When I go on trips, where I’m away from work and distractions, I take a long list with me of things I want to get done. Ususally, this also involves carrying a lot of additional weight along so that I can get those things done. This time, since I drove, I had even more room for stuff like that.

So, what I planned to get done:

1. Write the latest in my series of articles.
2. Finish reading Pirx the Pilot and Chasing Shadows so that I can start reading the latest Harry Potter tome.
3. Figure out my training schedule for the rest of the year.
4. Start some serious work on the book I’m writing with Chris.
5. Find at least another 50 geocaches.
6. Get code working for GeoEat.com
7. Various other assorted things, including several things I wanted to write/edit/rewrite for the Apache docs.

What I actually got done

1. Had good Ethiopian food. Twice. Mmmm.
2. Spoke at the St. Louis Perl Mongers about, of course, Apache.
3. Found 8 geocaches
4. Got some preliminary OO-ish stuff working for the underlying GeoEat stuff, but got sidetracked on a Geo::Caching module that may or may not ever make it to CPAN.
5. … um … well, that’s all.

So, I’ve decided, the next time I go on one of these trips, I’m not going to take anything more than a good book. And a few hundred geocaching waypoints. And … um … some other stuff. Yeah, that’s all. And my laptop. And … stuff.

It was about 1 by the time I got home last night, I didn’t stop to do any geocaching on the way home, because it was already late, and dark, and I was tired, so I didn’t want to make it any later. Oh, well, so much for my goal.

Well, thank the stars, McDonalds is going to think for us, so we don’t have to. Because Americans are, apparently, too dumb to make decisions about what they eat, McDonalds is removing items from their menu that might be unhealthy if, say, some moron were to eat nothing but McDonalds food for a month. (And, to make it worse, he won an award for it?.) So, in an attempt to protect us from our own stupidity, they’re going to remove the SuperSize option. Perhaps they should also impose a restriction on how many times I’m permitted to eat there in a week, since *clearly* i’m too dumb to make that kind of decision on my own.

Frankly, I’m slack-jawed in amazement that people can be so dumb. Not McDonalds, of course. They’re doing the only sensible thing, in the light of getting sued because idiots don’t realize that eating nothing but burgers and fries might be a health risk. I’m gratified, however, that the courts have thrown out some of these lawsuits. I hope they also fined the lawyers in question for filing boneheaded suits.

Since first grade, we have been taught to eat a balanced diet. Folks, “balanced” does not mean one cheeseburger in each hand. I think that’s obvious to most people not intentionally trying to be obtuse.

I’m waiting for someone to sue a liquor store because they went for a month on nothing but beer and vodka, and their health deterioriated.

For those that wondered why I care about what’s going on in Haiti, my Sister and her family live there, in Port Au Prince. I spoke (IM) with her this morning, and she says that things are moderately calm. There was a picture on CNN this morning of burning tires in the streets, and people calmly walking by, going about their business. This, she says, seems to sum up how things are. People seem moderately unconcerned, and it’s mostly business as usual. An American who had been in Haiti for many years offered the best advice a few weeks ago. If you know where the riots are, or if you see burning tires, don’t go there. Seems like sage advice to me.

She also mentioned that Sunday is the birthday of Guy Philippe, the leader of the rebels. He’ll be 36, and wants to celebrate his birthday by capturing the capital city.

To clarify something that someone asked me about earlier – no, Haiti does not have an army. They were disbanded after the US military action in 1994, and have not been reestablished since then. So there’s pretty much the police, and Aristide’s bands of hired thugs, who are resisting the remnants of the old army, along with some reinforcements from Dominican Republic. So, it would seem, from an uninformed external view point, that there’s really very little chance of resisting them.

The US is sending 50 Marines down to Port Au Prince to protect the embassy in the event that the rebels capture the capital city. Don’t expect folks to forget that it was the USA that put Aristide back in power in 1994 after these same folks (or at least many of the same people) threw him out.

I hope that the incoming government, whatever that looks like, has more to their 5-year plan than just ousting Aristide.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to revive this journal. I tend to have tasting notes that I want to put somewhere, and after forgetting to do so for a few days, I forget what I wanted to say. So, this is mostly a feeler to see if I actually have any readers. I expect not, but it’s worth asking.

I watched “A Christmas Carol” yesterday. Twice. First, I watched Allistair Sim’s version, from 1951, and then Patrick Stewart’s version from 1999.

Of course, I had seen the Sim one before. It’s been around for a while. It is pretty good, except that it takes a great deal of liberty with the story, adding huge bits about how Scrooge came into business, and squeezed Fezziwig out – stuff that’s not even suggested in the book. And they change Belle’s name to Alice and make her a worker in a homeless shelter, rather than a mother of a dozen or so kids frolicking around the christmas tree.

I had not sen the Stewart version before. Wow. It was truly amazing. Stewart has a knowledge of the story that few other people have. He’s been doing a live reading/enactment of the story for more than 10 years now, and knows the story inside and out. He takes a few liberties with the story, but only those which help to explain a few of the more obscure details to a modern audience. The only thing that I really didn’t care for was the narration, which was injected a few times to fill in some details, and was the voice of Fred. Somehow it didn’t seem right to have Fred narrating it. Also of great interest to me was the graveyard scene, which borrows something from the Mickey Mouse version of the story! I’ve not seen this bit put into the story by anyone else, and so it immediately brought to mind Scrooge McDuck. That was somewhat distracting, but I suppose that it was still a very effective addition, even though it is also not mentioned in the book. Finally, I *REALLY* liked the end of the Christmas Past scene. I feel that it is one of the most symbolic bits of the entire story, and it has never been shown in any other movie rendition.

Yes, I’m being vague, because I don’t want to give away the good parts to anyone who might end up seeing this version. If you want to watch a Christmas Carol movie, this is the one to see. Absolutely fabulous, and more true to the spirit of the story than any other that I have yet seen. And I have … um … several.

I refuse to forward these sorts of things in email, but I don’t mind putting the on my web site.

Between being sick on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and being generally lethargic on Saturday, I movie binged this week, seeing:

* The Mission
* The Black Cauldron
* Dead Man Walking
* Shocked
* Leap of Faith
* Cast Away

I think I *might* have seen “Shocked” before, many years ago, but I’m not certain. The rest of them, this was the first time to see. And, also with the exception of “Shocked”, they were all movies thave have been on my list for a while. I tend to be rather selective when I go to rent movies, and seldom get things by whim.

“Black Cauldron” was a book that I read when I was young, and was, I believe, my introduction to the Tolkein-esque genre. Although I may have already read, or had read to me, The Hobbit, by then. It is unabashedly derivative. And the movie, almost as though to mock this, has the same illustrator for the kid as did arthur in “Sword in the Stone” and the same illustratof for the pig as did the pig in Charlotte’s Web. I don’t know either of these for certain, but the drawing is so exactly the same, that I don’t see how it could not be.

“The MIssion” was very interesting. The footage of Iguacu was pretty amazing. And the history lessons about Paraguay were helpful in understanding some of the Jesuit buildings that we saw in the area. Shame so many things have to be politically motivated in the church, even today.

apparently i managed to acquire some kind of flu bug. bleh. all day sitting about feeling awful. bleh. bleh.