Somebody’s comedy is someone else’s tragedy …

I actually was going to write about something else today but then I got this strange tag saying that HostAurora was gone. Not that I see any point in commenting about that since I have no idea who left the tag (they didn’t leave a name) but I guess there must have been some point to that little exercise :p Anyway, on to what I really wanted to talk about today … (actually, I’ve wanted to write about quite a few things but just haven’t had the time to write lately … but that’s another story altogether :p)
I watched "The Sweetest Thing" last night – actually, I’d started watching it last week but finished watching it yesterday. Can’t say that I was too impressed. It had funny bits but for a romantic comedy it was strangely unsatisfying. Don’t get me wrong – it was definitely breaking new ground as a movie since this seemed to really portray things from a woman’s perspective and to tread in many areas most movies wouldn’t even dare to tread :p But overall, it left me unsatisfied. It was realistic but I think realism is hugely overrated. I watched "Serendipity" last week and was entranced – now that is my kind of romantic comedy. If you contrast "Serendipity" and "The Sweetest Thing" you see that "Serendipity" is totally unrealistic as to it’s situations whereas "The Sweetest Thing" actually portrays possible situations and interactions between people in a normal manner but it just left me so, so … unfulfilled :p I guess I just want the dreamy, romantic, unrealistic stuff to escape from the boring, monotony of a humdrum existence :p

To me, there was no romance, no real feeling, behind the relationship between Cameron Diaz’s character and the guy she falls in love with – Pete. The whole love story seemed to be just an incident in a movie filled with incidents – there just seemed to be no meat to it … no passion .. no drama … or maybe it’s just me :p A friend of mine (a girl <g>) called "The Sweetest Thing" a chick-flick :p Now I love chick-flicks but this to me wasn’t even a "real" chick-flick. Yes, it probably is a chick-flick for the girl of today – of the nineties and the … what the heck do you call this decade? the naughties? :p But it isn’t the kind of chick-flick that I like .. so there :p

Yesterday was kind of interesting but fairly hectic since I kept on getting hit from all sides with different stuff. I had the work related stuff to deal with (boring stuff – writing and producing television programs) as well as bug reports regarding Blog and the CSV reader component that I’d done – in the midst of that all, I was trying to get some work done on the new ASP/MSDE project I was working on and also trying to get a web based app for managing MSDE databases that I’d got from SourceForge. So all in all, a very muddled time was had by me :p

Actually, it turned out that the problems with the CSV reader component was a data problem – they had a CSV file where one record got split into two or more lines (don’t ask me how) and so obviously the reader component complained that there wasn’t a proper record with the correct number of columns to be read. As far as I know, a CSV record has to be on one single line and this was the proper behaviour for the component. I don’t know what the client will want though after they figure out what caused the problem in their input files. Maybe they’ll find that they have a memo field which has carriage returns or something and want me to work around that …

Carriage returns played a role in the Blog bug too :p I had a Blog user who couldn’t get Blog to remember his e-mail passwords for Server mode. We thought at first that it might be because he had a fairly long password. So I tried with a 16 character password at my end and that worked fine. So I sent him the latest build of Blog and even that didn’t seem to work. He finally sent me his Blog.ini file and I noticed that his password was going on to the next line and the only way that could happen was if the encryption scheme was generating a carriage return. So I asked him for his password and he let me know and I tried it out and sure enough, it generated a carriage return 🙁 This basically means that my current encoding scheme is no good since there is the possibility that this problem will occur again under the right conditions. So I’m going to have to change the encryption scheme for the next release. Ah well …