electric relaxation

Jai’s shoulder has healed to the point where he can play basketball again, so we’ve resumed our morning workout + games of 21 at the UCSF Mission Bay gym.

We cleared the record. After the first day, Jai was up a half game. He then followed up an exhausting stream of trash talking with an inexplicably poor showing resulting in back-to-back defeats (21-10, 21-15) and allowing me to recapture the lead.

However, Jai did snag the day’s highlight with a monstrous block on a left-side drive. His elation was exceeded only by my own shame.

Jai: 1 Ramesh: 2.5

I watched several good movies recently. A few of these were picked off of IMDB’s “Best Sci-Fi” titles list (sorted by popular vote).

• The Day The Earth Stood Still
  This is a classic Science Fiction movie (black and white, 1951), about an alien visitor who comes to Earth to warn humanity of the fact that aliens are closely watching their behavior. It’s aged remarkably well. Apparently they’re releasing a remake of it this year with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.
• The Prestige
  On the surface, this one seemed like it had a lot in common with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it’s a fairly different concept and story arc. I enjoyed it, though I don’t think it deserves the #10 spot on IMDB’s list.
• Persepolis
  An animated film that was nominated for an Oscar in the animated category (where it was defeated by Ratatouille). Pretty good, though I feel like it didn’t have the impact on me that it was supposed to… Perhaps I’m just being lame. At any rate the Eye of the Tiger sequence did not do anything for me, but other than that it was definitely very engaging.
• Some Kind of Monster
  A documentary about Metallica. It follows the band through the two-plus years leading up to the release of the St. Anger album in 2003. This one was recommended to me ages ago by John Haggerty, a former colleague of mine at VMware. I have had it lying around for years and I finally got around to watching it. Very worthwhile though ultimately I was a bit underwhelmed by the band’s drama and disorder compared to like a Queen or The Beatles or someone of that nature.
• The Iron Giant
  I’ve been intrigued by the visual style of this animated movie and I loved the book so this is another one that I’ve been meaning to watch forever. The story was pretty cheesy but the visuals were nice (side question: have these guys drawn other films? Their style seems similar to Fox studio work like Anastasia or I dunno, maybe it’s just the coloring or something).

I wish I had found this years ago:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/rss/best_new_music

When I get bored or motivated enough I’m planning on writing a little RSS transformer that transforms this feed into one that sources Mininova. Actually I think that’s exactly what Yahoo! Pipes is supposed to be for…

Update: Holy fuck, that was easy. I’m impressed. This link works in uTorrent.

I had a slow leak in the rear of my bike which I managed to fix today. I knew that this was supposed to be really easy to do but a dangerous combination of laziness and unfounded intimidation almost lead me to bring it in to the shop down the street where I bought the thing.

Anyway, it took all of fifteen minutes to do. I simply followed the first guide I found on the internet, though I skipped the tire levers since I didn’t find them necessary.