According to IMDB, these are the "10 Best Pictures" and "10 Best Popcorn Movies" of 2005. I'll bet you can't guess which list is which in 10 seconds or fewer.

For an added challenge, three movies in each list have been whited-out. Give up? Click-drag your mouse over the lists to reveal the hidden answers!

Near the cat trailer, behind Best Buy, is a big mural that I'm still trying to get a handle on. Here's is one of the more vexing portions:

Sooner or later, Grace and I are going to get a cat from the SPCA (sooner, if I have my way). And when we do, I want it delivered in this here trailer:

One of the nice things about my route is that it takes me past a number of nice murals in the Mission.

Even if you walk the same road a hundred times, you'll find something different each time.   - Gail Tsukiyama

I've been walking to work for the last three months or so. Not when it rains, and not when I really have to be there in a hurry, but most of the time. My normal route takes me about two and a half miles down the entire length of 15th street, under the freeways, over the homeless, and into the office.

It's about a 35 minutes trip: slower than motorcyce and about on par with MUNI on a good day. Speed isn't the point, though - it's more about time to think, get perspective, listen to music, and even get a little bit of exercise.

It's also about experiencing the city in which I live firsthand. I pay a premium to live here, so spending time walking around it and taking it in seems like a simple matter of getting my money's worth.

With that last bit in mind, I've decided to start taking pictures of the things I see every day along the way. I'm going to start with a photo that I've really wanted to take for a long time, anyway:

Will somebody please explain to me what is going on here? This is on Noe street just off Market at a weird little office park just behind Cafe Flore. I think there used to be a dry cleaners there, but now there just isn't much of anything. Cars go in and out of the parking garage but that's about it for activity.

And this poster. It's been hanging there for at least as long as I've lived in the neighborhood - coming up on FOUR YEARS now. Mimc 2? WTF? I caught about 10 minutes of Mimc One on cable - had no idea there was a sequel (turns out it went straight to video - go figure).

How has this poster managed to stay there so long? Why did someone put it there in the first place? I want answers, damnit.

Eff the new MacBooks - check this puppy out:

Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about! The best thirteen bucks I've spent in a while - a portable laptop pad that

• helps keeps a powerbook cool
• protects surface of the table and the PB's underside
• provides a handy swivel motion
• produces a slight tilt that i think is actually more comfortable for typing

David Bau wrote a good chunk of Internet Explorer but now even he is giving up on it. That's gotta be the last nail.

It really is surprising (or not) how crappy a job MS has done keeping IE up to date.

I've been using Retrospect for backups forever. It came free with a drive I bought a while back, and it just seems like the thing to use. But prior to prepping my Powerbook for return to Apple, I tried using Carbon Copy Cloner instead.

Aside from being free, the big win is that it makes a completely accessible and bootable backup of your entire drive. I don't care so much about being able to do incremental or journaled backups - I really just want to know that there is a fairly recent copy of my stuff on my backup drive that I can access and boot from as needed. Once you get past a somewhat clunky GUI, CCC fits this bill perfectly.

It also makes it trivial to migrate your entire operating environment to another machine: just mount your destination powerbook as an external firewire drive (hold 'T" at startup), and use CCC to clone from old machine to new. Start up the new machine and everything just works. Brilliant.

I ring in the new year with a return of PowerBook woes.

The hard drive is making scary noises and I'm experiencing increasingly-frequent lock ups. And now I noticed in System Profiler that I'd lost a 1/2G of RAM. Turns out this is a common issue and there is now an online petition about it.

I'm about to put AppleCare to the test. I want them to replace the RAM and/or logic board, give me a new drive, and ideally a new LCD - I have some of the dreaded 'white spots. Problem, is the behaviors are intermittent, and Apple has not acknoweldged the logic board problem at all. We'll see...