I'm having a strange week. Not a bad one, really. I'm actually feeling fairly content.

I have a lot of stuff to think about, I guess. There's moving, which I think we're going to pull off reasonably gracefully.

At work there's the documentation for the product that's shipping soon. A coworker and I have been knocking items off the to-do list there right and left yesterday and today, and if it weren't for the half-dozen items that require input from other people for us to complete, I wouldn't even be breaking a sweat about getting it out on time. (Coworker and I make a great team. And she let me dump the vast bulk of the indexing on her, poor thing. I owe her one.)

Over the weekend, I bought Mac OS X Tiger and an external Firewire hard-drive. The plan is to back everything up, and do a wipe and a clean install of the new operating system. I have yet to actually psych myself up to doing the backup and wipe yet. Tonight I opened the box on the hard drive, admired its sleek silver shininess, and skimmed the installation manual. Maybe tomorrow I'll plug it in. Baby steps. That's the ticket. Perhaps I'll have the backup done by the end of the week.

Also, over the weekend, I watched The Seven Samurai. Woah. I watched half of it Saturday night, and the other half Sunday. (The movie is 3.5 hours long!) Then I watched it again with the commentary track Monday night and tonight. And having already given over seven hours of my life to this movie, I'm thinking, "I really need to buy this on DVD." It's kind of hard to explain what makes this such an amazing film - especially since I did find it kind of hard to follow and slow at first. (Part of the problem is that, as in other Japanese films, I have trouble remembering characters' names, which can make the dialog hard to follow.) I think what makes it so compelling is the depth of the characterization - I can't think of many other films that bring such a large cast of characters to life with such complexity. Woah. Sorry, that movie ate my head.

As if my coworkers didn't already think I was a complete geek, now they ask me what I did over the weekend and I start blithering about fifty year old Japanese movies.

With that, I think it's time to go bump some more Kurosawa up toward the top of my netflix queue. Later!