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You win. Please call off your pollen attack dogs. Achoo, I say, achoo!

We’re heading to pizza land today for a little break. It’s time to find out if Italy has what we want, so for me that includes food and wine. I do know that the change in weather might be nice, although we’re expecting warm days. I’m told that Italy actually gets real summer weather… I think it might be time to buy some shorts!!

OK, for the actual DAY of my birthday, I didn’t put the NET back in SlantyNet.  I did that at about 11PM of the evening before.  But it was a present to myself.

Anyway, the wife and I had free movie passes so we went to watch another summer blockbuster on my birthday (We saw Star Trek a few weeks ago).  We watch so few movies in the theatre these days, I figure that when you go to a theatre, it should be for a movie that has will benefit from the big screen experience.

Cue the Terminator music.

Terminator Salvation follows the Terminator 3 storyline, where we discover “actually, no, you can’t change the future, you can’t change fate, some things are inevitable”.  The movie starts in the near future, with some of the early work on Terminators at Cyberdyne systems, but quickly jumps to 2018 — post-Judgement Day, with John Connor (Christian Bale) being a bad-ass.  Bale does a pretty good job of being a bad-ass who has the weight of becoming “the saviour of the people against the machines” resting on his shoulders.  And when I say “pretty good”, I mean its _very_ good for an action movie — its not exactly an Oscar winning performance about a tortured soul though.

The visual effects of the post-judgement day world are really good.  You’re introduced to a lot more of “the machines”, including some small creepy ones (waterbots), some big ones (house wreckers, really) and more.

There are two main storylines.  One is mostly to move the action along, and its about John Connor preserving the past and future by saving somebody important to his existence.  (The time travel dyamics are a little confusing and are probably best ignored.)  The other storyline is the interesting one about Marcus Wright and asks questions about free will and what makes humans what we are.

The movie is tightly edited, under two hours for sure, with well-paced action.

If you liked ALL the Terminator movies and action movies in general, you’ll like this one.

I personally thought the franchise should have ended after T2, but still enjoyed this movie.

I’ve blocked CBC.ca, Facebook and Craigslist for my PC at work.  These are the websites that I looked at a lot over the last three months, and well, that doesn’t translate so well to the working environment.  I may have to block blogs one day too, we’ll see.  Or maybe I’ll be able to ratchet it down after I get back into gear.

You know you’re grown up when St. Patrick’s Day means an incredible thirst for Guinness rather than a longing for the minty flavor of shamrock shakes.  I’m looking forward to being able to relive a small part of my childhood through the kid eventually but will have to settle for Guinness until then.

Ricers still make baby Jesus cry

Come on, I know its not ‘educational’ — I tried that with my parents.  The lessons learned at the end of GI Joe, Transformers and He-Man are not only a little simplistic, they’re more like worthless.

TV == Entertainment

Last night, I managed to partially paint two fence panels and I finally got the NET back into SlantyNet.

For the umpteenth time, I’m going to say… “Its a good thing I don’t make a living as a painter…or a sysadmin”  (And for the technically minded, I have three routers I shuffled around the house for performance reasons, and MAN, three routers and one bug I wasn’t familiar with sure made for a lot of lost time.)

I consider having Slanty back a bit of a birthday present to myself.  Happy birthday to me!

OK, you may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

We passed through our newly opened local supermarket and picked up some lovely fillet steak on Tuesday.  In deciding what to have with it we didn’t realise that we had chosen “meat and three veg”.  Actually it was…

Pan fried fillet steak -  rare - sliced thinly

oven roasted chips

salad of butter lettuce and sliced tomato - covered with fresh salsa verde and fresh goat’s cheese.

Topped off with a lovly French Cotes de Blayne from Chateau les Millards.