But once the trailers started, I was much happier. The crowd was definitely ready — there was applause for a couple of the trailers, and then when the Lucasfilm logo came up, there was loud applause. Followed by a respectful silence for the movie itself. And more applause at the end.

I thought this movie was much better than the Phantom Menace — though I wish they’d found someone with more oomph to play Anakin. I won’t say more, just in case there’s someone reading this who hasn’t seen the movie yet — there aren’t many surprises (we all know where it all ends, after all), but I don’t want to spoil the few that there are.

We saw the film version of the movie; I want to go back and see the digital version, maybe next weekend. And we now need to re-watch Episode I (so we have to buy it), as well as the original trilogy (so I have to dust off the laserdisc player). We watched Hardware Wars as soon as we got home, but now I just discovered that they’ve released Hardware Wars – The Collector’s Edition on DVD. Diane and Jeffrey are pleading with me not to get it (Diane is even calling it the “Nuts’ Edition”) — but their pleas may well fall on deaf ears.

Art was pretty good, too — it was very funny. I didn’t like the first half-hour much, but it got better, and I quite liked the coda. The play is rather short (80 minutes, no intermission), which surprised me — but it was just about the right length. The play was originally written in French and took place in Paris, and they left prices in francs in the translation; I think they should have changed the unit to dollars, because the shock value of “200,000 francs” isn’t as strong as “30,000 dollars” would have been (and that’s for an all-white painting!).

Tonight, Diane’s Intermediate Hebrew class graduates by reading the Book of Ruth as part of Shabbat evening services.

Tomorrow, Jeffrey’s Daled Hebrew class graduates by leading Shabbat morning services. Then we go to San Jose Rep to see Art.

Sunday, it’s the last day of Sunday School for this school year, followed by a trip to the movies to see Episode II.

And maybe we’ll even make a dent in our TiVo backlog. Or go get some exercise. Or both.

But if I’m smart, what I won’t do is turn on a computer.

Shabbat Shalom!

Today’s Mercury News had a bunch of discouraging headlines and leads:

• Sharks Eliminated in Game 7
• IBM to Lay Off Thousands
• They Can’t Blame Jar Jar for This One

To which I say:

• Wait till next year
• This, too, shall pass (I hope)
• We’re going to see it anyway

Then I get to work and find that, as part of the yearly “nominal adjustments” in cafeteria prices, the cost (including tax) of my morning Starbucks has gone from 75 cents to $1.01. Oy!

Another way to wander the Web

Doc says he’s been getting a lot of visits from URLizer, which converts horrible URLs like this: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/lol/world.html?loc=dwmain/ into more reasonable ones like this: http://urlizer.com/00/420/.

I suspect that changing the numbers in the URLizer-generated URLs might lead to interesting random pages, like this: http://urlizer.com/00/419/ (I have no clue what that page points to; I hope it’s not overtly pornographic).

Yet another way to sense the Web’s zeitgeist and avoid doing real work.

I guess it’s possible to watch a show while it’s being broadcast, but why would you want to?

But moving East wouldn’t avoid quakes — as the 5.3 quake on April 20th showed. Or the 2.6 in Manhattan. I’d hate to be there when a big one hits!

It’s been quiet here tonight; I didn’t feel any aftershocks from yesterday’s quake (which has been reclassified as a 4.9), either yesterday or today, and that’s just fine with me.

In other news

In case you were relying on me for reports on WWW 2002, I’ve finally gotten around to writing up my notes for Wednesday afternoon’s final session. I tried to do it at the conference, but ETP glitched at just the wrong time. Life is like that sometimes.