Thoughts from the snow day

– I’ve got two long drives and two long flights ahead of me in the next week. The time isn’t wasted if the music is good.

– I walked down to the store and back last night in fifty degree weather, partly to prepare myself for the upcoming San Francisco weather. I wore long sleeves to protect against the cold, and by the end of the walk I wished I hadn’t. Which just makes me glad I fought off my initial urge to order long sleeve “iProng Magazine” shirts for the upcoming trip. Short sleeves will do just fine, thank you.

– It probably means nothing, but I find it odd that Amazon is sold out (three to five week delivery time) of the low-end MacBook Pro; they’re instead pointing customers to one of their marketplace partners. Maybe it’s simply because Amazon was selling that model at a $130 discount plus a $100 rebate and oversold itself. Then again the partner site is selling it at a $150 discount and seems to have plenty in stock, as does Apple’s own website. So it’s probably just an anomaly. But any time you see an Apple product running low on stock from a major retailer three days before Macworld Expo, it does make you wonder – even if it is a product that was introduced a mere three months ago. Why am I watching so closely? Because assuming Apple doesn’t make any changes to its laptop lineup by the time I get home from Macworld and CES, the particular model in question will be my next computer purchase.

– Come to think of it, why is the new MacBook Pro being sold at such a discount, a mere three months after its introduction? Is that just an economy thing?

– Whatever I said at the beginning of the football season about Chad Pennington being refreshingly mediocre, I take it all back. He may have a mediocre arm, but he’s the best quarterback to line up under center for the Dolphins since Dan Marino himself. And I think they tried about twelve different guys at the position in the eight years in between. In one year the team went from being the worst in football to making the playoffs, and everyone on the team’s defense keeps giving all the credit to Pennington instead of one of their own. Back in September I said he was no savior, but his teammates would know better than I do. With the team at 11-5 it seems pretty obvious at this point, but it needs to be said that I was wrong about him. And that stands no matter what happens in the playoffs.

– Speaking of the Dolphins, back when they were 3-4 earlier this season, Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish told me that they would make it to the Super Bowl. What did he know that the rest of us didn’t?

– I finally saw The Dark Knight. I know, way late to the party on that one. I was too busy working when it was in theaters, and by the time I had found time to make it to the movies, it was already gone. Now that it’s finally available for rent through iTunes, I finally got to see it. The verdict? Very well done, but perhaps not quite my kind of movie. The previous Batman movie was a caper, while this one was a borderline horror movie. Iron Man was more my style. But I’d watch The Dark Knight again, if only to see a repeat of Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a movie before, but at this point I’d say give him every award he’s up for and then some. Make up some additional awards for him if need be. And that has nothing to do with the fact that he’s deceased.

– In fact one of my new years resolutions is to try to work as many of Ledger’s Joker quotes into conversation as possible without anyone catching on. Of course step one toward making that happen would probably have involved not announcing it on my blog. Oh well.

– According to ESPN, every team in the NBA played a game yesterday, the first time that’s happened in basketball history. Hmm, I thought it was still the preseason.

– I finally tried one of those expensive “delivery-quality” DiGiorno frozen pizzas. Not bad, but I still like the 99 cent crispy crust frozen pizzas better. I must be low-rent.

– So what’s my plan for 2009? I’m just a dog chasing cars. Do I really look like a guy with a plan?