t trust that Iowa verified my existence/identity correctly when they gave me my license.

After that ordeal, we had been walking a while so we went through the skyways back to Block E and had some ice cream from Coldstone Creamery and I had a pretzel. We discovered that if we were more astute earlier, we could have seen Harry Potter at a special showing at the theater there. Then we took the streets to the post office, where I finally mailed my copy of This is Spinal Tap to someone who wanted it for $10.

All in all, it was a LOT of walking, so my feet hurt now, and I’m resting. I didn’t go into work today and feel kindof bad about that, except that I found out that nothing would have been done by me except a couple of useless phone calls anyway. I’m going to sit down and watch some TV now and rest.

I was thinking the other day for no particular reason about the expected price of the inevitable “Extended Edition” Lord of the Rings Mega-Set that New Line is sure to put out at the end of the whole trilogy being out on DVD, and thought a bit about using eBay as a futures market.

The idea is simple enough and here is how it would be executed:

1. Andy is willing to bet that the price of some tangible item to be sold in the future will cost X or lower.
2. Andy starts an auction on eBay with a starting price (or reserve price) of X.
3. Bob thinks that the price of said tangible item will be higher than X, so he places a bid on the auction.
4. Repeat Step 3 with other bidders who believe the price will be even higher.
5. Once the auction ends, Andy has a contract with the highest bidder to buy said tangible item when it is placed on the market and send it.

It’s fairly simple, but it could easily be pulled off. The question is whether anyone would go for this plan, if it’s possible to have a futures market on items which don’t exist yet, and if it’s within the bounds of eBay rules.

This scheme couled easily be repeated with more classic futures markets on eBay, for example people betting on the price of a bushel of corn in July or something.

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