Month: April 2009

So this weekend I went to visit some friends in the North Bay.  It was the first time I had driven the R32 in a few weeks (since the Jetta has been fixed it’s back as the daily driver) and as I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge I was thinking that maybe I should try taking a different way home.  So I ended up doing this:

View Larger Map

It was a VERY fun drive.  While I’ve spent plenty of time playing in the Santa Cruz Mountains I had somehow never really taken Hwy 1 all the way down past Half Moon Bay and I really enjoyed it.  There are some cool little towns in there like Montara that I had never been through.  Places like that are high on the list of places I would want to go shopping for a house if I ever won the lotto.  Also, since that stretch of road will be going away I want to drive it a few times before it does.  (Somehow a dark ugly tunnel won’t be the same.  Especially when tanker trucks explode in it.)

Taking this little detour helped to remind me why I like Northern California so much and the central coast especially.  There’s something about the coastline here that is just different and it just strikes me as being amazingly beautiful.  And right around here is where you get the blending of the central coast vegetation combined with a bit of the redwoods that you see farther north.  Of course, since this wasn’t planned, I lacked a camera.

The only real flaw in my plan was that I was coming back a bit later than I had hoped.  I underestimated the time it would take.  So by the time I got to Page Mill Road…it was dark.  And I had forgotten just how technical that chunk of road is.  Doing it in the dark did make me a bit nervous, but there are a couple of turnouts where you can see a very nice chunk of Silicon Valley.  Usually when I’ve done Page Mill in the past I’ve noticed that while the view is nice but the haze gets in the way.  At night, however, it was all twinkly lights and pretty pretty. 

Stuck on the train during the week it can be pretty easy to forget how beautiful things are around here.  There are worse places to live.

day_the_earth_stood_still_ver4

Originally uploaded by Cine Fanatico

I know I haven’t said anything about movies I’ve watched recently but…wow. This was really bad.

First off, I hated the kid. I was kinda hoping Bill/Neo/Klaatu would just off him. I hope that’s not like he is in real life or the Fresh Prince needs to start laying down the law. The thought of this kid and Jackie Chan in a Karate Kid remake is just repulsive.

Of course Jennifer Connelly’s character was at fault – the first time the kid got fresh she should have put the smack down. I think parents should be allowed to taser their children. Yeah yeah, she’s just a stepmom and dad’s dead….don’t care. The upside of his head – let me show it to you.

Secondly, the special effects were just meh. The nano cloud of death was ok, but a lot of the compositing was off. On Blu-Ray at least, at 1080p, you could see how out of place the helicopters looked. I just was never impressed. If the goal was to be a special effects masterpiece…it wasn’t. Weta has done better.

Thirdly there was Keanu. Ah, Keanu. What can one say? You should have stopped with Johnny Utah. Srsly.

Finally there was the “green” message. The aliens are here to kill us because we’re harming the earth. They, of course, had their own crisis and developed nanotech. They want to knock us back to the stone age. Hey, guys – I’d think a species that valued life would care about sapient beings and not want to wipe out six billion of them.

Oh well, movies like this are why I have Netflix. I will happily put this one back in the envelope and send it back from whence it came.