My boss's boss resigned yesterday.

In a way, he was kind of like my boss, as my actual boss works all the way across town from me, and my boss's boss had his office in the room next to mine. He'd assign me tasks, I'd send my daily reports to him, and we had much more interaction than I have with my actual boss.

He was a no-nonsense kind of guy (ex-military), but he did have a good sense of humor, he knew what he was doing, and he constantly kept my plate full of challenging tasks. Even more shocking to me, he actually told me several times that he appreciated the good job I was doing. (Not that I'm surprised by the quality of my work, but I worked for twelve years for a boss whom I don't believe I ever heard utter a single word of praise to any of his employees — the only time he ever said anything was if he was unhappy with someone's work — so it was an experience I was unaccustomed to.)

I'm not sure what will happen now. Until a replacement is found, his duties are going to be shared by a number of upper-level managers. I've heard horror stories about management by committee; I guess I'll find out if they're true or not.

Why am I so bad at coming up with names for my characters? I figured I would start writing the script for my Big Animation Project while I'm waiting for tasks to complete at work, but I can't for the life of me come up with names for the characters I've been visualizing — and planning the dialogue — for months.

Or retroactive continuity, the alteration of a TV show's history to excise facts inconvenient to the current storyline.

Back in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake aired, there was a scene where Colonel Tigh put a cigar through a picture of his ex-wife, who oddly enough looked exactly like the Cylon spy Dr. Baltar was banging, and who has been spending the rest of the series as Baltar's annoying imaginary friend.

A couple of weeks ago, they had an episode where another copy of Baltar's fantasy girlfriend showed up to accuse him of treason. I found myself asking, "Why is Tigh standing there right next to his ex-wife and not even reacting to her presence?"

But that conundrum was resolved in this week's episode, wherein Tigh's ex-wife comes back. As we see in the "previously" clips, Tigh wasn't burning his cigar through Cylon Chick's picture at all! Our memories — and the recording I made of the pilot — were just faulty, that's all it was.

Do they really think the viewers are so dull-witted that they wouldn't notice? Yes, apparently they do.

And if it is broke, don't fix it either, as the fix might make it worse.

I've been loving my little ammo-box PVR. Karen and I can record our shows and watch them at our leisure — without the thing phoning the mother ship to report what we watch, or suggesting shows it thinks we'd like — and then save the ones we want to keep to DVD±R.

But yesterday, I noticed that Nero had put out an update which would support dual-layer drives (which is what I put in there). Naturally, I immediately downloaded and installed the updates. And now, instead of simply burning the already DVD-compliant files onto the DVD, as it used to do, Nero decides it has to "transcode" every single one — at about one hour's worth of transcoding per ten minutes of show. Which means not being able to actually use the PVR while it's doing so, since it eats up so much CPU time.

Needless to say, this does not make me very happy. At all.

But on the plus side, yesterday Karen actually allowed as how she likes "the technological terror [I've] created". Oh, she was full of scorn when I was building it, but the seductive lure of being able to watch Alton Brown, The Daily Show and the Weather Channel's tornado specials whenever she wants has given her cause to reëvaluate her position.

Curse Pixar.

I spent last night rewatching The Incredibles (and hunting for easter eggs on the DVDs; they're present in nearly every menu on Disc 2, and even a couple of places on Disc 1). I did absolutely nothing I had planned to do, thanks to that.

Anyway, despite the fact that I already have one of the characters for my animation project almost completely finished (she's about halfway through the rigging phase), I now want to scrap her and totally redesign everyone. Not too terrible a loss, since she's the only one I'd modeled so far, and I hadn't managed to come up with a good design for two of the other three protagonists yet — but I hate the design process, since my drawing skills aren't quite up to where I need them to be.

A point they make over and over again in the special features is that realistic CG humans don't quite look right, as we all see humans every day, and we know what to expect. If the modelers and animators don't do everything perfectly, the viewers can tell — even if they don't consciously know what's missing — and it becomes a distraction. On the character I've modeled already, the face is a bit stylized — the eyes are extremely large — but the body is way too realistic (I based it on one of Akira Gomi's photograph sets). Rigging her has been a headache, because I've been trying to make her move realistically, too. Perhaps I can save myself a lot of trouble by making them more cartoon-like.

Which is a totally different set of problems, because I can model pretty well from photographs, but from drawings? Well, my drawings? Ack.

On the other hand, I can quit obsessing about making the hair move like real human hair; if the characters are stylized, the hair can be too. I've rendered at least a hundred test animations in the past couple of weeks, trying to get the hair "right". If I go with more cartoonish characters, I can settle for "good enough" hair.

As a side note, one of the troubles I'd had with my model was her eyes. Because they were so large, I had to rotate the eyes outward a little so she didn't look cross-eyed. But when I did that, the eyes' specular highlights didn't look right, because they were occurring in different places relative to the iris. But I discovered that the Incredibles character Mirage, with eyes about the same relative size, was also a little cross-eyed, but it wasn't really noticeable until I was actually looking for it.

I don't usually buy movie soundtracks, but I loved the music in The Incredibles. So after dinner tonight, Karen and I stopped by the mall so I could pick up a CD.

There were two price labels on the wrapper: A generic one reading $18.98, and a store label boldly proclaiming "Our price: $19.99"

The girl behind the counter seemed embarrassed by it. "Oh, I guess they forgot to take the other label off. I guess we mark it up a buck."

She gave it to me for the lower price, but I think I'll be avoiding that store in the future.

Every day as I drive to and from work, I pass the Florida State Capitol building (or the "Cock and Balls Building", as it is sometimes called). There are frequently protests going on at a busy intersection. The subjects range from stopping the war in Iraq ("HONK IF YOU LOVE PEACE!") to legalizing marijuana ("HONK IF YOU INHALE!" — which elicited a nearly continuous stream of honks) to, of course, saving Terry Schiavo's life.

I was going to avoid writing about that. I really was. But something I read tonight made me mad enough to reverse that decision.

"It is more than just Terri Schiavo. This is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight that fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America. That Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death for two weeks." — Tom DeLay; emphasis mine.

Lucid? Lucid? If Terry Schiavo's lucid, what the hell is all this fuss about? Instead of legal wrangling to determine whether or not she would want her life support terminated, why not just fucking ask her?! Or is this perhaps some other definition of lucid? Perhaps he merely meant that, having spent the last fifteen years out of the sun, her skin is so pale as to be translucent; not that she was coherent. Yes, that must be it. A politician would never knowingly utter a falsehood, surely.

To add insult to injury, Mr. Delay used the plural pronoun "them" to refer to a singular subject, a shocking display of disregard for proper English syntax. Is it wrong to expect our leaders to set a better linguistic example for the children? Won't somebody please think of the children?