If you’ve never seen Jim Gaffigan’s stand-up routine, well, you should.

He’s an observational humorist, in the vein of Jerry Seinfeld and others. He is self-deprecating, and often riffs on food. In the past, he’s had hilarious insights into bacon, Hot Pockets and the Waffle House. In Mr. Universe, one of his targets was McDonalds.

And working out.

Hotel indoor pools.

Hotel rooms.

Taking too damn many pictures.

Mr. Universe was a new experiment for Gaffigan: This is available download only. No rental copies; no DVDs online. Five bucks and the MP4 is yours to burn, watch on a computer and so on – no DRM, he just asks you to not to share. I downloaded the HD version, burned to a (single layer) DVD, and it looked pretty damn good on a 47″ TV (some pixalation in shadows/low-light areas).

Worth it to me. Just 75 minutes of sly, understated observational humor.

A lot of days, that’s sorely needed.

WATCHING:
Young Adult
Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson

This is the movie I was expecting – an essentially dark movie with a veneer or comedy – but it disappointed. It just wasn’t as good as I had expected.

I had higher hope for it as it once again brought together director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, who collaborated to such success with Juno.

This was no Juno.

It was a good movie in that the character development of Charlize Theron had a nice arc, and you could – eventually – see how she ended up where she was today: Essentially, she never left the glories of high school even though she’s in her 30s.

Patton is in a similar situation, but his lot in life was set when he was a geek in high school, and – without giving anything away – this led to events that really leave him with few options other than to continue to be the sad outsider.

The ending is ambiguous, and I like that – does Theron’s character grow up, or does she continue to circle the drain even faster? Can’t really say.

All movies

Well, I installed Google’s latest free feature – GDrive – yesterday, and here are some quick observations.

Note: With my own domains/servers, I’ve never needed file sharing tools like GDrive or Dropbox – I’ve just used FTP. So my point of reference is a techie with little exposure to these tools.

The Good:

• Since I have a Google account, the install was a breeze (see “The Bad,” below).
• 5 gigs of storage for free, as compared to 2 gigs for Dropbox.
• Fast synch; links to my Google docs appeared almost instantly in my local “Google Drive” folder. Uploads appeared in Gdrive almost instantly.

The Bad:

• Didn’t let me install the program where I wanted. I have my drive partitioned off, and I like to put apps on the NON-C:/Program Files partition. There was no option for this. I was allowed to select the location for the “Google Drive” folder, however. Odd.
• GDrive’s Terms of Service are a joke and scaring off users. I expect Google to shortly revisit and revise same. Get rid of the goddam lawyers and treat your customers – us – with respect!
• For some reason – maybe it was an opt-out I missed – but the next day my screen saver had changed to “Google Photos Screensaver.” I don’t like when apps change other apps. That is evil.

Just first impressions, more as I run across the good and the bad.

About a decade or so ago, Six Apart’s Movable Type blogging tool was all the rage. Ben and Mena Trott were internet rock stars.

What happened? It looks like the company (Six Apart) is now owned by a Japanese firm.

And WordPress is all the rage for blog/CMS installs (today).

I never really thought about it until I saw an ad for Movable Type on some tech site.

I did a local install of Movable Type on one of my Linux boxes years ago; slick program. Perl.

WordPress is PHP, which is the hot blogging/CMS language right now (good for me – I know some Perl, but I’m a PHP developer).

Still, Movable Type and Ben/Mena just dropped off the face of the earth.

Just sayin’/askin’…

WATCHING:
Singles
Starring: Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon

This Cameron Crowe-directed film has, of course, a lot of great music (not as good as Almost Famous) and an incredible cast.

It’s been 20 years since its release, and I just watched it for the first time this past weekend. Worth watching.

Not a great movie, but fun – about the lives of a bunch of 20-somethings living in Seattle. Talking, falling in and out of love/lust and so on. I kept thinking of “Friends” watching this. I swear it must be an influence for the TV series.

I’ve been to Seattle a couple of times, so the location shots were fun, and the general tone of the movie made it a nice – but not remarkable – watch.

I’ll recommend this flick, but not push too hard on same.

All movies

Well, I put a new fan into one of the Linux boxes today (an old Dell box that I turned into a Linux server). The old fan was starting to screech – not too badly, but I took this as a sign that it was ready to die.

After shopping at TigerDirect.com – and not having the fan arrive in over a week – I placed an order for two fans (let’s have a spare and save on shipping) from newegg.com and they arrived today.

First time I did this particular repair (been lucky…) and it was pretty straight-forward. My only complaint is that there wasn’t a direction flow marked on the fan, so had to power up the box before securing the new fan. Or maybe I just missed the indicator. No biggie.

Quiet again!