Solaris

Went to see Solaris with Mark last night. I liked it. It could definitely have been edited down a bit more, but I wonder if doing so would have broken the mood. There weren’t any specific scenes that were unnecessarily long; it was more a matter of five seconds here, two seconds there, replacing the pan with a jump cut… The naturalistic pacing did give it a good sense of indeterminate time, though: the feeling that Kelvin might have been on Solaris for days, weeks, maybe even months.

Then I went to go fix Mark’s computer. Again. This is the fifth time something has gone horribly wrong with Windows and the whole thing has needed reinstalling; though to be fair, on one of those occasions the supplied recovery CD worked, and on a second occasion the “quick restore” CDs he was sold by Compaq for $50 extra did the job without further messing around. This time something had screwed with the disk partitioning. Once I fixed that and did some other messing around and checked the BIOS settings, the reinstall CDs worked.

He says he’s seriously considering switching to a Mac. The sad thing is, he thinks all computers suck as much as Windows. I suspect this is true of a lot of people—every computer they’ve used has sucked, so they think all computers are just inherently unreliable and frustrating.

Got back home late, and we booked flights to Minnesota for Christmas. As if to give me a taste of the joys to come, Boston today is -9C with a vicious wind and a light powdering of snow. sara was loving it this morning.