June 3, 1999
Dear Everyone:
After a few warm days at the beginning, we’ve been
having a remarkably cool, and windy, spring.
Temperatures have hardly pulled up into the upper 70’s, much less
the usual 80’s. Not that I’m
complaining. I prefer it
cooler rather than hot. But
it is beginning to look like one of those “let’s spend the
Fourth of July skiing in the mountains” kind of summers.
We’ll see.
“Jeannie” still doesn’t have email yet.
This is because she will probably have to take a day off from
work to be around for the phone company to come in and install a new
line. Everything else is up
and ready. I’ve even gone
into her address book and entered all the family email addresses for
her. In the meantime, she’s
working diligently on her mouse skills, playing several games of
Solitaire
each day. It’s only a matter
of time now.
At work, we’ve been dealing with a bit of a snafu.
It seems that those fun-loving little rascals at the “Hobby”
Records Center have been mistakenly entering the wrong box numbers into
Versatile.
Thus, they have been changing the locations on numerous
“Livermore” boxes. The boxes
are physically in “Livermore”, but
Versatile thinks they’re in “Hobby”, thanks to some erroneous keying
by the “Hobby” folk. So far,
the tip of this particular iceberg looks to be around 3-4000 boxes.
So I’ve been spending time trying to figure out the
best way to put things back the way they were.
This takes time away from replacing
Versatile with
extemporé;
but many things are on hold right now.
I’m finally meeting with technical people regarding getting set
up as a customer on a shared
server.
And getting our hands on the actual
extemporé
software is coming closer.
But I think it will still be several weeks before we can do any actual
testing. (So frustrating!)
In other news…
Finally went to see
Star Wars (full name
Star Wars
Episode 1 The Phantom Menace) with “Jeannie” last weekend.
It actually worked out quite well.
I walked over to the theater at around 10:30 Sunday morning and
bought tickets to the 1:00 PM showing.
The cashier advised getting there an hour before Show Time to
ensure getting good seats.
This meant that “Jeannie” didn’t have to reach my place much before
noon, a time when she is likely to actually be awake.
Was it worth the wait?
I think so. It has
all the necessary elements:
Beautiful queen, handsome knights, evil villains, cute kid, comical
sidekick, exciting races, spectacular special effects.
And music by
John Williams. Some
people have complained that the plot is rather simplistic.
In
The Mummy
(which you’ve either already seen or probably aren’t going to), someone
asks Brendan
Fraser’s character why he is taking a particular course of action.
Fraser deadpans:
“Rescue the damsel in distress; beat the bad guy; save the world.”
That pretty much sums it up here as well.
Numerous recurring themes, such as technologically
superior bad guys can’t hold a candle to cute-and-fuzzy good guys, even
if the good guys’ best “secret weapon” is a single, incredibly clumsy
individual. And, of course,
lots and lots of “creatures, aliens and droids”.
And as for the comical sidekick,
Jar Jar Binks,
I have heard him described as “frog-like”, but I felt that, with his big
feet, gangly limbs, floppy ears and genius for running in the wrong
direction during a crisis, he more resembled
Brer Rabbit.
And for hard core Star Wars fans, the movie
provides several important clues as to why “the Force” is so strong in
the Skywalker
family and what went (will go) so wrong with
Darth Vader.
In all, it’s thoroughly enjoyable.
And, as I told Mother, “Hell, it’s got
Liam Neeson and
Ewan McGregor in it.
What more do you want?”
Go.
Enjoy.
Love, as always,
Pete
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