New England

I've never been to the east coast before, so Kelly used to try and describe it to me so I'd know what it was like where she grew up. She'd tell me about all of the trees and the weird winding roads and everything, and I really had a hard time imagining a place where the houses were just built with woods surrounding them and no fences, so you could run through the forest in your backyard.

Well, now I'm here in Connecticut visiting her, so I see how everything is like she described. However, it didn't seem as strange as I'd thought just by the description. In fact, I recognized the place as we drove in to Danbury that first night: New England is where all of the horror movies take place.

That was a comforting realization as I was about to meet my girlfriend's family for the first time.

Trump

Is Donald Trump famous for anything? Isn't it just for being rich? Well we went to the Trump Tower in New York yesterday, and that place is a dump. I expected more out of a guy whose whole thing is being rich. Shouldn't the place be posh or something? Both the elevator and the escalator in the place were broken, and the little dining room we ate in was about as fancy as a Flying J. And all of the brass doesn't make it look expensive---no more than a mall food court, anyway.

C For Cookie

Opera is the new Firefox

I recently started using a new browser. I started looking for a new browser because of how slow and memory-draining Firefox is. Internet Explorer is better in these areas, mostly because it shares memory with the rest of Windows (which is kind of cheating, and an issue in itself), but I wasn't willing to switch back to Internet Explorer and further foster the monopoly of a browser that's not developer-friendly. (As a developer myself, that's important to me.)

So I started looking for a new browser, and this is the result of my search: Opera. It is supposedly less memory-intensive and even more standards-compliant than Firefox. I'd used it at work before, but not extensively and only to test my web pages and see if they worked. Previous versions of the browser advertisingted by a built-in advertizing bar, so that was kind of a deterrent to give it much of a try. The newest version, though, is completely free, so now I'm going to give it a chance and see if it can live up to my expectations.

The first thing I noticed about switching to Opera is that it is different. The interface is unique in a lot of subtle ways, so I've been having a harder time switching from Firefox to Opera than I had switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox. It might be a process and I'm not sure if I'll stay with it, but I'm excited to be giving it a try.

Nightmare Before Christmas: Sally (updated)

In honor of the re-release of Nightmare Before Christmas, I thought I'd write some thoughts I had from the last time I watched it. I realize that these things stand out to me because of my theory about the spiritual meaning of the movie, but I'm ok with that. It's part of what makes the movie special to me.

If you haven't seen the movie (not that I can imagine that being the case), you might not want to read this until after you've seen it at least once. I just don't want to ruin it for anyone.

First, I noticed how bright and colorful Christmas town is compared to Halloween town. Almost everything in Halloween town is some shade of gray. Except Sally. I didn't realize this until later, but Sally has colored hair and a colorful dress and is filled with colored leaves. She's different.

Then, when she overhears Jack's song about his soul searching, she says she knows how he feels. Also, contrast her attitude and that of Jack with the rest of the town. Jack's tired of the same old thing, just turning on his wheels, and Sally doesn't want to be locked up in her house--she wants to be free.

Also, Sally has visions. She knows that Jack's pirating of Halloween is a bad idea.

I think the things about Sally are cool with the idea that the movie is really about Jack's dealing with spiritual awakening. Based on the differences between Sally and the others, I think Sally is already a spiritual person. It makes this conversation more meaningful:

SALLY
You don't look like yourself Jack, not at all.

JACK
Isn't that wonderful. It couldn't be more wonderful!

SALLY
But you're the Pumpkin King.

JACK
Not anymore. And I feel so much better now.

SALLY
Jack, I know you think something's missing. But --

Anyway, there's just some things to think about. I hope you watch the movie again.

Update
I went to see the movie in 3-D tonight and I thought it was great. There weren't any new scenes or weird 3-D things, but I'm really glad that they used the original footage to make it instead of doing some hokey George-Lucas-like thing with it. The new format just made it seem more real and alive. Go see it.