Another Friday Night...

We are trying to get caught up on Oscar-nominated movies and performances. So tonight for family movie night, we watched, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." It was alright. We're impressed by Casey Affleck's performance. And Brad Pitt was good too. But compared to the other Westerns we've seen recently, it was no great shakes.



Rachel and I watched "American Gangster" earlier in the week. We enjoyed it, but it felt A little like trying to turn New Jack City into The Godfather.

We also watched, "We Own the Night." It was also good. It was gritty and intense and had some really powerful scenes.

And we watched Gone Baby Gone. Also good.

Rachel and I also got about halfway through, "Rendition" and had to take a break because it was too intense before bed. So we will probably finish that one up tomorrow.

I've made a lot of progress on the office reorganization. But I am not happy with where I thought I was going to put my new computer. It sits on the shelf on its own fine, but when you start plugging in monitors and other devices that shows it out about 4 inches and it just looks stupid. So I need to rethink that. I did get rid of a lot of old papers and junk and tchotchke from tradeshows. And I found some old receipts to submit for reimbursement. And I figure if I put in a couple of hours on Sunday, I'll be ready to take that after picture.

Rachel is also going through files in her office. The main goal, aside from getting organized, is to get all of her accident expenses together so that we can submit our claim. Along the way, she found a bunch of my old writing -- that's poems, some from college, a couple of short stories, some haikus, and a long piece I wrote called, "Rant -- Run-On Sentence." I might post a few of them up here in the next few days.

She also found was my first attempt at a novel. I remember when I wrote it. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and I found that I could. I had about a week to myself in my apartment at college between my last two semesters. I just started writing to see what would come out. I found that I really got into it. I would go to sleep at night thinking about what might happen next, and the next day I would write more. Finding this treasure trove of old writing is motivating me to get started on finishing those two stories I started this year.

Work was interesting this week. The system I worked on for Wisconsin Public Service went live on Monday without a hitch. It was a limited rollout and they plan to roll it out to a larger group next Monday and to everyone the following Monday. I also worked on a name capture application and got a prototype working. And we started working on what will soon be Adapt's speech recognition banking application. And by "soon" I mean June or July.

Jake is doing well. He is just about caught up on all the work he missed while he was out with his flare up. We're talking to the athletic director to see if we can get him try out for baseball. And we received a letter saying he had made the honor roll. He also received a birthday present from his Bio-Dad. It is a cool bass effects pedal and he has been having a lot of fun playing with it.



On Wednesday and made another curry dish. It was delicious.
Less spicy than last time. I think I'm actually ready to cook something like this for guests. I figure since Lauren and Paul gave me the curry book for Christmas, they should be the guinea pigs... I mean first beneficiaries of my new skills with curry and coconut milk.

And finally, I started messing around with some of the moviemaking software that came with my new computer. It's a bit rough, but here it is...






I look forward to playing with this more in the future and putting together some DVDs of pictures set to music for friends and family.

That's it for now.