iconic

sunday:

the week began with an early-morning meeting with wordsworth. advice to the world: when you're meeting with someone, there are two things you can do in order to prevent having to start the meeting late in spite of you both having arrived on time. the first is to look around before going inside, the second is not to sit in a dark corner in the back. i arrived first and on blades, so i'd perched myself right next to the entrance...

afterwards, i went to the cinemateque to pick up a ticket for hobo with a shotgun. while i was there, i overheard confusion from the girl in front of me and the guy behind the counter, and was the first to let them know that there are TWO icon festivals; in a country this tiny, there's nothing more ridiculous. i went around to the other one to check out the gaming wares, and after getting contact information decided that i'd order stuff online if it's going to be so expensive after the icon discount.

unfortunately, whether imported or not, the games in this country are super-expensive. and purchasing them online even more so :S

after all that blading i was too sweaty to go to work. i had a shower, and worked from home. even with all of pg's distractions* it was still more efficient than being in the office, and FAR more comfortable. also, when i felt the need to react loudly to absurdly illogical behaviour i could feel free.

* not least of which, a lengthy argument over the types of food generally available in the apartment; in the evening we went shopping together and sorted that one out

in light of friday's failure i've been carrying pg's bus pass with me. i don't feel bad at all about it because at the end of the day i'm going to be paying the same amount for mine, whether i purchase it this week or the week after, and pg barely uses it when we don't have classes. i'm just pissed off with the ministry for making it so damn complicated to buy what dan wants to sell :S

when i got into the other office in the early evening i was still angry about the whole voodoo-scripting thinking, and my greetings got kinda tangled up with a rant and rave about the day's discoveries. sorter had a good laugh at me because my raised voice was making the door he was leaning against vibrate :P

we went downstairs for a calming cup of coffee, and agreed that i'm going to begin porting what i've done so far to flex. it now seems like an even better idea than java.

having learned a lesson about code reviews, i began to perform the thorough pre-release check, having gone over the QA report and intending to be done before leaving. boy, was i wrong... he's still taking shortcuts with the comments, his functions are badly named, and i haven't the foggiest notion of how he checked off his QA tests when the damn thing wasn't working. at all. i spent an hour going over it and rewriting it with him by my side, then he left and i carried on finding mistakes :S

once i'd gotten everything operational, i sent him a long email expressing my desire to kill him for lying to me and containing instructions on how to proceed. i had just over half an hour to get to the movie, so i hurried and hopped on the first bus that should have taken me there.

WRONG BUS! and the worst part is that the driver had double-checked to make sure that everyone was trying to get to bat yam, while i was listening to music... and contemplating hopping off and walking, but i figured that i'd save a good ten minutes and i was feeling lazy. when the bus turned left at azrieli, my heart sank and i scrambled to the front, too late to be able to get off before we hit the highway.

i was devastated, the clock was ticking, and there wasn't anything to be done. he put me down at the first stop with a rough explanation of which line to take; i checked out taxi prices, which would have been about twice the price of the ticket, and paced back and forth between stops while deliberately not paying attention to the two guys lurking on a nearby wall playing horrible, loud music in the dark.

26 TO THE RESCUE! not only did a bus come fairly soon, but it was a much better one than the driver had told me about - it dropped me off right at the cinemateque instead of a half-hour's walk away. and those two guys from the wall? they got on the bus too - it turned out they were security guards :P

as i got off the bus i ran into my co-worker on his way home from the previous showing; i was amused that he hadn't told me where he was going to. i convinced him to join me, and then met up with cm, his girlfriend and another guy from the rollerblading group.

hobo with a shotgun: 1.5 hours of mental backflips, a half an hour's walk trying to deal with the horror (the script almost as much as the gore, and it kind of worked!), and I think I'm scared of canadians now. seriously, though, it's a great terrible film and the more i think about it the more intrigued i am. i'm fairly certain that any depth is coincidental, but my word - that movie says a lot.

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today:

the early morning involved following around the handyman while he examined my patio roof. unfortunately, there are weird bugs outside (i'm almost certain they're attracted by the fact that the neighbourhood cats use our garden as their dumping ground) and i got bitten, but the bumps and itches didn't last more than an hour or so. anyway, he wants to construct a replacement roof of polyurethane. it sounds a bit expensive and i'm not sure about it, but it's definitely a better solution than what there is currently...

after a couple of hours at work fighting with pie, i got it to work (more or less) and stepped out to pick up a salad. lesson 1: order medium, not large. it was a delicious salad, but i ate too much. i don't know that that's the only reason i found myself passing out at my desk, unable to continue working on a problem that would hurt my brain now if i'd start thinking about it. my boss and i spent the next hour or so struggling together, and eventually he took it over and authorized my returning to the other project. i'd almost forgotten there was other stuff to do.

the bus driver recognized me on the way back, so i didn't even have to show him my student card...

i was at work for a very short while, accepting an apology from my co-worker and finalizing the stuff from the day before. i then came home, in time to run but without energy to do so. i crashed on the couch, surfacing only for dinner, and then pg and i walked to the cinemateque to meet her brother and cm and his girlfriend. oddly enough, we ran into scrapper and a girl from my class...

love is two movies long, the first ending with something akin to a spacewalk. none of us have a clue what happened, and only one of us (myself) enjoyed the movie in spite of its tediousness. actually, i thought that the director expressed the sense of time excruciatingly well. it's a visually astounding movie, the sound is great, the ideas are all good and only the ending is lacking in clarity; it's a confused muddle of messages that would all make sense if we'd been given a base context for them.

either way, it's a tiring movie.

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it's taken me a while to write all of this, during which time i've been trying to upgrade my iphone software. unfortunately, itunes popped up a question about proceeding while i was in the middle of typing a sentence and accepted my input as negative. now i'm not sure if i'm upgrading or restoring.