I finally got around to posting a freshmeat update for the latest version of newslog. There are a couple of bug fixes and a few new features. It’s the first update in nearly a year.
Susan and I went to see Miss Congeniality last night. It was okay – definitely a see-once sort of movie but it was good for a few laughs. We saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon last week and I forgot to post a review – it was a good movie and worth seeing but has really, really cheesy fighting sequences. Apparently, anyone who possessed the magic green sword was able to fly (also anyone who previously possessed the sword, or knew someone who possessed it, or fought with someone who knew someone who possessed, etc…) and not just fly but sort of float as if they were full of helium. During at least one fight, people kept floating up in the air like balloons and had to be pulled back to Earth periodically to prevent them from drifting away before the fight was over. In other scenes they would swing back in forth over the house-tops as if hung from wires while pretending to run (even though their feet weren’t touching anything). At other times they flew more-or-less like Superman – arms outstreched and horizontal to the ground. There was never really any explanation – were they using the force? was it magic? One other minor complaint was that they used the fake-floating technique to compensate for lack of actual martial arts skills sometimes. There were several moves that I’ve seen actually done by humans under their own power in Jackie Chan movies that were faked in this movie by swinging people around on wires (such as ascending from ground level to roof top by bouncing between the walls of two adjacent buildings). Oh well, if you overlook the silly fighting it was actually a fairly interesting story and quite enjoyable to watch. Another see-once movie.
More interestingly, I had a blow-out in the right rear tire of my Integra on the way out to the movie theater last night. I put on that tiny little spare tire thing which most cars have in place of a real spare these days and it turned out to be flat (which is not suprising considering it’s been sitting in the trunk for 10 years). We stopped at a gas station and bought enough air to fill up the spare. Today we got some new tires. I’m planning on a buying a new car sometime this year. The Acura was great while it lasted but after 10 years the maintenance costs are getting high enough that I might as well just buy a new one.