Wow, the link to my old blog was, for some crazy reason, pointing to some kind of "Mega Bible Site" full of wacky End o' Times type stuff. I just republished the old blog and it seems to be back to normal. Odd.

Spent the whole day today working on one call. My customer had a beastly and pernicious spyware problem that was absolutely hellish to track down and destroy -- 7 hours worth of hellish. But, he was a nice guy and very grateful.

So I got home late, overcame a sweeping wave of laziness and went for my walk. Made baked romano chicken tenders and a small side of pasta for dinner for G and me, very tasty. Rented The Iron Giant tonight, directed by Brad Bird, who's directing The Incredibles for Pixar. I have heard rumors of some differences of opinion between his hand-picked crew and the Pixar team, and some Pixarians being kind of locked out of the production. Who knows if these rumors are true, but the Incredibles looks really great regardless, and I'm very excited for Lasseter's return to directing, Cars, next year.

Iron Giant was . . . pretty good. I kind of feel like the story was really kind of watered down, changed from a story about hypocrisy and courage to a fairly predictable yarn about "being who you want to be." The animation was top shelf, but I wasn't so crazy about some of the voice talent, particularly the kid. I really loved the book by Ted Hughes when I was a kid, and was disappointed they didn't stick to the story, which is a great story. There is, of course, a dose or two of poop humor, which apparently is required in every kids' movie these days (except Pixar's, I note). Overall, animation wise I would give it a solid 8 out of ten, story maybe a 6 or even a 5. Nice to see Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston of Disney fame in cameos as, of course, train engineers. It's a tribute to the animators that I recognized them before they even spoke.