Saturday was spent in Woodland, WA, touring the Empress Palace, a location that Jenn and I ended up reserving for our wedding.

It’s a beautiful place, currently decorated for the holiday season, and, frankly, we couldn’t beat the price for what we got. Paying up front got us a 10% discount, and Jenn won a drawing for another $500 off.

The date’s set for October 14, 2006. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to fill our time between now and then, but at least the venue (for both the ceremony and reception) is settled.

Went with Stu and Tif to see Aeon Flux this weekend.

Now, I’m a fan of the cartoon. I admit I came in thinking (hoping) that they’d stay faithful to it and reproduce the coolness (and oddness) that the cartoon renders.

I was disappointed.

It’s not that Charlize Theron did a bad job - she didn’t. She was pretty good as Aeon. It wasn’t that the premise was bad - it wasn’t. They came up with a reasonable plot with respect to the cartoon. It wasn’t even bad effects - they worked in the cool gadgets and some of the more odd things the cartoon had to offer tech-wise.

It’s just that… well, it’s like they said when they were making the thing, “Hey, we can be 100% faithful to the cartoon with this movie, except where we can’t be totally faithful. Then… aw, fuck it. Half-ass the thing and call it a day.”

The cartoon felt rich and intriguing. The movie felt sort of hollow. I didn’t feel for any of the characters. I didn’t get to like them. I didn’t care why they were doing what they were doing. It very much felt like it was just going through the motions.

If you see it, do it on a rental. I might even wait until it’s off the new release wall at the video store and pay your buck. You’d do better, though, to pick up the cartoon and watch Aeon in her full glory and pretend the live action version just never happened.

The new version is out and is primarily a bug fix release - hopefully some alleviation of problems for the VS 2005 users.

Fixed bug that would cause VS 2005 to throw an exception on shutdown if the CR_Documentor window had been displayed during the session.

Fixed bug that would display a security warning in the CR_Documentor window for VS 2005 users. CR_Documentor now executes the preview in the “Local Intranet” security zone.

Go get it!

Big thanks to Max and the rest of the DevExpress support team for being so responsive and pointing me in the direction for the exception-on-shutdown bug as well as for testing it out for me to make sure it was fixed. Also thanks to Scott Grosch and Chuck McGavern for reporting the bugs and helping test - if folks don’t tell me something’s wrong, I can’t fix it!

I added a new category to the blog - Release Notices - so folks looking to see when new versions of my software are released can look in that category to see the history of all the releases. The Software/Downloads category still provides the list of all available downloadables.

There are lots of things getting done lately, and I’m enjoying the closure I’m getting on them so much that I think my creative juices are flowing again - enough that working on new little side projects may be an option.

Friday night I got the last of my Odyssey CD storage cases from Sleeve City and finished the consolidation of CDs from the several racks and bookshelves they previously took up into three of these metal beauties. You wouldn’t imagine how much space I’m saving just on CDs.

Saturday Stu moved to the west side (not far from my house, actually) I spent the day helping him load and unload the U-Haul. Aside from being pretty exhausting (and causing me to be sore and achey even today), it was good to get all that done and I think it will be conducive to much gaming in the coming times. I’m itchin’ to get my Soul Calibur on.

Saturday night after moving, we watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which I anticipated being the lamest thing ever but was actually quite entertaining. Good humor and good action, just generally lots of fun. Deep and meaningful? No, but that’s not what we were looking for, either. Just a lot of fun.

Sunday was going to be a sort of “take it easy” day and was looking like it would stay that way despite some minor chores in the morning, but Jenn wanted to get the Christmas tree out of the attic, so that created… a little tension. But I got it put up and, a reasonable amount of grumbling and profanity aside, it all came together okay.

Woke up this morning at 4:30a and couldn’t go back to sleep, so at 5:00a I got up to read. Reading this book Sisters of the Raven by Barbara Hambly. It’s pretty decent, though it’s not one of those “can’t put it down” reads. I’m liking it, though, so I got up and spent an hour reading with the cat before the alarm went off.

Anyway, like I said - the juices are starting to flow again, which hasn’t happened for quite some time (the project we were on about this time last year and into the beginning of this year was, shall we say, trying) and I’m thinking about little projects and stuff to work on. I’m working on a minor bug in CR_Documentor, and I think maybe there’s some stuff I’d like to add to Junction Shell Extensions. I also want to get Solvent working in VS 2005. Oh, and I want better blog software (that’s been in the works for a while now) so it might be time to buckle down and get going on that. Plus the game bug has bitten me and I’d like to get back into the gaming thing. So much to do, so little time.