Author: Andrew Huey

The Polar Express

I’ve been seeing very mixed reviews for this movie. I’m really scratching my head over this bit from the New York Times review:

Tots surely won’t recognize that Santa’s big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.” But their parents may marvel that when Santa’s big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

Bizarre. Can’t anybody just watch a movie these days without thinking about Hitler and scrotums? There are a few good points in the review about the limitations of the motion-capture techniques used in the film. From what I’ve seen, I would agree that the characters look unnatural and a little creepy. Roger Ebert, on the other hand, loved it:

“The Polar Express” is a movie for more than one season; it will become a perennial, shared by the generations. It has a haunting, magical quality because it has imagined its world freshly and played true to it, sidestepping all the tiresome Christmas cliches that children have inflicted on them this time of year.

One reviewer’s “creepy” is another’s “haunting and magical”, I guess. I may have to go and see it, out of curiosity, if nothing else.

The last e-mail I got from Patrick

I’ve been organizing my e-mail and archiving old stuff tonight. I came across a number of e-mails from my brother Patrick as I was sorting through things. For some reason, I got curious about what the last e-mail I received from him might have been. It turns out to be a message from October 17, 2003, telling me about a recent visit to the doctor. The doctor had told him that something was wrong with his lymph nodes, but it probably wasn’t cancer.

The new MSN search

Walt Mossberg thinks the new MSN search isn’t quite as good as Google, and I tend to agree.

Searching for Andrew Huey on Google, for instance, finds my home page, and my Amazon page, no problem, along with a bunch of pages related to other Andrew Hueys.

Seaching my name on MSN though, comes up with a pretty weird result list. The very first link has neither Andrew nor Huey in it anywhere, as far as I can tell. It’s a pretty interesting quote, though.

Election Dejection

I definitely know a few people who are suffereing from election dejection. Besides this NY Daily News article, there was a piece on NPR last week, plus today’s Opus comic touched on this subject too. I like Opus’ solution: peaches! (I’d link to the strip, but it appears that the Opus strip is not available online. Strange.) Most of the people with this problem are too young to remember Reagan.

Changes

I decided to make a couple of major software changes on my home computer tonight.

First, I switched from using Eudora 4.3 for my e-mail over to Outlook 2003. I’ve been using Eudora for nearly 10 years now, but I haven’t bought an upgrade in a few years. The old version was starting to flake out a bit, but I really didn’t want to pay $40 for the new version when I had Outlook sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. I got all my messages from Eudora to Outlook by the recommended method of first importing them into Outlook Express, then importing from OE to Outlook 2003. That worked pretty well, and even saved my folder structure with no problems. The resulting .PST file is about 100 MB. My Eudora directory was about 90 MB, so it looks like there’s not as much bloat to Outlook as I thought there would be. I notice that Outlook seems a bit sluggish compared to Eudora, but maybe that’ll get better after I clean up the mail file a bit.

My second big change was pulling my music library into iTunes and letting that be my default music player. I, of course, use iTunes on my Mac, but I’ve been using something called Zinf on my PC. It works OK, but it’s not as nice as iTunes. I’ve had serious problems with iTunes in the past, but the current version seems to be stable on my machine. I’ve got about 10 GB of music on my PC, mostly downloaded from EMusic. I’ll probably still stick with Nero for CD burning, just because I can’t imagine iTunes could possible work better.