Well. I picked up the package. It’s BIG! Daunting. I’m a bit scared to open it, really. Big heavy clunky things inside. I’m glad I didn’t pick it up on the way to work, I wouldn’t have lasted the day without opening it.

And the answers?
Sometimes the answers just come in the mail.
And one day, you get that letter you’ve been waiting for forever.
And everything it says is true.
And then in the last line it says, burn this.

I’m nervous. I haven’t been nervous for a long time. While walking the half-block home from the post office this afternoon, I thought: “I’m holding my future in my hands”. Or is it my past? Or neither?

Now I in you without a body move.
And in our hearts we fly.
Standby.
Good morning. Good night.
Same Time Tomorrow, Laurie Anderson (both excerpts)

I just got one of those mystery parcel pickup cards in my postbox today. What could it be? Who could it be from? Not many people have my address here. Could it be a bank? They seem to like sending me things. The back of the card tells me that it’s an “Ordinary Article / Parcel”, whatever that is. There’s another tick box for “International”, so it’s going to be something from within the country.

This might be The Letter That Explains Everything. But why isn’t it just a regular letter, delivered with the rest of the post? I’ve waited for this letter with great angst and excitement since I sent my first and only love letter, nearly a month ago. Since then, there has been not a word from her. Nothing. Normally, I hear something at least once a week. I take this to be a very bad sign. But why a parcel?

Don’t tell me you don’t love me,
For I don’t want to know.
I don’t buy lottery tickets
To be rolling in the dough.

Someday, I’ll work those lines into a million-selling pop single. Until that day, they’ll be here, gathering dust and maybe the occasional eyeball.

Righto. Navelgazing over. Time to make dinner.

Two muffins are in an oven. One muffin looks at the other muffin and says, “Hey, it’s getting a little hot in here, isn’t it?”

The other muffin says: “EEAAAAAAAHHHHH!! A TALKING MUFFIN!!!!”

_[I’m such a sucker for this crap]_

This is a bit scary – the globalisation “companies are evil” crowd will love this one:

Private military contractors are being hired to support American troops in Iraq. Kellog Brown & Root, a private military company has become an indispensable to American military needs. As much as 20% to 30% of the military support in Iraq has been accredited to private military. Some legislators argue that the contracts are a benefit to the people because the contractors are as competent and less expensive than the military. However, some Army generals feel that the contractors are less disciplined than the military and therefore unreliable.

_[from FUTUREdition

From Slashdot:

After upgrading their network infrastructure and doing some testing over the summer, Dartmouth University is making free voice over IP available to incoming freshman . It turns out it was costing them more to bill the students for local and long distance than for the calls themselves.

I wonder how many other similar organisations have looked at the cost of billing vs the cost of phone calls. It’s currently impractical here in Australia, due to Telstra having its head up its ass, but I’m thinking of Telus in Canada, who have recently moved their entire infrastructure to VoIP. What does this mean for the economics of long distance calls? Will flat-rate long distance be the future?

Eric just gave me a great testimonial on Friendster – now if only more people knew what he knows. And I’m not sure how he knows, really. I don’t think I’ve been that drunk around him.

My friend Pat Griffin built cardboard computer – although “built” might not be the right word. “Taped together” perhaps. So much for Japan being a groovy high-tech place.

He’s in Japan for a year or so, teaching English in a small town somewhere near Hiroshima. He took his old 12” G4 Powerbook with him, as well as a disassembled Celeron PC. He found a good cardboard box and put it all back together again. Two snaps up!

Sydney is really beautiful (obligatory Melbnian comment: yeah but it’s expensive and the people aren’t as nice). A stylised computer-animated utopian Sydney is stunning. Fish are really pretty. Stylised computer-animated utopian fish are stunning. Put those two together and run it through Pixar, and no matter what happens in the plot, it’s gonna be a pretty good film.

The plot was a pretty standard overprotective parent loses son and stops at nothing to find him. Both the dad and the son end up better people at the end. Yay (Aside: Why do all Pixar films so far feature single parents?). Nothing special there. There’s a bit of a buddy film happening as well, because the dad meets up with another fish who travels around with him. She’s got a very funny short term memory loss issue (you’d almost think she should start tattooing phrases on her body).

Some of the glimpses into fishlife and birdlife are hugely funny – one of my favourites is the seagull. They only can say one word, and it’s not “please”. All the same, the personalities seemed very Disney and one-dimensional. I can’t believe I’m going to write this, but Buzz Lightyear was a complex character compared to some of them in this film. They weren’t as interesting as some of Pixar’s other characters, they didn’t seem as “real” – the bad guys were bad, the good guys were good, and that was that.

Saying something like “the worst of the Pixar films” is a bit misleading. That’s like saying “the worst flavour of Toblerone”. It doesn’t measure up to either of the Toy Stories or A Bug’s Life, but it’s still better than most of the other crap in the theatres.

Before the film, they showed a Pixar Short, as tradition seems to dictate. It was an old one, Knick-Knack. One of my favorites, and a very good soundtrack, but it would have been good to see something new. But something wasn’t right. Something was missing. I’m almost certain.

Really quickly, it’s a film about a frustrated snowman knickknack trying to get out of his snowglobe prison and seduce the beautiful mermaid knickknack. Problem is, in this remixed and Disnified version, the poor mermaid has had a mastectomy! If memory serves, in the original, she had a massively ridiculous set of boobies, and now they’re gone. Pixar has re-rendered the short and removed the tits. Gone! What, are cartoon breasts not allowed in Disney movies?