"Spontaniously Demounting"

Ya, my new HDD decided to unmount. At random. New 160 gigabyte HD that after a series of confusing rebates would cost a mere $40. If send the rebates. Probably will if it's not too late. Woop...too late.

I'm starting to wonder if my note taking at work has become my new "creative outlet". It's not like tech support note taking can be that creative. I've just noticed some of my titles are broken up and separated to summarize an issue in the fewest number of words possible. Sort of like a news paper headline. Have to be sort of creative to do that effectively.

I'm starting to think Tiger was a successful launch. Judging by the call volume. Of course, not all of the calls are on tiger. But we have been rather slammed since the first week post-tiger launch. In fact our wait times have been hovering around 20 minutes at certain times of the day. In those instances I've been going out of my way to thank customers for waiting for so long before the caller has even said anything. I'm hoping to defuse an upset caller made more so by a really long wait. So far none of these customers I tried to defuse were very upset. In fact most were rather nice.

It appears my time at apple is soon to come to an end. Couple more months and I'll be finding a new job in fact. It's time to move on anyway. This is just like in college when I took all those networking classes but didn't have a network at home to play with. With nothing play with/break/fix/experiment all this stuff is just conceptual. I don't own a Mac so I still feel a degree of separation from the very product I'm supposed to be both advocating and supporting. If I had one to play with/break/fix/experiment I would probably be much more of a fan and do my job a lot more effectively than I am. And my call resolution is already pretty high now.

In other news I saw Episode 3 last night. And today of course (predictably) I watched episode 4. Then a second time...in Spanish. Like everyone else who saw episode 3 last night...(right).

So it appears Lucas made these three new movies extremely bad B-movies on purpose as he's two movies to practice on now and no longer has an excuse for making bad movies. Not necessarily true that Episode 3 is extremely awful, just that it has what you might call weak points. On the plus side Jar-Jar doesn't have a single line in the whole thing.

Also it did in fact earn it's PG-13 rating. Hopefully this won't be a spoiler to anyone: Anikin becomes Darth Vader in this movie. And does so in a rather gruesome way. Although Anakin's first lines as Darth Vader left me a bit unnerved. But then it is a bad B-Movie. So what do ya expect?

There are of course other points of embracement. Yoda jumping up on Chewie's shoulders. Yoda taking off in a ship in fashion reminiscent of the ending of E.T. A wookie yodeling like Tarzan.

I still wish it had been made a little better. The dialog written and delivered with some degree of competence. The quality a little higher.

I didn't think about looking at what time it was through the whole thing though. If nothing else a movie can be judged by it's whether a viewer can keep attention on the movie through the whole thing and not start to lose interested think about other things.

Also keep in mind I don't even dislike bad B-movies. I still have fond memories of the B-Movie no one has heard of: Knights. But if you're going to do it that way why not go full-bore and over-the-top bad B-movie (like Knights)? Why try to make some parts like a movie you can expect to be real movie and others just plane lame?


By comparison look at the movie The Mummy. Now that's a B-movie that *knows* it's a B movie and isn't afraid to admit it. And stays consistent in that mindset all the way through movie. I loved The Mummy on so many levels.

One example of a lame line is the now famous line from the movie: "only the sith deal in absolutes" as uttered by Obi-Wan Konobi to a newly formed Darth Vader who had just said something like "you're with me or against me". That's a really bad line in fact. Because the appeal of the first movie was the absoluteness of it: the empire is 100% evil 100% of the time. In fact the opening "crawl" of the movie goes out of it's way to say "the evil galactic empire". Sounds like an absolute to me. Did Lucas just indirectly admit to being a sith? Nah.

The ending was at least partially satisfactory. Sets the stage for episode 4 to pick up where it leaves off rather effectively. And really it's not a cliff hanger/drop off for the TV series either. At least it didn't appear like this to me.

Ya, TV series. You heard about that right? Live-action TV series. No directed by Lucas at that. So maybe it'll be more serious, like the new Battlestar Galactica. Or maybe it'll be more the B-movie tradition, closer to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. Not going to have any movie series main characters of course. As long as it's not like That 70s Show in subtle references to things in the later movies I guess I'll watch it.  ¶ 10:06 PM