Primer

I saw a movie called Primer last night, and I have to say it was pretty awesome. It's a sci-fi movie but was done on a $7000 budget and revolves around the story of some friends working on a project in a garage and what happens when they discover and explore an unintended side effect of their invention.

It was quite confusing after about the 3/4 mark when some significant plot twists occurred, but after reading some of the material online about it I think I mostly understand what happened. Probably will have to do at least one more viewing to fully absorb it. I think this is the first movie I've seen since Memento that really had a quite original and challenging to understand story.

In the interest of not spoiling it for anyone I'll avoid giving you any more detail other than that.

New car musing and blog title pronunciation

One thing I've noticed in the four months since I've had the new Prius is that I'm much more often the driver for group activities... previously I had a 1990 Honda Accord and it was much more rare to have more than one passenger.

This is a good thing in some ways. I'm getting around 45-46 MPG on average, so the environmental impact is lower to take my car. It just wasn't a change that I ever expected when I was shopping for a new car.

On a completely unrelated note, I wanted to clarify how to pronounce my blog title. It's "coop-town" even though it's spelled like the u is short. This is the same as the first syllable of Cupertino, since "cup-town" is an affectionate nickname for Cupertino. Hope that clears things up.

Prius Invasion

I was leaving from the Stanford pool yesterday and saw a couple other silver Priuses so I had to move my car into position for a picture. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out which one of the three is mine.

Upcoming TV show conflicts

It seems like every season I invariably have at least one or two conflicts between shows I want to watch. Fall 2005 is going to be no different even though some of my shows were cancelled or ended their run in 2004-2005. It seems that the networks have conspired to move shows into conflict anyway.

Here's how the current lineup looks (in ranked order of show preference):

1) Monday 9pm-10pm: 24 (Jan 2006)
2) Wednesday 9pm-10pm: Lost
3) Wednesday 9pm-10pm: Veronica Mars
4) Friday 10pm-11pm: Battlestar Galactica
5) Thursday 9pm-10pm: Everwood
6) Thursday 8pm-9pm: Alias
7) Thursday 8pm-9pm: Smallville
8) Wednesday 8pm-9pm: One Tree Hill
9) Sunday 10pm-11pm: Grey's Anatomy
10) Thursday 10pm-11pm: ER
11) Friday 8pm-8:30pm: What I Like About You
12) Thursday 8pm-8:30pm: Joey

Out of these, notice how the evil networks managed to create a conflict between Lost and Veronica Mars (my number 2 and number 3 shows) as well as a conflict between Alias and Smallville (my number 6 and 7 shows). The unfortunate thing about this is I came up with the ranking before I had seen the schedule grid, so it really is a toss up on both of those conflicts.

Hopefully I'll have a second TiVo set up by the time the season starts. If not I suppose the VCR will be placed back into service.

I guess I shouldn't complain too much.. last season I had conflicts between 24 and Everwood, One Tree Hill and Veronica Mars, Lost and Smallville, Enterprise and What I Like About You, and life as we know it and Tru Calling. Based on what I've seen about the new shows coming out this season, there's not much that I'm interested in picking up in my schedule. Also, even among the returning shows above, from number 8 on I'm not 100% convinced that I want to keep the show for this coming season.

So, it kind of sucks that with 18 different hour long timeslots for each network that my top 7 shows yielded two conflicts.

Farewell to Summerland

Today was the last episode of Summerland, a short lived show on the WB set in a Southern California beachside community called Playa Linda (which is "beautiful beach" in Spanish). Anyway, I haven't yet watched the finale but it's waiting for me on the TiVo. I'm definitely going to miss the cute theme song... here's the lyrics in case you've never seen it:

Summerland theme

when i see you smile
i know everything's ok
when i hear you laugh
it's always a brighter day
gonna do my best
forget the rest
as long as you're with me we'll be alright

it's a beautiful day
yeah yeah
it's a beautiful day
yeah yeah
it's a beautiful day
yeah yeah
such a beautiful day

Ukraine Matters

My old roommate from my first year at Stanford has started his own podcast on Ukraine called "Ukraine Matters". Check it out.

It's also available on iTunes.

RSS feed: http://profiles.blipmedia.org/Serhiy_Kudelia/podcast.xml

Apple Third Quarter Results

I think the numbers speak for themselves. $320 million profit on $3.52 billion in revenue. Oh, and $345 million in software revenue. Yowza.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jul/13results.html