Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been grinding my way through Farscape Season 2, and came across the inevitable body switching episode. I find it amusing that it’s such a common theme in sci-fi shows (and with several movies where that’s the entire premise), especially considering how it’s a pretty tough plot device to swallow for even the most fantastic of fantasy settings. Of course, it often makes for an amusing exercise where you get to watch the actors try to impersonate each other. It’s often kind of neat for that alone, though the plots of these episodes are often quite… painful.

The Farscape incarnation of this was rather neat. First off, they mixed over the voices for the teaser part to partly make it seem more like the “transferred” character’s voice, and a little more unreal. I’m sure that would have gotten old fast, but it was a little strange that they dropped the effect for the rest of the episode after the opening sequence. What was best, though, was that when the male lead character was put into the female’s body, there wasn’t this dancing around the issue awkwardness of tripping in high heels or not knowing how to put makeup on or any of the other you-have-to-experience-it-to-really-know things. No: he found a corner, unzipped the top, and bounced.

Bounced.

Last year we had to deal with BEMs selecting a hurricane-devastated area of Mexico to hold the conference. We had deep fears all along that the hotel would not be ready (2 weeks of margin-of-error for their opening was not a lot of time for repairs that stretched out over 8 months) — and indeed, it wasn’t. We had to go with the hotel next door at the last minute, which over-charged us, and was suffering from some residual damage itself (periodic hot water and air conditioning outages, and the internet never worked in the rooms).

This year, we’re going to an undamaged part of Japan, so there shouldn’t be any of this nonsense. However, we’re still having issues being confident that this meeting will actually take place, so we haven’t booked flights or anything yet. For one thing, the deadline to apply for student travel support was last friday. As part of the application, they wanted your paid conference registration and a copy of your airline ticket (so they could estimate how much money they needed to find from sponsors for the travel awards). There was no registration form yet, so we couldn’t do that. And since there was no registration form, we hadn’t booked our tickets yet — they said that was fine, nobody had yet. Instead, they just wanted us to send in the page of the application with our contact information so that they could get an idea of how many students there would be.

I find this a little troubling, but even more troubling is that they haven’t yet picked a hotel to host the event. I don’t know about Japan, but in many other cities where we try to have conferences, you can’t leave booking out 150 rooms to the last minute. At least, not if you want a decent rate and/or to be close to where the conference will be. And not having any hotel information makes us cautious about booking flights. Despite not having anything done yet, we’re pretty sure the conference organizers will eventually book rooms for the conference itself, but what about the days before and after? Many of us from Canada are planning on arriving a day or two early to get over the jet lag before the conference begins. Many people are planning on staying afterwards for a bit of vacation, but if it turns out the rooms are a few hundred dollars a night, those plans might have to change, so we can’t very well book flights until we know how many days we can afford to stay in-country.

Two solid days of travel (24 hours in a plane or train, each way!) for 5 long days of work. I don’t know why I didn’t just outright refuse to go long ago. I don’t need the stress of worrying about this nonsense for two months in advance… not to mention the flying halfway around the world to be bored to tears by smelly, unwashed scientists. Though a really good suggestion was to try to get Febreeze to sponsor the conference, and we could mist everyone down as they entered…

I’ve had my computers set for the longest time to notify me of any Windoze Updates, but not to download or install them until I give the okay. Today I had two computers mysteriously reset on me when I was away at seminars, and I couldn’t figure it out. I think I know now: Windoze just popped up with that annoying “resetting in 4 minutes…” countdown after it does an automatic update….

What the hell?! I hate that “feature” that resets your computer no matter what you’re in the middle of after an automatic update (or worse yet, automatically resets it after 4 minutes if you step away, no matter what unsaved work you may have open). But more importantly, how in the hell did automatic updates get turned back on on my computers? And how is it that there’s an update that requires a reset now when I saw a news story that said MS was skipping Patch Tuesday for March?? I’m a little bit afraid now: has a trojan/virus finally managed to masquerade as Windoze Update and distribute itself to everyone at the operating system level? Did the patch from last month override my Windoze Update settings without telling me, and now it’s grabbing the patches I specifically ignored before?

London, for being a relatively medium-sized city, has a relatively decent bus system. If you want to go to a lot of places on major streets then you can do pretty well for yourself. While there are a few blind spots in the coverage, and some strange route choices, for the most part they even come often enough to be useful. And once they arrive, they’re pretty quick to get to where they’re going! However, I just can’t figure out a lot of the weird burst scheduling they do. For example, today we were at the hospital waiting for the bus to come to take us up to campus. One of my office mates said “oh, it’ll be nice and fast, the #6 comes every 5 minutes or so” and I said “well, it averages out to every 5 minutes, but we usually get 2 every 10.” And that’s actually the way the London Transit system works. In the summer, when there are fewer busses running due to the lack of students, there are two busses running down Richmond (or to put it in a way that’s more relevant, two busses that would take me from my old apartment to work). They each ran on 20-minute intervals outside of rush hour, and of course, they always came back-to-back, rather than being one every 10 minutes.

So there we are in the bus shelter, and 15 minutes after I made my quip about it averaging out with two busses every ten minutes, sure enough, three busses show up. Not just any three busses, but two #6’s and a #13 (which does a very similar route to the #6). Now, during rush hour that makes a bit of sense: when you can see that there’s another bus right there, you don’t try to kamikaze the doors of the already-full bus. But at the same time, the masses of people at the bus stops wouldn’t form quite so much if a bus actually came every 5 minutes instead of getting swarms of them every 15-20.

It got worse as the day went on, though. After seminars were over, it was time to head back to the hospital from campus. On campus there’s a spot in front of the Natural Sciences building where the busses stop for a bit to “get back on schedule” or let the drivers get a coffee and a break, etc. So in front of Natural Sciences are 4 idling busses: 3 #10’s and an “out of service” one. There were a bunch of people queuing up for the #6, which was nowhere in sight. Then, the driver for the “out of service” bus came back from break and started flipping, oh so slowly, through the route signs, keeping us in suspense. So, what did he reactivate his bus as? Not a #6, which a bunch of people were waiting for, and not a #2, which just had two busses come through but didn’t actually have any sitting right there at the moment. No, he came back into service as a fourth #10. That was just ridiculous. Then, a bit later, two #6’s came through, and within 3 stops we had completely filled the first one.

I hate the way he yells randomly. I hate the way he thinks saying things louder make them funny. I hate his penchant for male nudity. I hate his terrible, forced acting style. I even hate his awkward, lanky stance.

But I loved Stranger Than Fiction. In it, he played a mostly straight character: a mildly bumbling, obsessive-compulsive IRS agent… who hears voices. Specifically, one voice narrating his life. Aside from the odd bit of yelling at the sky, his usual shtick was happily absent.

The movie itself was actually really well done: surprisingly in many aspects. The pacing was very good and even, which is a bit surprising since as a comedy/romance/drama coming in at two hours there was undoubtedly pressure to cut it down to one and a half. The writing was also quite good, a welcome surprise since quite often movies about authors have rather terrible narration. With this one though, I think if you closed your eyes and listened to some of the narration, you could easily see it working quite well in a novel. Even the effects were well done, somewhat unusual for a film that really didn’t even need them in the first place.