Yesterday evening was
Lord of the Rings:
Fellowship of the Ring night. As a
movie of the book, it strikes a few
false notes here and there, but that doesn't stop it being an amazingly good
visual symphony. it's a visual
feast, well acted, well paced, probably the best movie I've seen this year. The effects are ubiquitous but not intrusive. For instance, after a while I just got over the effect that
Gandalf was almost twice as tall as
Frodo, and accepted it as reality.
As someone who read the book again this year for the nth time, I found the events as told in the movie went by very quickly.
The movie was supposed to start at 8:45, but we only got going around 9pm, and emerged, blinking, a seeming few minutes later, but after midnight. I and a headache and a runny nose & sore throat. Definitely a sniffle coming on, so I took a sinutab (Over the counter cold medication containing paracetamol & codeine: a very very nice pill for sleeping) and was out cold by one am.
In the morning I was feeling better, but I am still going to bunk gym today, hoping to feel 100% on Friday. I was at the doctor at 8:30 am on another matter. After measuring my vital signs he told me that I was fit as a fiddle, and the pains must have been a strained muscle. I felt better right away for knowing that.
My boss has me on another of his wild goose chases that he insists that I go on sometimes, chasing down transient errors that only manifest when the packets are traversing the internet and two firewalls. Now I have to try to replicate it on my PC. It's probably a real error, but I kinda feel that I have better things to do than spend the next two weeks fooling around with settings that don't actually change anything, becuase this is now "higher proirity" than stuff I can actually fix, as this is Java and you can't get at the low level stuff. I it wouldn't have happened if the protocol had been better designed in the first place. I am again appreciating large companines, when there are other experts to help you out, when your advice on your speciality is valued, when the programmer doesn't double as the system administrator, webmaster and network troubeshooter.
I spent several hours staring at text scroll by, indicating flawless transmission on localhost, whist surfing E2. And finally getting around to reading critical opinion on LoTR:FoLR. I had been avoiding this until I had seen the movie firsthand. It looks like they have stuffed up my pay again this month. I'm not overly motivated.
I have stopped being nice to the HR lady, after she today promised to find my payslip and didn't reappear at all. Assuming that it exists, I will extract it from her tomorrow. I could be more proactive about this, but I find keeping my web site up and in business more interesting. I'm a coder not an accountant. They don't exactly go the extra mile either, and I'll be lucky to get anything from them in the next couple of days, asuming that they are not all on leave already. Sometimes being on contract sucks.