This morning at 8:00 Sandra and I were at UVRMC (the local “big” hospital) for her MRI. I decided that rather than sit for an hour in a sterile waiting room playing with my new Blackberry device, I’d go get some breakfast. So I went to McDonald’s, and that took all of 10 minutes.

So I drove around.

UVRMC is at the northwestern corner of what I call “central Provo.” That’s where the grid of streets gets interrupted by the Grandview hill, and in the heart of that grid are a few places that were pretty important to me a decade ago.

I drove past the Acadamy Square library, built in the gutted-then-renovated facade of the old Brigham Young Acadamy. From there I drove past the little house on the 400 block of 2nd east where Sandra and I had our first married apartment, living downstairs from my friend the genius after whom I named “Kevyn” a decade later.

I drove a couple of blocks over to 341n 300e, which was my last “single” apartment — a house I shared with four other guys and a married couple who got the basement. I drove past the first LDS church Sandra and I attended as a married couple. I looked at the contstruction-atop-a-smoking-hole where the ratty old piano store used to be, where I worked for about 4 months.

I circled BYU campus, where I graduated about 11 years ago with my Bachelor’s Degree in music composition. On my way back towards the hospital I drove past 876N 300W, where RMS Audio and HoTay productions joined forces in 1995 to create Sanctus Records (which I sold off six years later). And finally, I drove past the house where Chalain was living when I first met him.

“Central Provo” used to seem much bigger.

–Howard

I just watched Tron for the first time in 20 years. The movie wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be, but it was still pretty hard to sit through.

There were a couple of memorable moments.

1) The meatspace bad guy (“Dillinger?”) says “The system isn’t there for user requests. It’s there for BUSINESS.”

Well, yeah. He’s RIGHT. User requests need to be brought in line with business reality. The system exists as a solution to business problems at the macro level, hopefully holistically approaching the matter, rather than simply letting users do what they usually do a little faster or more efficiently.

It’s amusing to listen to that and find that I agree with the bad guy (at least in one interpretation).

2) The credits… there’s a sequence where they credit the Taiwanese animators, and we have chinese characters running in vertical columns, green on black. If that’s not where the brothers Wachowski got the idea for their “Matrix” visual I’m a hairless gracile ape.

Jay, if you’re reading… good costume, dude. Capturing the “flow” effects of their circuitry would have been perfection, but you did fine without it. Besides, how many people have seen the film recently enough to compary?

–Howard

You know, I really only do two things for Novell. I mean, there’s the research, the meetings, the email, and all that stuff that I lump under “preparation,” but through it all I’m really only preparing for two things:

1) Presenting to the public
2) Negotiating with Engineers

I’ll liken these activities to the martial arts.

Presenting to the public is like performing the katas. You study the forms, you rehearse them slowly, and then you perform them at speed. It’s physically draining, as you’re supposed to be putting every bit as much power into those moves as you would be if you’re sparring. Ultimately, though, you’re in control. Sure, sometimes when I present to the public there’s a hostile out in the crowd, but I’ve prepared for this, and it’s in the context of my “show,” so it’s never a real threat.

Negotiating with engineers is like a street-fight. All those katas, all that rehearsing, all the study of the forms… it all comes down to surviving for the next thirty seconds. It’s just as physically demanding as kata performance (obviously), but there’s also a mental aspect to it that is completely exhausting, as you act and react real-time with your opponent, knowing that the stakes are a lot higher than missing a jump, pulling a muscle, or falling down during tricky footwork.

I have a two-hour street-fight scheduled to begin in forty-five minutes, and I’m currently sick. I need the martial-arts metaphorical equivalent of a handgun, so I can give all that exhausting stuff a wide miss and just FINISH HIM!

–Howard

I read three reviews of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which was released on DVD on June 22nd, and all three of them told me the movie would be a nigh-complete waste of my time.

Naturally, I ran right out and rented it.

The movie was filmed in the style of the campy Sci-Fi B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s in black-and-white, the dialog is bad, the acting is bad, the plot is bad, the science is bad, and the special effects are atrocious.

It’s perfect.

Well, almost.