Mostly Harmless

Joined twitter to whore out a tweet/twitter for free software from MacHeist. http://twitter.com/HarmlessBob

I’ve been burning vacation days recently (by order of the powers that be) and for the most part I spend the days websurfing, reading books, and watching movies.

I was going to actually leave the apartment tonight to see a movie and wash the car but the weather sucks so to heck with that.

The extra-lazy part of the story is that I’ve used six different iPhone apps to look up the movie showtimes (Flixster), then the weather temp (Weather), and traffic (Google Maps) — seeing that traffic was moving slowly I got more weather details from WeatherBug and the The Weather Channel app. Finally I am posting this from the WordPress application.

The only problem is that I need to move to get food… But I suppose I could order in.

I like to say that the iPhone is also a phone. I hardly ever use it for that, however.

(retro blog — I saved a draft of this a couple of months ago but never finished it. I want to see how the picture upload works out.)

I’m blogging from inside the theater since there are only 2 other people here so far and I’m behind them. Also I was losing at MotionX Poker.

For $1 less than the ticket price for this event (25th anniversary showing, one night only) I could buy the 25th anniversary DVD. Hopefully the interviews are decent.

This event is basically a promo for the “sequel” but there isn’t much on TV tonight so I figured I’d watch the movie on the big screen again. I probably saw it on the big screen 25 years ago, when I was a wee lad, but I have no recollection of that.

I’ve seen the movie a number of times since then, of course, which was the reason I kicked ass on the WOPR trivia question at the IT gathering last week. I also knew the significance of “42″ (f’ng DUH!)… One: my Mac at home is named “wopr”, befitting the gigantic performance leap over my last Mac, and Two: this blog (and my “gamer tag”) are Hitchhiker’s Guide related.

What saddened me was how soundly I kicked butt in IT/nerd Jeopardy in a room full of “IT professionals.” I won gift certificates for my whole table.

Oh: two more bodies for the movie. They should sell at least one copy of the new movie. I’ve already acquired mine, which makes their “no recording devices” warning a bit pointless. Maybe the interviews are particularly awesome.

Three minutes to show time.

… Time passes …

Show’s over. The interviews were actually pretty good. Both Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy noted the importance of their roles in WarGames for their careers. I think Matthew’s turned out better in the long run.

It was nice to see it on the big screen with no interruptions. I still find the movie’s computer tech amusing. Not laugh out loud hilarious like “Hackers,” but fun nonetheless.

I swear that Hackers gets funnier every time I see it. “Hacking a Gibson” — bwahahah!

Yup. It works.

Really long article about Milliways, that I haven’t had time to read yet:

Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Playable game:

Milliways (Release 15, Serial 880512)

Once upon a time I missed a calculus test because I was playing the Hitchhiker’s Guide game in the school computer lab. It would have been considerate of my fellow classmates to have mentioned the test (or even class) on their way out of the lab, instead of on the way back into the lab. (In my defense I claim that spending every waking minute in a computer lab has worked out pretty well so far.)