Today started off so crappy that I almost called in sick and stayed home. But things have picked up a bit. Two more Gateways came in, so I’ve been setting one of them up. To speed up the process for the remaining ones, I’m burning a CD of all the shareware/freeware that I install on every machine (Acrobat Reader, Quicktime, EditPad, Flash 5/Shockwave player, Mozilla M18, Aladdin Expander, etc). I’m sure I’ll think of something else to add the minute I’m through burning these to a CD.
Not much else on the horizon. The Academy is gearing up for another month of assignments, which means more web work for me. My main task right now is dealing with all of this incomming gear and setting up our tiny lab into something workable.
Watched a documentary about the Rockefellers last night on PBS. I caught the first part on Sunday. This was the second (and longer part). It was very good. I knew very little about them before. I remember John D. senior as a union buster and monopolist from high school history classes (and he was both) and I remember him as gentle philanthropist handing out coins to children (from stories my father, who was born in 1917, had told me). And I’d heard of the Attica prison riots, though I didn’t associate them with Nelson Rockefeller. It was, as far as I could tell, a reasonably balanced portrait, though it did tend to focus more on the inner dynamics of the family than anything else (that “great man” theory of history isn’t behind us yet). Still, it was an incredibly interesting portrait and very well directed.
I think Gina and I both ended up admiring John, Jr more than anyone else in the whole clan. He was neither as mired in the blood of Standard Oil nor as contradictory as his most prominent son, Nelson. It’s easy for me to hate the great capitalists. I still have enough of a progressive neo-socialist strain in my thinking to want them to pay for their good fortune. At the same time, it’s impossible not to admire their philanthropic interests (especially the MoMA) and their suprisingly progressive moments. Having grown up in an era when the republican party has been controlled by its right wing fundamentalist faction, it’s refressing to see Nelson, championing an older idea of the party with a genuine interst in public giving and progressive ideals.
[That quicktime installer download has ground to a hault. I’m not sure what’s up with it.]