A day of cleaning, reading, watching movies and eating...

Oh, and I worked too!

This is my day. It actually started with me finally finishing "Fallen Dragon" by Peter F. Hamilton. It is an interesting book, but I can't say it's great. Like most comments about the book, all the flashback moments are a little tiring and don't add too much to the story itself. The main line of the story, a resistance movement against a corporation that makes money by going to colonies and forcing these colonies to give them products from their factories aided by a highly advanced alien race, is not that inspired either. Sure there are some memorable philosophical discussions about technology and the reason corporations exist, but they don't go too far. A shame, but again, not too bad.

Then I cleaned my apartment. Not everything, but I vacuumed and did laundry. Now I just need to finish cleaning the bathrooms (oh joy! But tomorrow's joy). Then I worked on my research and on some stuff for Amazon. Last evening I left when my server wasn't working and I decided that I should make it work. Well, it worked, but not as well as I wanted, so I'll have lots of things to do on Monday about it.

Later I went for dinner. As I had lunch at home and I didn't have many other options, to celebrate the fact that I actually worked, I decided to treat myself to a nice restaurant. So I went to a place called "Café Juanita", an Italian restaurant. Well, for you to understand how much I was treating myself, they even had a Vallet at the door (not too common around here). The food was great! I had a penne pasta cooked on parchment paper with pine nuts, peppers and cheese. Wine and dessert (a chocolate trufle with red wine poached pears and a anise candided something (I'm not sure what it was)). Very good, but I'm still too full.

I came home and decided that I was too full to work, so I got the movie that I rented yesterday and put in the DVD player: Manchurian Candidate. Yes, it's little old, but there are too many movies that I haven't had time to watch. Unfortunately it was a very disappointing movie. Oh, the corporation wants to control the US through politics. Add to that a touch of "crazy people sometimes are not that crazy" and "soldiers are important" and there you have the movie. Nothing to learn from it.

Well, if I compare to the movie I watched yesterday (that I rented with this one), "Pandora Machine", it's a tough call. As I knew Pandora Machine was going to be bad, I think it was actually a little better than my expectations. But I heard some good things about Manchurian Candidate, so it was much below my expectations. If I compare both side by side it becomes much more difficult to tell. Sure "Pandora Machine" probably had the budget of about 2 minutes of the Manchurian Candidate, but if you compare storylines, both are very bad. "Pandora Machine" is about the world in the future when some very strange murders are going on and the privatized police is trying to find out what is going on.

Almost the whole movie is shown through the eyes of the security cameras that are spread around the whole city, so they are very strange camera angles with lots of glitches and things like that. Interesting, but annoying. Then it takes some very bizarre turns, in which the partner of the main policeman suddenly is found to be an android that is becoming sentient, but has to be destroyed or else it will destroy the whole human race (she was the "Pandora Machine"). The strange thing is that she has no role whatsoever in anything until she starts to become dizzy and faint (signs of sentience). At the same time, the killer is another sentient machine that is in love with the main character and saves him from time to time. And they have met before when he was serving the army in a war many years before. No sense whatsoever.

Oh, well, see, I do things! I try to keep myself busy!