this morning's commute found me sitting in front of a tall woman who was standing up. she was so tall, her crotch was right at my eye level. she wore very nicely tailored pants (brown, synthetic fabric), a bit wrinkled at the knees, which made me think she was about to do the walk of shame when she got to work. she must've been 6 feet tall at least. i should calibrate myself, measure how tall i am when i sit down, so i can accurately measure people's heights when they're riding the subway. i wondered about her boyfriend, whether he would be just as tall as she was. i wondered about how she shops for clothes, whether it'd be easy to find things her size, or would she have to shop in the men's section, or maybe just get used to wearing everything a little bit short and tight.

another day full of debugging. it's mostly graphic stuff, swapping out the bad pieces with the fixed ones. my webcam code is failing and it might be related to the xtra we're using, vcap, which seems to sporadically cause a fatal error in the runtime and crash out of the program. that's not a good thing, and when i left work today i implemented a new fix but i'm not confident it's going to do anything and i'm going to have to go in early tomorrow morning and try out a different xtra. bear in mind we have a friday deadline, which means it has to be fixed by thursday (tomorrow) night. i'm not sure if it's a hard deadline though, i hope to get it done by tomorrow so adam won't inherit my problem.

i went to the bank during lunch, took out some cash from my account for the trip, also bought some new checks at inflated bank prices, $20 for 150 checks. i'm just going to eat the cost instead of trying to work out the details if i went with a much cheaper 3rd party check supplier. the checks i'm using now are from 1996: fresh out of college i went out a bought 4 boxes of checks. i ended up throwing away 3 of the boxes thinking i'd never ever use up the single remaining box. well, the more you live the more bills you pay, and now i'm out of checks. those checks were so old they still said "bankboston" on them (fleet's my bank now), with my old address with the wrong outdated zip code. i went to cosi for lunch, got the buffalo chicken sandwich, before coming back to the office.

i've been wearing my new hiking shoes all week, trying to break them in, and today i really got to test them out as the city was covered in torrential downpours, rivers of rain water running down the streets. although the bottom of my pants got wet, the shoes stayed dry.

i miss running. my heart is starting to feel weird again, which made me realize why i started running again in the first place: i had the same weird chest sensation a while back, and i think i even went to the doctor who said it was nothing. but that sort of motivated me to get more exercise, which got me into running. i can't remember the last time i ran, probably a few weeks ago. kristine asked me today if i wanted to go running this week, and as much as i'm tempted, i don't want to risk messing up my legs before the big trip. after next week though, i'm going to start running again, it's time to get healthy once more.

police motorcycles	tables & chairs outside of cosi	corner mail in the rain
park street crossing	bu school of communication	park street station

i left work at 6pm to meet alex down at the boston university school of communication to see a free screening of "the bride wore black", a 1968 francois truffaut movie that was the inspiration for kill bill, about a bride seeking revenge. i didn't think alex would show up and i was waiting for him to call me to cancel (he's finicky when it comes to doing anything when the weather's bad), so i was surprised when he got there before me. the place was empty when we got there, and there were already people in the screening room, but it seemed to be for some sort of class. we went in anyway (room dark, a movie playing), and when it looked like it wasn't our movie, we left.

trying to salvage what's left of the evening, i suggested we go back to my place, i'd go out and rent a movie or two, and we could still have a movie night. this gave me a chance to visit hollywood express on mass ave for the very first time, the underground (literally) videostore. the place has a really cool movie geek vibe to it, i'm sure people like dan and elias would love it. tuesday nights are 2-for-1, as well as wednesdays and thursdays when you use a coupon, which i just happened to have. i ended up renting shiri and confidential for $5.

alex ordered some peking raviolis while i cooked up some ramen for dinner. we watched shiri, this korean espionage/action movie that i really wanted to see when it first came out. the fact that it depicts a sexy female assassin on the dvd cover was also a factor. after watching the movie, i can honestly say that it wasn't very good, and i don't know what all the hype was about. the story was weak and confusing, about these highly trained north korean assassins who enter south korean to steal an experimental liquid explosion so they can use it to kill the two korean presidents during a historical north-south soccer match. i couldn't tell the actors apart (that's always a bad sign), and all the action sequences were boring, maybe quite good compared to other korean action sequences, but a dime a dozen when compared to hollywood action. especially in this post-matrix movie world, by the book car chases and gun fights just aren't exciting anymore. the ending was somewhat poignant however, when the boyfriend listens to the confession of his assassin girlfriend (i'm giving away the plot, but 30 minutes into the movie, you'd have figured it out yourself) on his answering machine.