No four-day weekend this time around. We’re working a half day today…supposed to close up shop around lunchtime.  To make matters even worse, we had snow overnight. A good inch or two of new-fallen crap to clean off the car before I could go anywhere. Seems like it’s hardly worth the effort to come in for just a half-day.  I guess I’m supposed to be doing in-house work today…

I’ve got to take a look at our antivirus server - we’ve had something crawling around our network for about a week now, and a couple of the machines aren’t updating right out front. I think one of our receptionists was bored and clicking on something she shouldn’t have…

And we’ve got some new hard drives for our backup server. The old ones are completely full. Back when we set it up 600 GB seemed like an insane amount… Never really thought we’d fill it up… But a single backup these days includes about 20 GB of music/movies/pictures, so that 600 GB doesn’t go too far anymore. We’re going up to 1.5 TB, which again seems insanely huge, but I’m sure we’ll fill it before too long.

And there’s some more work to do on our RT install… Though I’m starting to think that it’s a lost cause. We’ve pretty much embraced it now for our work orders, all but stopped using the paper ones, but I keep getting hit with questions about how to make people do things as they should be… How can we make people keep detailed notes, how can we make people close out the work order when they’re done, how can we make people keep track of the time worked… The problem is that those aren’t really software problems - they’re people problems. And the only way to really solve them is to fine/discipline/fire the offending people; which my boss is unwilling to do. So I’m really not sure how much good the whole RT thing is going to do in the long run.

It’s Friday again, finally, with hope of another four-day weekend.  But I’m not entirely sure that another four-day weekend would be a good thing…

Sure, more time off from work is great, but I’m still recovering from the last four-day weekend.  I’ve been sluggish all week…  Trying to catch up with everything that broke on Monday and Tuesday while simultaneously getting the stuff done that was scheduled for the rest of the week…  I’ve been tired all week and feeling like I ought to be sleeping in later and working less.  I just haven’t felt like I was ready for a return to work.

Today’s been especially bad…I’m all kinds of out-of-sorts today.  Had some trouble falling asleep last night…  The bedroom felt too warm and stuffy, I couldn’t get comfortable.  I woke up this morning at 5:00 and had a very hard time falling back asleep.  My face feels funny…itchy…and I am very tired.  I keep feeling like I should just close my eyes and go back to sleep.

We watched Blade Runner: Final Cut last night… I was very impressed with the changes made to the newest version.

The visuals are much cleaner and clearer than I remembered them. The night-lit skyline, which I remembered as being muddy and grey, was instead sparkling and bright. But, unlike the special editions of the Star Wars movies, the special effects were not completely re-done with over-the-top CG stuff. It was all very subtle. There was nothing I saw that absolutely screamed “new effects!” - instead, it was all simply clearer and easier to see.

I also liked that all the voice-overs were gone. Yes, I know that they’re a staple of film-noir, but in this movie they just got in the way. They were too loud, too obtrusive, too invasive. At times it sounded like somebody had just muted the movie and started talking…you couldn’t hear any of the ambient sounds/music/conversations. I think the movie works much better now that they’re gone.

A number of the scenes have been touched up a bit… Some of them are slightly longer, or shorter, or just plain different than I remember. Nothing too obvious, but it all seems to flow a lot better. There’s also more suspicion that Deckard is a replicant, which I think is a good thing. It draws out the moral questions more.

Terri asked me, after the movie, why it was called “Blade Runner” and I had to confess that I didn’t know why… As it turns out, apparently the name just sounded good.  Then she asked me why I liked it so much, if I don’t even know what the title means…

(more…)

Back to work today…  Felt weird getting up so early, heading in to work.  It’s been a while since I had a normal workday.  I was off for a couple days last week when Terri had her surgery…and then I had the four-day weekend for the holiday…

And I’m starting the week off with a real bang.  I was supposed to spend most of the day working at just one client’s location…  We’re setting up an Exchange server for them, bringing all their mail in-house.  I was going to standardize all their usernames into something sane…set up a password complexity policy…set up the exchange server…  Also had to give everyone some private storage space on the server, and set up the Cisco for home VPN connections…  Certainly enough there to keep me busy most of the day.

But, of course, the phone’s been ringing off the hook.  One of our clients can’t get into their accounting software and needs it to run payroll.  Another client, a medical office, is having trouble with one of their reception PCs.  Another medical office has one of their Dr.’s tablets down.  And that’s just the stuff for me.  Everyone else is scrambling as well.

So, it looks like I’m going to spend the day running from one place to the next.  And it’s all made far more brutal by the fact that I’m just not up to speed yet…  I’m really dragging…  Everything seems to be happening far too quickly for me.  That’s what I get for having so much time off.

We just got back from seeing AvP:R - and I was very pleasantly surprised by it.

I wasn’t really expecting much…  I figured it pretty much had to be better than the first one.  And after The Mist turned out to be pretty darn good I had hope.  But I never really expected it to actually be good.

This time around they didn’t pull any punches just to get a PG-13 rating…  Nor did they indulge in gratuitous violence as is so very popular these days…  Plenty of very nice references to the original movies…  Lots of good action…  Several very suspenseful moments…  A few very surprising scares…

Definitely good enough that I’m looking forward to seeing it again when it eventually comes out on DVD.  We’ll almost certainly buy it.  And I’m now very hopeful that they’ll make a 3rd movie.