Today’s Report:

In the job hunt, I went to a job fair in Sacramento today. If I were qualified to be a probation officer or a social worker, I would have been set! The Sacramento Office of Information Technology had a booth, but I’m afraid I’m not qualified to be a supervising technical manager; I’m not analyst material, let alone management material. A few of the booths wanted technical writers, so I dropped off my resume with them. I chatted with a few folks, but I don’t expect anything to come of it.

In the home IT front, I’ve been playing around with ports and forwarding, and discovered how to set up Apache on my personal computer to listen to a different port than port 80. Effectively, that means I can turn my computer at home into a webserver. Heck, I might decide to start hosting this journal on my computer at home. I have all the tools to do it now; however, the service at Pair is more reliable and I don’t know how effective a sysadmin I’d be, even for just one computer. Besides, I haven’t lost the 30 pounds that I agreed I’d lose before buying a webserver to live in our house. I also downloaded and installed a product called Crossover which lets me view all kinds of Windows media on my Linux box. Finally I can watch those movie trailers at Apple’s website, and listen to my favorite NPR station, KXJZ on my desktop.

Sometimes, it’s the little things.

This afternoon, my blood pressure had reached the ionosphere, and the trainers at the Healthy Weight Program were uncomfortable with me working out today. So I took myself to see The Time Machine, the latest "reimagination" of H. G. Wells’s classic 1894 novel. The word "reimagination" is an ugly word to me: especially since Evilpheemy and I took our wives to see Tim Burton’s reimagination of The Planet of the Apes (a film which, apart from its wretched script, horrid acting, predictable plot, sequences which looked like they’d been lifted straight from an old Scooby Doo cartoon, was almost a decent film — though I admit that was a an insult to Scooby Doo). That film shook my faith in Tim Burton’s directorial abilities.

I had very low expectations for The Time Machine; with few exceptions, Hollywood has demonstrated that they believe that the IQ of the average science fiction fan ranks somewhere between that of a flea and an eggplant. I was somewhat surprised, though, that The Time Machine wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard of this film is that H. G. Wells’s commentary about Victorian life doesn’t translate very well to a 21st century movie screen. That is, of course, true. But I think that what these critics fail to remember is that The Time Machine is also a good adventure story, and this film captures that fairly well. I did find myself wishing that there was more action after the main character and his co-horts had encountered the Über-Morlock (played hammily by Jeremy Irons, still on the road to recovery after Courtney Solomon had drugged him and forced him at gunpoint to play the Evil Wizard in Dungeons and Dragons — the only explanation I can come up with for how that happened). But the vision of the future presented in the film was interesting and amazingly consistent with itself. And surprisingly, I thought that the social commentary that H. G. Wells had presented in his novel managed to translate fairly well to the modern film. Of course, the major themes of the novel — that there are Forces with which Man Was Not Meant to Tamper, and that The Rich Eat the Poor — are as timeless as romantic love itself, so there probably wasn’t much need for alteration.

On the whole, not a bad little film. Definitely worth a rental.

Over the weekend, Jennifer and I also saw Resident Evil, another film for which I had very low expectations, and which surprised me. Apparently the film was originally supposed to have been directed by George Romero, the man behind the Living Dead films; and there are certainly elements of Resident Evil which could have come from Romero’s mind — the ending, in particular, and the nasty surprises that turn up just when you think things are going to be okay — are very much in line with something that could have shown up in a Living Dead movie.

The special effects were pretty neat, too, though they lack the special touch that Tom Savini might have brought to them.

And that, I suppose, was my day. There wasn’t much to it. I bought a vinyl cover for the futon. I returned a CD that I had borrowed from the library (I’d returned the case yesterday). I watched Enterprise (sometimes also referred to as Spot the Nipple) with Jennifer. And I mopped the floor.

I swear. Only the Army has me beat for the number of things that they do in a single day.