musings

Paula and I went to see George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead last night. Like all of George Romero‘s zombie movies, this one is a bit (and I emphasize bit) of social commentary wrapped in a zombie thriller. Where Dawn of the Dead was an allegory for mass consumerism, Land of the Dead embodies the Marxist class struggle. Like the other Dead movies, however, the social commentary really amounts to “Hey, look!”. It’s not deep by any means. Land of the Dead is nothing at all like scary. There are a whole lot of cheap startles, but there’s no real tension. There is, however, an unholy amount of gore. And now that Romero has a real budget, the gore is incredibly visceral. Zombie fans, rejoice, this is the first good zombie movie since the not-zombies-at-all 28 Days Later….

I picked up OS X 10.4 and iLife’05 while on holiday, and finally got around to installing them both. Tiger’s amazing ; Dashboard is a piece of fluff, but it’s nice fluff. The real shining upgrades to Panther are Spotlight, the new Mail.app and all the Core stuff. If you’ve got Tiger, install X-Code 2 and then run Core Image Fun House to see just how cool Core Image is. I’ve not played with iLife enough yet to make a cal on whether or not the upgrade was actually worth it for me. I really only wanted iPhoto5, but it’s not available except as a part of iLife.

Well, I’m back from my holiday. I had a fantastic time – we didn’t really do anything. Just mellow, you know? Hung out, did some shopping, did some barbecuing, just took it easy for five days. Somehow I spent way too much money doing nothing much at all, but that’s okay. It was a great break from the daily grind. Now that I’m back, I’ve got tons of work to do, and there’s all kinds of deadline pressure looming over me. I guess the increased workload on returning is to be expected. I wouldn’t trade the time off for the reduced work though – you take the bad with the good, after all.