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I just saw Seabiscuit — very good movie, I highly reccomend it.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now. I just want to quickly comment on a certain minute-long clip that was shown before the movie — it was the MPAA’s ad against movie piracy (“Movies: they’re worth it.”). I was appalled. But not at the Ad, nor the premise. I agree with the MPAA. Movies are worth it, and pirated movies probably do cost the industry quite a bit of money. But I wasn’t appalled that they were advertising against piracy. Nor was I appalled that they charged me $9.50 to get in the theater to see the movie; nor that they charge half that for a coke and as much for nachos.

No, I was appalled that they played the music to ‘Contact’ in the background while running that ad. Contact… it makes me laugh, it’s so ironic….

“See, in all our searching, the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

“I was part of something wonderful, something that changed me forever; a vision of the Universe that tells us undeniably how tiny, and insignificant, and how rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not, that none of us are alone.”

::

It’s been a while, so here are a few things to pique your interest.

• First of all, a little something from Slashdot’s random line generator at the bottom of every page:
  Genius, n.: A chemist who discovers a laundry additive that rhymes with “bright.”
  I cracked up.
• Second, umm… oh yeah. I found this really cool program. It’s not a game exactly, but, well, you just have to see it. It’s called Celestia, and it’s an open-source galaxy exploration program, which is basically like those sophisticated “planetariums” which are really just movies of solar-system flythroughs projected on a giant dome. Well, this program is better than those. You have to see it.
• Thinking about vacation… apparently our hotel in Avalon fell through (as in, the place looks crappy as hell and their manager just got fired for letting people live there for free), so who knows where we might be going. All I know is that I move in in less than 20 days. Summer is always too short…
• Speaking of which, there’s no way I’m going to get close to finishing a certain project I’m working on before I go back to school, and there’s no way I can continue to work on it while in school, because my workload is crazy as it is. Oh, and then there’s band. Heh.
• I sign up for the rest of my classes next Friday. I can’t find anything I really want to take that I can take though. I guess I’ll just have to look harder.
• Anything else? Probably not. Check out /., it’s more interesting. Or Sourceforge, I find something great and free every time I go there.

So that’s kinda life for now. I’ll think more later, and if I come up with something interesting, I’ll post it. It might be a few days. ::