I saw the movie Panic Room this weekend. For those interested, it was actually well worth checking out. It wasn’t scary at all, but there was some good suspense going. Forest Whitaker (who is very cool) was good in it, but let me tell you now, and have no illusions about it:

It was all about the Jodie Foster cleave shots.

There was some pretty damn good JF cleavage going on in this one. As far as I’m concerned, worth the price of admission. Gay, straight, bi, whatever. She’s hot. That’s all there is to it.

Oh, and her daughter (in the movie) was annoying as hell. If my kids ever act like that, I’ll beat the crap out of them. I mean, come on - you don’t ride your stupid scooter through a house you’re walking through to buy. Seriously.

The Winter Hawks won game six of the seven game series with Seattle, so I guess I’ll be at game seven tomorrow. Admittedly, I sort of hoped they’d lose because I’d like a little more time to not have to run around all the time, but since they won, I hope they make it all the way.

Of course, if we have to play Spokane, it’s all over.

Had a good Easter dinner at Mom and Dad’s place. Afterwards, Jenn and I got tormented with home movies that my parents had filmed but never watched. Actually, it wasn’t that bad - we have my cousin dancing at Christmas from a couple of years ago, drunk and doing his best attempt at breakdancing. I really should digitize that and put it up here. It’s just way too funny.

On a whole other topic…

We have air pots full of coffee here at work. There are three pots, all of which should have some level of coffee in them at all times. There are three huge signs around the pots, all of which say (in some form or another), “If you take the last cup, make a new pot.” It takes, seriously, about two minutes to grind the beans and start a new pot of coffee.

I went to get a cup a little bit ago and there wasn’t a drop of coffee in any of the pots. Not one. I don’t think I could have combined the dregs from the pots to make half a cup. I thought about starting a new pot, but then decided that if I didn’t get any, I wasn’t gonna make any. Fair’s fair.

I think I need to start a CoffeeCam. Stick a motion-sensitive camera out there, aimed at the pots (and, more importantly, the people getting coffee). Let’s see who the last person was so we can stick it to them. Or, even better, rig the stand the pots sit on with scales so you only take pictures of the people who leave the pots with less than a cup of coffee in them. I don’t think that’d be too difficult. Maybe I should start that as a side project.

Or, more precisely, “Oscar Contest Winner.”

That’s me.

My friend Liz has a contest she runs every year where she sends out ballots to a group of folks and we get to vote on who we think is gonna win the Oscars. I must be freaking psychic because I got the most right. Which means I won a gift card to Hollywood Video.

In case you were wondering, yes, I am the man.

Yesterday I downloaded some software called MixMeister that allows you to take music in just about any format (MP3, WAV, etc.) and mix it like a DJ - either just fade one song into the other or actually do beat mixing where you change the tempo at the end of one song and at the beginning of the next and mix them together in a continuous track. It also allows you to do overlay tracks (like little sounds or whatever that you want to mix into a song). Once you’ve got your mix, you can burn it to a CD or even webcast it. It’s pretty cool. Give it a look.

My Tron action figures have shipped from eMerchandise.com so I’m hoping they’ll be home when I get there. I think I’m going to set up a Tron display at work on my desk. That’d rock. One thing about the eMerchandise site, though - when I went back just now to check on what Tron stuff they had, I noticed they had doubled their prices on the Tron stuff across the board. I bought the figures for $4.45 each; now they’re $8.45. The light cycles were $8.45, now they’re $16.95. For the figures, that’s a bit of a rip-off; you can get those at SunCoast for like $6. But the light cycles are still $8 cheaper at eMerchandise than they are at SunCoast.

I got forwarded an email today from my friend Mike. The subject line was “Travis is a dad!” His comment at the top of the message was, “Dude! I saw the subject of this email, before I saw the sender, and it scared me!” Me, too, man, since it would have to be, like, the Immaculate Conception or something. According to the email, the “baby’s got Travis’s head.” Scary. I don’t think I wanna see a baby with my head on it.

Jenn’s parents come back from Disneyland today. They asked me what I wanted, and I said I wanted a big Cheshire Cat, like the gigantic animals you see in the Disney Store. I thought that’d be awesome, the Cat being my favorite character. Well, apparently they don’t make big Cheshire Cats (figures), so I’m SOL. Which probably also means that they didn’t bring me anything else back, either. I guess we’ll see, eh? If not, I sure hope they don’t think I’m bringing them anything from my vacations, either. Turnabout’s fair play, and all that.

Oh, and for the record, Alice is a total hottie. I’d take her any day of the week over any of the so-called “Disney Princesses.” Snow White? Bah. Cinderella? I think not. It’s all about Alice.

Important things first: I’ve finished finding all of the hidden packages on the first island in Grand Theft Auto 3 and now I’ve made it to the second island. I’ve been doing mostly taxi missions to get to know the place, but I’ve done a couple of regular missions, too. The place is huge! I had enough trouble getting to know Portland and now Staunton Island is here. My work is cut out for me.

Thank goodness for GameFAQs.

Got a link today to probably the scariest thing in the world - US Attorney General Ashcroft singing a “patriotic hymn” of his own concoction. Give me a frickin’ break.

I’m trying to find a decent stuffed Domokun doll. A guy at www.domo-kun.de has some links to online stores, but they’re always out of the one I want - if you squeeze the doll, his arms flap. If anyone out there knows where to get one of these in the US, leave a comment. Thanks.

The Blazers sucked hard last night. Really hard. They started the game out with a 25 point lead and then came back to lose the game. How do you lose the game with such a lead? Ah, let me enlighten and amaze you.

See, it’s really a strategy for them. They start out strong in the first half of the game and come out with a huge lead. This is, I’m sure, an attempt to demoralize and degrade the opposing team in an effort to make the opposition weak. And, for the most part, it works. The opposing team doesn’t come on too strong in the first half of the game.

But then - and here’s where the plot really twists - the Blazers notice that they’ve got a huge lead on the other team and they decide to take the rest of the game off. As in, “send in the clowns, ‘cuz we’re going home” style. And when the ref calls them on something, by all means, bitch out the ref so you can pull the technical foul.

So, 100-103, the Blazers lost. Not a big surprise.

The food in the box that Jenn and I were in was good, though, and since the Blazers scored 100 points, we all got free Chalupas, which pretty much just made my night.

Then Jenn had to go let out her parents’ dogs because her parents are on vacation, so I got a little late night Grand Theft Auto in. Found all but three of the hidden packages on the first island, but I know where they are, so I’m good to go. Buffy is a rerun tonight, so I hear a little package-searching in my future. Or maybe we’ll watch an episode from the first season, since Jenn hasn’t seen all of those.

This weekend was sort of a whirlwind of events - lots of stuff happened, nothing too spectacular in-and-of-itself, but all of it added up to one thing: busy.

Friday night the Winter Hawks kicked ass in game one of the playoffs against Seattle. It was good to see them win, and I had faith they’d waste Seattle in the first four games (it’s a best-of-seven series).

Saturday night, not so good. One of our players got suspended because he checked a Seattle guy and the Seattle guy got hurt pretty bad. I don’t think it was entirely our guy’s fault, but they have to suspend anyone involved in accidents like that. Anyway, that was sort of foreshadowing for the rest of the evening.

The ref was way too sympathetic towards the “poor Seattle players.” If we checked someone, we got called for interference. If they checked us, we got called for roughing. The linesmen even called offsides incorrectly. How you can mess that one up, I couldn’t tell you. Everything basically just worked in favor of Seattle, and they trounced us, 6 - 2. Granted, they did deserve a couple of the goals they got. But not all of them. I think we got screwed.

During the day on Saturday was chore day - did some laundry, vaccuuming, etc. Played a good share of Grand Theft Auto, which I now have to admit is a full addiction. It’s actually sort of nice - it’s been so long since a game has sucked me in like that, I feel a sense of relief that people can still design innovative and fun games. I had lost faith there for a second.

I also went shopping on Saturday at the local Tower Records and picked up my copy of Tom Jones’s Reload. I’m groovin’ to it right now. If you ain’t got it, get it. My hunger for Tom is finally sated. At least, for now.

Sunday I fixed my Dual 1215S turntable. Mostly. I had one, but something came disconnected underneath and required a new part. Well, I couldn’t find the part anywhere, but I did find someone selling a functional version on a mailing list. So I bought that one for $55 (cheap compared to buying a new turntable) and planned on cannibalizing it to fix the one I already had. Why not just go with the functional version and trash the broken one? Except for the one piece on the broken one, the rest of the turntable is in mint condition, like it’s new out of the box. The functional one I just bought is well loved and there are some pieces rusting on it, some pieces not in the best of shape, but, yeah, it’s functional.

Anyway, I got the new one in the mail, flipped both turntables over, and started to take the broken piece off the old turntable when I realized that Dual redesigned the stupid part sometime in the manufacturing process and, while I have in my possession two turntables of identical make and model, the one stupid part that I need is not the same. Everything else on it is absolutely identical. That just figures, doesn’t it? So I ended up swapping as much as I could without disassembling the whole turntable - The functional turntable now has a nice case on it and a nice stylus, but the rest of it is the well-loved, slightly rusting turntable I just bought; the non-functional one is still non-functional.

Since my dad and I figured that the non-functional one was basically lost anyway, Dad’s going to take the part and try to re-solder it back together in a roundabout fashion. If it works, we’ll have two working turntables. If not, no harm, no foul.

Sunday night I went to a party for Jenn’s aunt-who-isn’t-really-an-aunt-but-just-a-long-time-family-friend. If that confuses you, don’t worry. I’m in the same boat. You should see Christmas around their place - everyone’s a cousin. If you don’t know what relation someone is to someone else, they’re cousins. I still don’t even know all of their names; every time I go over there it’s a different 50 cousins.

It was a surprise party for Jenn’s aunt’s birthday. We got there at 5:00p, when the aunt was supposed to arrive.

At 6:30p the aunt finally showed up. She was happy that everyone was able to make it, but I was pretty much ready to go by that time. If you’ve ever had to wait an hour and a half to surprise a person you really don’t know, you’ll know what I mean. There was a lot of television watching going on. I think maybe someone needs to smack the person who was driving the aunt around and was supposed to be there at 5:00p. Or at least buy them a watch.

Oh, well. Chillin’ with Jenn’s parents isn’t as bad as all that. It was more the “hurry up and wait” state of things that got to me than anything. Besides, Jenn’s dad lets me wear his fez. Aw, yeah.