I saw Buddy and Coyote vs. Acme within a couple of days of each other and I was struck by how much they occupy the same territory while still being wildly different movies. One is horror, and one’s a heartwarming comedy. Both are about the border between reality and children’s television; both are surrealist exercises. Will Forte and Cristin Milioti are the pivot points, the humans with a foot in both worlds. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of this, but I suppose the circumstances of Coyote vs. Acme’s release were the elephant in the discourse room. ...

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...

As is strictly obligatory in Minnesota, we visited the State Fair this week. Good way to burn a day while waiting for our things to arrive, although the minimalist lifestyle wasn’t so bad. We missed the TV, though, since it’s our only way to watch movies together. Anyhow, the bus ride to the Fair was super-easy and we went on a traditionally low-attendance day, which means it was only slightly jam-packed. ...

So that’s the first week in the Twin Cities. We’re loving it so far although we’re about ready to get our stuff back; fortunately it shows up Tuesday. I dropped an AirTag in one of the moving boxes to figure out if it’d be an effective tracker and it sure was; I can see our things in a warehouse to the northwest after a somewhat alarming trip down to Chicago. ...

My Vision Pro has been getting a real workout this week while our TV is in transit; it continues to be a great media consumption device and it’s also standing in very well as a monitor for my desktop Mac. Today I spent half an hour watching the start of the Red Sox/Yankees game, presented as an immersive experience, which means it was a 180 full range of vision view. ...

On Sunday, August 16th, we checked into a lovely AirBnB near our house in Seattle with the cats. On Monday, we went back to our house and supervised while the movers loaded all our crap into two U-Haul pods. On Tuesday, we packed up everything we needed to bring with us for a week and a half before the pods made it to St. Paul, stuffed it in the car, and started driving along I-90 starting at the western end. ...

Set the Wayback Machine to February 1995, and let’s head back to the Netcom offices. I’d been promoted from tech support to email administration by now, so I was no longer trailing into the office at 5 PM — which is not to say I was an early riser by any means, so that day I got in around 10 AM or so. Either way, I was completely weirded out to see a total stranger sacked out in a sleeping bag under Robert Hood’s desk over in the network administrator bullpen. ...

Another month, another Criterion Channel lineup. Still no Boston Crime collection. It’s OK, this is my first of these posts from the lovely city of St. Paul so now I’m gonna demand a Viking themed collection instead. Fun month this month, which definitely reflects the wide range of programming the Channel provides, so without further ado, let’s hit the headliners. And this month the main attraction is Directed by Abel Ferrara. They did a great job here, getting movies from Ferrara’s whole career. I’m interested in his first (non-pornographic) movie, The Driller Killer, and his most recent fictional movie, Padre Pio, both of which are here. So are his classic New York movies, his Body Snatchers, New Rose Hotel — it’s really comprehensive. The only thing I’m sad is missing on a quick look is Mary, which has such a good cast (Binoche, Whitaker, Cotillard), but it looks like rights are a bit of a bear there. ...

I have a lot of cheerful funny stories about interviewing and being hired. I also have a similar number of harder stories about leaving jobs. This is the toughest one. It’s a layoff story, too, just not my layoff story. There I was at AltaVista in 2001, entering my third year or so as a director and my fourth year as an AltaVista employee. I ran Production Operations: our system administrators, our NOC, a very small project management team, and a few other things. I owned servers for AltaVista.com and the Zip2 services, and another director — Ken Rouleau? — owned shopping.com. There were a couple other departments in there but we don’t need the laundry list. ...

There’s this restaurant in Seattle, Canlis. It has a reputation for excellent service and very good food. It is the only restaurant in Seattle with a dress code, which is fairly loose but don’t show up in a T-shirt. It is pricy – $185 a head for a six course tasting menu before you get into drinks – and it has a remarkable view of Lake Union. My in-laws kindly gave us a gift certificate for Christmas several years ago and it’s use it or lose it now that we’re moving, so we invited our dear friends Joe and Harli out to a big old blow out dinner. Here’s how it went. ...