I recently found myself surrounded by college-age kids discussing pointillism. Pointillism is the technique of applying many small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that when viewed at distance, the dots come appear to come together in a larger, cohesive image. The technique was invented by the Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and is used with vivid success in the painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte which is currently displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Wow! Another fantastic book from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. This one again features our favorite hero - A. X. L. Pendergast - and brings back some old characters from earlier novels. Similar to Cabinet of Curiosities and Still Life with Crows, this plot features a series of inexplicable crimes. Agent Pendergast again brings his formidable intellect to bear in pursuing a resolution to these crimes. He teams up with an old friend for the first adventure that takes place, in large part, overseas.

Election Day is November 2nd this year. Election Day is always the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. Since Monday is the 1st, we have the earliest Election Day that is possible. The timing is a bit unfortunate for me this year as I will be in Istanbul, Turkey on Election Day. I really want to vote this year so I need to figure out this whole absentee ballot concept.

I have an issue with the usual attitude toward calling in sick at work. I think many Americans have this attitude that you should not call in sick to work unless you are barfing up a lung or something. In other words, you should “tough it out” and get into work and support your company or team. This policy, in my view, causes more harm than good. Let me turn the situation around a bit.

Two of my favorite people got engaged this past weekend! I’m really excited and happy for them - they are a great match for each other! I was lucky enough to be around when they met and to see them become friends and to see that friendship grow into something much more. I always hoped that the guy would be smart enough to realize what an amazing woman he was with and, apparently, after all his crazy misadventures, he is.

There is a debate going on between afficionados of the movie The Big Blue. However, before I can describe the debate, a little background info is required. The Big Blue is or was a French movie and when released in Europe, was met with great critical approval. It was considered an avant garde art house movie and enjoyed a successful theater run in Europe. The excellent soundtrack was written by Eric Serra.

There have been some changes to ForkBender.com recently. These are due to me getting closer and closer to the 1.0 release of the Narrative CMS and finalizing some design decisions. There are a number of small issues with the website which I am working through right now. Some have been very challenging to debug but I fully expect all issues to be resolved soon. One of the big changes you may notice is that all pages have an HTM extension now.

Chicago has a lot of tollways. The history of the tollway is kind of interesting. Supposedly the idea of the toll was created so that the toll would be charged to pay for the creation of the tollway. In other words, Illinois would build the road but you would have to pay to use it, at least until the cost of building the road was recouped. Of course, it turns out that tollways need to be repaired and resurfaced every so often so instead of getting rid of the toll when the road was paid off, they kept the toll to pay for ongoing maintenance.

Last Tuesday night I was driving home from class and had a bit of a problem with the Jeep. We’ve had the Jeep since October 2002 so its about 2 years old. There are 38,000 miles on it so far. Recently my brother was in the Jeep with me and said it sounded a little loud and maybe was making a grinding noise in the front. I didn’t really notice anything.

UPDATE: This link is currently broken. I am searching for a new link. In the meantime, this site has many Office Space quotes and some audio files from the movie: http://showcase.netins.net/web/cfurler/office_space.html I found a lovely web page out there that contains the full script to Office Space: http://68k.org/~interiot/scripts/office_space.html