Actually, I was intending to go to Shenzhen Saturday, but the friend who was gonna go with me backed out and I couldn’t find anyone else to go at such short notice.  Could have gone on my own but one of my reasons for going was to hit a couple of favorite restaurants, neither of which make sense if I was going to be there alone.

And so I stayed home and … sigh … installed the 64 bit version of Windows 7 and a couple of dozen apps.  I figured it was time.   I’d installed Win7 before and was dual-booting but I’d never gotten around to installing most of the apps I use on it.   Lightroom 3 64 bit is noticeably faster than 32 bit under WinXP – not sure if that’s a fair point of comparison or not but what the hell.

Migrating iTunes with all my settings and playlists seems to have as well as can be expected.  I’m syncing my iPad now and it’s an hour so far and not even halfway through the back-up.   And that reminds me – I’m running Open Office here instead of MS Office, except that I’m still using Outlook to manage my contacts.   I don’t want to go the bloat-ware route and install Outlook here so I need another strategy for a contact list that syncs to iPhone – any suggestions?

Win7 may be the fastest selling version of Windows ever, or whatever it is that they’re claiming, and I can see some improvements but also, one day into this, I can see a lot of the same old errors and crap that’s been carried over from older versions.  Minor annoyances such as how File Manager still shows directories on tree on the left even after that directory has been moved or deleted and even after I’ve hit the refresh button several times.  You’d think they could at least get the simple stuff right.

So I’ll leave you with a link to Wired’s list of “cerebral sci-fi films.”  Actually it’s rather disappointing – no Forbidden Planet or Fantastic Planet, let alone Silent Running or Dark City.

And another movie list by Julie Gray at Huffington Post, she says this is an evolving list from GASP (without saying what GASP is) of films you should have seen if you plan on working in the entertainment industry.

Although it is simply not possible (or advisable) to have seen every movie ever made, the criteria for this list is that these are movies that have seminal, iconic or culturally significant performances, writing, direction, or premises. These are the movies that set the bar, raised the standard or innovated something new and oft-imitated.

I counted 156 films on the list and I’ve seen them all but I find the list rather distressing.  I counted a total of 3 non-English language films on the list and those are Amelie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and La Dolce Vita.  No Kurosawa, no Bergman, no Truffaut or Godard or Antonioni or Rosselini or Satyajit Ray.  And the sad thing is, this list is the set of cultural touch points for Hollywood today, which is probably one reason why most American commercial film making is so unambitious.

I could probably sit down and do blogs that collect essential film and music lists – well essays more than just lists, perhaps group blogs with several trusted contributors.  The only problem is that I have this little thing called a job.  Could I jettison the job and do these?  Yeah.  Could I jettison the job and do these and earn a decent living from it?  Maybe not so much.

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