I’ll have a large run32.dll and a side of you unsaved Word doc, please.

Being a huge Kevin Smith fan, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the various films of the View Askewniverse ((Save Gigli and Jersey Girls, but they’re only ancillary to the ‘verse)). Needless to say, I’m a fan, and that includes the poorly received film that is Mallrats. Seriously, critics hated it. Here you had Kevin Smith who just made his gigantic mark on the world with $27,000 and some friends, and along comes a studio handing him buckets of cash to put out something mediocre at best.

While watching Mallrats tonight, I think I finally found the answer to the problem. Some blame the heavy role Jay and Silent Bob play in the film. Some blame the fact that it’s set in Jersey but filmed in Minnesota ((Eden Prairie to be exact - I’ve been there)). Some blame the overuse of overly verbose verbiage spewed disproportionately to the perceived status of the characters ((See what I did there?)). Others just think Smith sold out and that alone ruins it. But me, I’ve found the answer. And it’s one quote.

“It’s not a mall. It’s the mall.”

Yup. That. It hit me like lightning. That one line was the entire plot of Clerks, despite it never being uttered. To Randall and Dante, Quick Stop was the world. Not just a minimart - the minimart. Clerks 2 beat this message over our heads with the dramatic Randall speech and montage to end the film, but it was there all along. The unwavering love they had for this place was tangible, despite the fact that Dante wasn’t even supposed to be there that day.

All of these genuine, endearing qualities were missing from Mallrats. Even when Brodie outright says phrases like “the mall” and “my mall,” it served as nothing more than a venue. These people existed at the mall, but it could have just as easily been set at a theme park or Mooby’s ((Here’s looking at you, Clerks 2)) and it wouldn’t have been the least bit different.

So what, you say. Plenty. Clerks played off our empathy for shitty jobs. We’ve all worked places we didn’t like on our day off. We had friends with shitty jobs and we’d go visit them. Yeah, we’ve all shopped at a mall, but that’s just a roof over stores we visit. Who cares? Take Mall of America - there are multiple instances of any given store in one building. You can visit half of the mall on one day, then do the exact same shopping trip the next day in the other half. This is how we feel, and this is how Brodie, TS and the rest of them treat their mall. Hell, they even visit another mall mid-movie. You would never dream of seeing Dante stroll through a CVS or Walgreen’s in the middle of Clerks.

Despite it all, I love Mallrats. It’s not my favorite in the ‘verse, but not my least either. I love quoting it with my friends. I can’t eat a chocolate covered pretzel without wanting to vomit a little. I have finished countless tales with “true story.” And should I ever own a sialboat, I’m naming it schooner. Dumbass.

Being a rabid Mac fanboy, I really like seeing Windows fail visibly in public. Here’s the latest one I saw. Expect more of this.

It’s been almost a year since I posted, and that’s no good. I tried writing my own blog in the middle, but mobile device applications have come far enough that I decided it was not worthwhile. For example, a year ago I could do very basic posts from my iPod Touch, but with no camera and relatively limited wifi, that was dumb. Flash forward to today - I can post from my Evo, write a post from my iPad, or sit and use a desktop like I’m used to. I refuse to post pictures to Facebook since I don’t control things uploaded there, but I can publish a picture to my blog, hosted on my web server, from my Evo.

So, yeah, back to WordPress. I liked the idea of writing a Django blog, and haven’t abandoned it yet, but for now it’s a side project and not mainstreamed. For now, anyway.

I came across a pretty interesting thread on reddit today. It posed the question of preemptive things one can do to protect a Macbook against theft. Despite having had a Mac since I started college, I’ve never done more to protect it from theft than buy a Kensington lock to hook to my desk (that I never used). Needless to say, I’m fairly unprepared and incredibly vulnerable.

Clearly any portable computer is at risk of theft, and while the hardware itself is considerably more valuable to the thief than the data on the machine, the opposite is true for me. I can replace a computer, but I can’t replace lost data. This is easily enough solved (hello, Time Machine), but I’d rather have a situation where I don’t have to.

Imagine yourself in a cool new bar. It’s still fairly new, so not a lot of people know about you. You like to frequent the new bar, and find yourself going there fairly regularly. You start having some conversations with people in the bar, and really enjoying it. You try bringing a few of your friends to the bar, and they end up staying and having a pretty good time, too. All in all, things are pretty decent.

As it happens, the bar starts to gain popularity. You think it’s pretty great. More people start showing up and you have more people to talk to. As the bar starts to gain popularity, they do stuff to make it more fun to be there - put in a jukebox, karaoke, etc. And don’t you feel great, because you knew about it before it was “cool.”

The bar gets so popular that alcohol producers start to find out about it. The send reps to talk about how great their beer is, but you’re not looking to talk to a distributor, you just want to hang out and talk to you friends. Lucky you, it’s pretty obvious who the reps are, so you keep to yourself and your circle. The bar may be getting a little passe, but you still like it.

Turns out sending reps was pretty successful, so the distributors send more. And so do the competitors. And then, they send more.

Some pretty cool people start showing up to the bar, and it’s pretty fun to stop and listen to what they have to say. Sure, you still talk to your friends most of the time, but celebrity stature certainly warrants keeping an ear on their conversation. Every once in a while you try to shout to the celebs and see if they respond, but they never do because the celebs just like being heard and talking to other celebs. Remember, they’re just people, too.

Unfortunately, some new people have found about the bar, and they find themselves so infatuated with what others are saying that they just stand around repeating what others are talking about. You know they type - “hey, did you hear what so and so just said?” All that training from high school kicks in, and you ignore them now like you did then. They’re just looking for people to listen to them, anyway.

The bar keeps growing and growing, and everyone’s having a good time. You have the tables you like to sit at, the people you like to talk to, etc. But, it gets kind of noisy. I mean, you’re still having fun, your friends are still coming, but it’s just not the same. You’re tired of hearing about how great all the new beers and other beverages are. You find it harder to avoid those repeaters. You even start sitting in the back room - it’s still the bar, just a little quieter. But all those things you used to like about it have changed. And you don’t really enjoy going anymore, either. You start coming less and less, and some of your friends don’t show up anymore, either.

So, what are you to do? Go out in search of a new bar? Yup.

And that’s why I’m done with Twitter.

Two pretty insubstantial things happened to me today that, when mixed, sparked the great big idea bulb over my head (consequently scaring away all the bugs and dust resting on said bulb). The first was an email notification at work that one of the SharePoint sites I belong to had reached it’s size quota and needed some purging. The second event occurred as I was going through my inbox later in the afternoon. A short string of emails had gone back and forth to see if anyone was interested in grabbing sushi at some point next week (riveting stuff). Over the course of seven emails, the size of the message had doubled from 10k to 21k. While that’s not a huge deal, that is seven messages of increasing size sitting in my inbox eating 109k of space. SharePoint and it’s document revisions was the same way.

This is where Google Wave comes in. From the video demonstration originally released and the supplemental materials on their site, it looks like they have solved reply bloat. By threading messages and constantly referring and replying to one at a time, you aren’t left with a string of emails with increasing size. Sure you get all the benefits of a threaded conversation, but this is probably the biggest undocumented perk yet. Consider the effect it would have on an email server storage setup. Picture what would happen if you were to have included an attachment on one of those emails - 10k could have started at over 1M, and it would grow as rapidly as changes are made to the document. Wave will solve this!

I applied to be in as an early tester when they solicited participants, and now I’m more excited than ever.

I will definitely share more on this later, but I’m working on bringing my blog back up to what it used to be. What this means for now is no more Twitter on the blog, and more posts. So yeah, stick with me, big changes are coming.

• Tired. Just tired. #
• I had a dream last night that I got all the way to the airport without my luggage. As such, I will be packing for my Thusday trip tonight. #

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• I just realized that both of the meals I’ve eaten today required chopsticks. I’m OK with it. #

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