I saw “I, Robot and “Anchorman : The Legend of Ron Burgundy” this weeekend.

I, Robot was pretty good. It played a little more like an action movie than sci-fi which is pretty much par for the course for a summer movie starring “The Fresh Prince of Belair.” Still it waas a though provoking movie. I wish the plot had been a little more complicated and that perhaps it wouldn’t have wrapped up so neatly at the end. My biggest complaint was that it looked too much like “Minority Report.” I kept waiting for Tom Cruise to be seen sneaking around the corner looking for someone to poke his eyes out. I paid full price, and still liked this movie.

Anchorman was terrible. The only good part of the movie was the air conditioning. It seemed like an SNL skit that should have been cut at ten minutes. There was a funny concept buried in the movie where they were parodying the sports legends type of show seen on ESPN2. If that note had been carried more effectively and the movie would have contained a funny plot, and I paid $1.00 I might have like the movie. I paid matinee prices for this movie and still hated it.

I have used both MusicMatch and iTunes software to both RIP music as well as to buy music online.

The iTunes folks have really intrigued me by displaying celebrity playlists. Ordinarily, I don’t engage in a lot of celebrity curiosity. I don’t read people magazine, or collect autographs. I don’t have any curiosity about how Martin Sheen feels about Iraq or what Will Smith thinks about nanotechnology. But what music they listen to, for some reason, that seems interesting to me. Of course I have this niggling feeling that the playlist may have created by their publicist or perhaps the studio overlords who also happen to own a music catalog.

How do I like buying music online? For the most part I like it. I still have this little voice in the back of the room whispering that the software will change and your rights to your purchase will be taken away or restricted over time. When I have the CD, I feel I can prevent the music industry from busting down my door to get back my latest purchase. I still wish that I could buy the right to check-out a fixed number of titles at a time and then return them when I am done. I like listening to samples before I buy.

What am I listening to now … “Be My Yoko Ono” by the Barenaked Ladies.

I’m probably the last to discover this gem, but you can make your own paper cd case online. Very cool and very simple.

While we’re on the topic of art, check out http://www.robertsabuda.com for instructions on making your own pop-up books / paper crafts. I have his book “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and it’s simply amazing.

Although I really don’t own any modern furniture, I really like looking at it. Here are some links of interest.

• http://www.sumolounge.com
• http://funfurde.blogspot.com/
• http://www.soma-sofa.com
• http://mocoloco.com , very cool stuff!
• http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfcek2/text/modernlinks.html

There are a lot of really interesting ideas in those links.

On an unrelated topic, I tried to bring blogging to work as a way for people to post internal information. No one understood the idea. I presented it well, but people have blogging == editorial stuck in their head. I think blogging == publishing. It’s a really slick way to publish information, useful or otherwise. No one got it. Even Microsoft gets the concept of blogging … my co-workers were kind of mystified. This idea isn’t dead yet.

I am often amazed at my ignorance.

For instance, just today I learned all of Maine is south of the northermost border of Minnesota. In fact when I am in Ely,MN I am north of everyone in Maine. If you are having trouble figuring this out, remember the earth is a sphere.

It has also been claimed that 1/ 3 of all Canadians live south of Minneapolis. I can neither prove nor disprove this fact yet, though I am determined to.

• Alternate Handwriting Systems
• Census Demographic Info

I have been a Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox user for a very long time. I have to say these browsers keep getting better. The latest Firefox is especially good. I really like some of the extensions, including one that will synchronize bookmarks and another that will open a link in IE, for those IE only web sites. Adding search engines is also very cool. Now if only people would stop development of web sites that only work in IE.

Redirecting Standard Error and Standard Out on Windows

> command > file 2>&1

Works on XP.