So last week I jumped on the Barbenheimer bandwagon and went to the movie theater twice.

The first outing was the easiest, heading back to The Chabot Theater to see Barbie. The theater is within walking distance of home, and it’s a pretty standard length movie. I took a Sunday afternoon and walked over to the theater for a 2PM showing while Aaron was napping. I was back home with MJ and the boys shortly after 4PM.

The theater was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it, there was even a line going out the front door when I arrived at 1:45! But I got my ticket and candy, and settled in for what turned out to be a much more emotional experience than I expected. As a working mother, the movie definitely spoke to me, and I admit that there were some serious tears a couple times during the movie. It was also visually extraordinary and a lot of fun, I’m very glad I went, and it was a great movie to break my theater drought.

Oppenheimer took a bit more planning. First of all, it’s a 3 hour movie, which is quite the investment of time. And as much of a fan of historical docudramas as I am (The Manhattan Project looms large in our country’s mythology), I probably would have skipped it in the theater if it wasn’t for a simple fact: it was filmed for 70mm IMAX format, only 30 theaters in the world were playing it on this format, and one of those theaters was less than 20 minutes from our house, in the random suburb of Dublin, California. How could I miss this opportunity? I couldn’t! Which brings me to the second matter of logistics. The first showing I had my sights on sold out, so I had to adjust my plans and ended up with tickets for a Wednesday showing. My seat wasn’t great due to how close to the screen I was, but I was mostly centered and my seat reclined, so it was a pleasant experience.

It was a good movie, though I think it would have been more IMAX fun if they had more explosions, it was a movie about The Bomb, after all.

In other screen news, we recently bought a new TV. I wasn’t entirely on board with this plan, partially due to just how much is on our plates and I wasn’t keen on The Whole Project it would be to move the TVs around so we could finally replace the failing plasma TV in the family room. It’s just showing cartoons and baseball! Who needs a perfect picture? Well, ultimately even I had to admit it was getting quite bad, and the other day we even had some major audio distortion which rendered it unwatchable. We got this plasma TV in 2010, and it was fine for a few years until we replaced it with a much lighter, cooler, 4K TV. The plasma went into a box until four years ago when we pulled it out to use in the family room, and ultimately mounted it on the wall.

Our new OLED TV arrived last week, but we didn’t yet have a plan to install it, until an opportunity presented itself. Our two former au pairs reached out to ask if they could take the boys to the beach on Saturday morning! We quickly agreed and suddenly we had some child-free time that could be spent moving around huge TVs! Our plan was to take the plasma TV off the wall and pack it up. Then move the TV from the living room up to the mounted spot in the family room, and install the new TV on the TV stand in the living room.

It took a few hours.

As is often the case with these projects, we encountered several bumps in the road. Where was the plasma TV base, which we needed to return it to the box? Where are the spare screws from the mounting kit? Thankfully, we were able to find everything we were missing, and there were no panic trips to the hardware store, or worse. Taking the plasma TV down was no small feat though, did I mention it’s heavy? It’s very heavy.

The rest of the project went rather smoothly, just a bunch of manual labor in the form of lifting TVs and twisting screws.

Unfortunately my current lifestyle with two little kids and a full time job means I don’t have a lot of time for watching TV. Hah! But it’s nice that Shaun the Sheep is being reliably presented the correct colors now. I actually found myself with some time the other night when I was ready to sit down and watch some TV downstairs, but I had a snack and fell asleep to a podcast instead. Sorry TV, I’ll meet you some other night.

Plus, I had company! The Continuum Drag podcast was watching them too. A few days after each pair of episodes I watched, I would load up the next podcast on my walk or run, and voila! Some folks to enjoy the pain and laughs with. They were definitely harsher on it than I was, but I think I’ve come to be more comfortable with camp and older shows as I’ve gotten older. I also deeply appreciated how bad all the computer scenes were, so I had a fondness for the show that I think is hard for someone who doesn’t work full time in tech to appreciate.

But my favorite thing about the show? The Autocar. It’s instantly recognizable as a Lamborghini Countach LP400, the car that, to this day, I think of when I think of “the car of the future.” I don’t know why the Countach landed in my head like that, but it probably is the most iconic car of the 1980s.

The car graces the DVD cover:

And Shout! Factory (who was responsible for the DVD release) put a lovely clip up on YouTube:

Cool. But then, our friends at Continuum Drag tweeted about Automan merchandise and made me want an Autocar of my own! At first, I publicly mused about 3-D printing one, but after looking into designs and pricing, I started looking at toy cars that already exist and could be repurposed, so that’s what I decided to do.

First stop, eBay! I picked up a Matchbox 1982 Lamborghini Countach LP500 for about $10, shipped.

A few things about this model for this project:

• It’s green. Looking at the listing again, you can tell from the photos, but I guess I wasn’t looking that closely
• It has “Lamborghini” scrolled across the sides
• It has a spoiler
• Technically it’s the LP500 rather than the LP400, but I am pretty sure the exteriors are the same

My first decision had to be whether I wanted to repaint the whole thing black. I decided against it. I’m not very good at painting (as you will see), and I worried that I’d botch it, and it would just end up looking awful. Plus, this toy is the most fun when the lights are off anyway! And the spoiler? I’ll just have to live with it.

So, paint. I learned from my baby mainframes the best paints to use for this kind of work were acrylics, and I went with Golden Artist Colors.

In the baby mainframe project I learned that putting on a coat of white paint over the black did wonders for having the subsequent color put on. Now, this is also true of the glow-in-the-dark paint, but it turns out the Light Ultramarine Blue I was using doesn’t need a white base coat. I could have saved myself a lot of time and ugliness if I had skipped the white base coat. Oh, well.

But as I said, a base on the green was important for the Spacebeams Aquaris glow-in-the-dark paint. When I put the glowing paint on without a base, it barely showed up. So the good news is, if you could put the blue coat on nicely, you could afford to be a little sloppy with the glowing paint. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at any of it, so my Autocar is a cute hobby craft, rather than a work of art. The glowing paint also is mostly transparent over the blue, but not totally, so it did make for a slightly toned down blue in the light.

But once the lights were off, I was totally in love! The colors were perfect!

It’s my very own toy Autocar!

Oh, yeah, I also got a t-shirt.

Once this was all complete, I felt a bit silly about it all. I’m a 40 year old woman with two small kids, and very little time to myself. This is what I spend it on? But this project is so very me that I kept me entertained and grounded through a transformative time in my life. It’s silly, but it’s mine, and right now I need more that’s just mine.

I seem to have stumbled upon a similar situation with The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri by Liz W. Faber. I don’t know what I expected from this book, but it quickly became clear that without seeing the films and shows she referenced throughout the book, I’d struggle to properly appreciate it. As it was, I found the phrasing and prose of the book a bit of a struggle because it feels rather academic to me. I also don’t really understand enough about things like psychology to properly understand everything she discussed. Still, it was worth reading for me, and it is a fascinating tour through the intersection of feminism, sexuality, and science fiction.

The first chapter went well, I’d already seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: The Original Series, but then things got tricky! I’d never seen any of the movies/shows mentioned in the next chapter, so I had some catching up to do. Dark Star was on a streaming service we subscribe to, and I was able to digitally rent Moon. Finding the Quark television series was a little trickier. It’s not available streaming anywhere, and the DVD was expensive in many places. I ended up finding the series DVD for less than $20 with shipping on a somewhat sketchy movie website, but it came through, I got my copy!

It was about at this moment when I realized I was having a lot of fun.

Dark Star is a campy classic, and everything about it is ridiculous, including the sultry voice of their computer. Moon was quite good, and I’m surprised I hadn’t seen it before. In stark contrast to 2001, the computer ends up being an unlikely ally to our protagonist. And Quark was just silly, it’s hard to say whether it’s bad or not because it was intentionally bad to poke fun at other space shows of the age, but I did chuckle quite often while watching it. There’s a robot throughout the eight episodes that it lasted, but it was the actual talking computer, Vanessa 38-24-36, from the final episode which was mentioned in the book. She was awful, but she was the villain of the episode and so that was to be expected.

Vanessa 38-24-36

But more importantly than these first few films and shows, it turns out, this book was a gold mine of other science fiction recommendations!

Nearly half of them I’d already seen:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• THX 1138 (1971)
• TRON (1982)
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
• Iron Man (2013)
• Star Trek:The Original Series (TV series)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV series)
• Eureka (TV series)
• Big Bang Theory (TV series)

But there were plenty I hadn’t seen:

• Quark (TV Series)
• Colossus – The Forbin Project (1970)
• The Andromeda Strain (1971)
• Dark Star (1974)
• Rollerball (1975)
• Demon Seed (1977)
• Electric Dreams (1984)
• Fortress (1992)
• Smart House (1998)
• Moon (2009)
• Her (2013)

Rollerball is apparently a bit of a classic, but the computer segment of it was quite brief and the computer wasn’t very good (in keeping with its place in this dystopian setting). It was a cool looking computer though, and very different from the walls of blinking lights that most movies use to portray super computers.

Zero from Rollerball (1977)

Also, fun fact, as they walk past Zero throughout the facility, you see product-placement Sperry Corporation computers. The book is what clued me in to this fact, plus that Sperry as a corporation didn’t last long once IBM released the IBM System/360 and /370, the direct predecessors of which I work on in my day job at IBM. What fun I am having! (Sorry Sperry Corp.)

Sperry-IBM quote from The Computer’s Voice

I was surprised that I hadn’t seen The Andromeda Strain, though I’m certain I’ve read the book. It was a solid movie with a pretty cool looking computer room!

Compute room from The Andromeda Strain

Smart House was a Disney Channel Original Movie and it was dreadful, but almost worth it for the control room for the home automation system. Almost.

Control room for the home automation system in Smart House

Of all the movies I watched, the most pleasant surprise was probably Colossus: The Forbin Project. The setup of a super computer in charge of the missiles during the Cold War was too perfect, I really enjoyed this film. It’s a shame that it wasn’t available on any streaming service, having to buy the DVD is quite the barrier to seeing it for most people, and most people should see it! Plus, I learned from the book that the computers filmed were real, provided by Control Data Corporation (CDC) as product placements.

Colossus!

The next movie on my list was Fortress. I don’t like prison movies/shows, so this one was tough for me. The computer in this movie was sadly not cool to look at, the interface was a split keyboard and a wall of monitors. No blinking lights! But the computer can also override the wishes of the “warden” and goes on to control a fleet of robotic cameras that travel around the facility, militant cyborgs, and pretty much everything else in the facility (vehicles!), so that’s pretty cool.

Zed-10’s prison security camera from Fortress

I didn’t read the descriptions of the movies since I was planning on watching them anyway, so I was moderately horrified at by Demon Seed. As the title hints at, the computer impregnates a human. There was a lot going on in the 1970s, haha! But the computer, Proteus IV, looks really cool and it’s a super bizarre movie.

Proteus IV

Her was a very cerebral one. The computer in this movie is an evolved personal assistant, and in the course of the movie you discover that there are people here and there who fall in love with them, including the protagonist. Oddly, during this pandemic time when we’re all so isolated, it did make me think long and hard about what people need, and I joked that I was very confused about emotions after watching it. The computer interface is usually just a small smartphone or earpiece (boring! but appropriate), and it’s voiced by Scarlett Johansson, a voice that will be familiar to many viewers, so that also added an interesting dimension, much like Kevin Spacey being the computer voice in Moon.

Electric Dreams is another in the field of computers and love, but it’s much less subtle. The movie came out in 1984, so very few people had personal computers, and I’m sure it must have felt quite novel and futuristic to have what we now consider the standard CRT monitor, computer, and keyboard setup. Watching it now, it feels old. Much like Tron, the movie comes from a place where most people didn’t really understand computers, so they could do playful things that didn’t make any sense (throwing champagne on your computer is not recommended). Still, the computer was effectively “on-line” which was a rare concept at the time, and it controlled his home automation system, all things I’m sure people wanted but ended up being quite the future-facing idea! The movie was also so so so 1980s. The music was the biggest focus, aside from the computer, and it was fun seeing so many shots of 1980s San Francisco, where the film is set.

Edgar from Electric Dreams looks very familiar!

Finally, one of my favorite movies was in this book! And I took the opportunity to watch it again: A.I. Artificial Intelligence. I think the movie was a bit weird to ever be very popular, but it really struck a cord with me. The talking computer in this one is voiced by our beloved Robin Williams, and I really enjoyed the characters and the whole story. Also, I’m not much of a crier, but this movie gets me every time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this little movie and show marathon, but I think the best part about it was connecting with other SciFi fans on social media. My mainframe pal Ray Mullins told me about the Colossus book, which turned out to be a trilogy of books! I got old paperbacks of all three. On the topic of Colossus, there is quite the computer geek cult following of the movie, so it was also fun to engage with folks who are into that. I may have to get a t-shirt.

Most recently, my infrastructure pal Sarah Elkins pointed me in the direction of the Continuum Drag podcast where they just started talking about the show Automan (1983) which I immediately bought the DVD set of for the 13 episodes. It arrived today. Sounds like this movie marathon has taken on a life of its own, and I have a fun journey continuing ahead of me!

And many thanks to author Liz W. Faber for putting me on this path to begin with.

Young Caligula, gardening in Pennsylvania

Fast forward to today. Caligula has been living in a high rise in downtown San Francisco for over seven years! We haven’t brought him out during all this time. I’d loosely mention taking Caligula out to a park here and there, but Simcoe didn’t like being left alone and she’d often react badly when we brought Caligula home from the vet (hissing, growling, for days!). And I figured she still wouldn’t be interested in coming along for the outdoor adventures. Now that we have just Caligula, it was time to revisit outdoor adventure plans. This past weekend we brought him to Golden Gate Park, where we found a quiet patch of grass not too close to anyone else and enjoyed some food (picked up from a Mexican food truck) as Caligula wandered around on a short leash.

We weren’t sure what to expect. I’d never brought him to a public park before, and I’m sure the car ride over wasn’t his favorite thing, but he loved it. My often lazy cat spent the hour and a half there wandering around our blanket, and then dragging me around so he could explore further.

Caligula in Golden Gate Park

Eventually we rounded off our day as the wind picked up and it got a bit cooler, but I’m really happy that he had such a nice time. I know I’ve been pretty down since losing Simcoe, and I think he’s really missed having his snuggle buddy. It was a good way to cheer all of us up.

I’ve mentioned that 2017 has been a tricky year for me, but I’ve started to feel better. Instead of spending so much non-work, non-traveling work watching TV, I’ve transitioned back into reading. My interest in other hobbies has picked up too, I’ve started moving away from so much computer work and decided to get more serious about my interest in model trains. When I was in Philadelphia last time I picked up a starter train set at a toy show, and I’ve now started to refresh my memory on some of the other basics. I subscribed to Model Railroader magazine, and am now somewhat overwhelmed with how much opportunity there is to learn and explore. I’m also struck by the fact that hobby-wise I’ve mostly focused on digital and outward-focused projects. This will be one of the first that gets me back to hardware, but it quickly occurred to me that it can be pulled into a bunch of the electronics projects I’ve idly wondered about over the years. Arduinos and sound-activated controls for a model railroad set? It’s totally going to be a thing!

Increasing the scale, we decided to go back to Philadelphia over the week of Memorial Day. As we were musing about travel, my interest in trains distracted me into talking about cross-country railroad trips and MJ seriously suggested we finally do it for this trip. After geeking out over routes for a couple hours, MJ secured tickets for us on the California Zephyr which we’ll take the entire length, from Emeryville to Chicago in one of the bedroom compartments. From there we’re taking a Capitol Limited to Washington DC in a Roomette and then on to the Northeast Regional to Phliadelphia in Business Class seats. How long does this trip take, you ask? We’re leaving from San Francisco’s temporary TransBay Terminal at 7:50AM on Friday the 26th and arriving in Philadelphia at 5:15PM on Monday the 29th. From there we’re taking the SEPTA regional rail from 30th street station in Philadelphia up Trevose, where the train drops us just over a mile from our townhouse. So it takes a long time and train is not cheaper. Traveling how we are, in the bedroom and roomette is actually considerably more than flying. For us, it’s all about the experience. I’ve not seen much of the center of the country, there are beautiful places I’m missing out on. Taking a train through over the course of a few days is a pretty exciting proposal, I’m really looking forward to it.

With all this train stuff, I realized over the past year how much more adventurous I’ve gotten with rail-based public transit. I’m slowly starting to default to it where it makes sense time-wise, and sad about missed opportunities to take it in the past.

I also recently finished reading Train by Tom Zoellner. He takes several journeys on train lines all around the world, and weaves a tale that blends his experience on these routes, conversations he has with fellow train passengers and a hefty dose of history about each line, and those which are naturally related to it in some way. It was a beautifully written book, and made me even more excited about our cross-country journey! I recently finished the audiobook for Ringworld. I read the book years ago, but never really got into the series. I decided this time around to buy the series as audiobooks and start making my way through them. I got an audiobook of If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran which has so far been incredibly engaging. Back to the pages, I’ve been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s The Arm of the Starfish and my second book by Brene Brown, I thought it was just me, but it isn’t.

But OK, I’m not just spending lots of wholesome time reading. The new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) came out several weeks ago and I’ve been doing my best not to binge watch. I slowly made my way up to 1105, the episode that has my name in the credits because of the Kickstarter campaign. I then went through the next few pretty quickly, they’re just so good! And MST3K has been an important part of my life since I discovered it in the late 90s on the SciFi channel. I don’t remember how I found it, I must have just stumbled upon it in my general watching of the SciFi channel. It’s what made me join my first IRC server to chat with fellow fans. It was there that I met my ex-husband who introduced me to Linux, and dove into IRC client scripting and creating websites. Later I helped a pile of fellow fans run an MST3K fan site, which was tricky after the show stopped airing, but gave me my first experience scouring the internet for stories, which I later used in my work on the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

I had my doubts about a reboot of the series, on the one hand we had many of the original cast and crew members participating, but on the other they suddenly had big names and cameos being announced as part of the project, and there was a real risk of the show getting more serious than I would enjoy. Thankfully, my fears were not realized. The show is just as silly and campy as it ever was. They didn’t let a budget or big names go to their head, it has the feel and jokes that I came to expect from MST3K.

At home things are chugging along. As I write this on an early Friday morning before work Caligula is in super snuggle mode and is curled up against me. He’s been like this since we lost Simcoe. We think he’s lonely, as my trip to SLC this week didn’t leave him the happiest (MJ was at work all day). There is a temptation to get him a new kitten friend, but every time I think about it I get sad and realize I’m not ready for it. Plus with all my travel lately I don’t really have the time to train a new kitten, who will have claws.

Speaking locally, this past month we’ve seen the closing of two Italian establishments in our area. A.G. Ferrari has closed all bay area locations. It’s a shame, that was my go-to spot for fresh Parmesan cheese and Italian bread. Umbria, my favorite Italian restaurant in the city, and conveniently on our block, has closed. We made our way down there on their final night, finding ourselves in the midst of other random diners, as well as family and friends wishing the owner a fond farewell. There were speeches, stories, hugs, and tears, which we were included us in. Thankfully this is not the end of the story for them! They’re moving up to Glen Ellen in Sonoma, with progress being tracked on their #WheresGiulio website. We’ll have to visit when they finally open, but I’ll really miss having such a great local place.

We’ve also been carving out bits of our weekend to actually catch up on boring adult things. Our dining area has always been a den of chaos, and I’ve finally started tackling that by picking up a new piece of Ikea furniture so we have a place to pack things into. The chaos still mostly exists, but it’s starting to be tamed and some things are now put away, hooray!

I think this weekend will be a stay in one. I have a ton to do here before I depart for two weeks. And a busy work week is on the horizon with attendance at DevXCon on Monday and a journey (ferry + car service) up to Napa on Wednesday to speak at a conference on Thursday. Then the rise-with-the-sun trek over to the TransBay terminal Friday morning to catch that train across the country. It’s all exciting stuff though, I wouldn’t trade next week for a boring one even if I could.