Excuse me while I try to knock out this insomnia I have at 3 am in the morning.

TPTB at work just gave me a raise so large, the CFO had to approve it. Even so, I figure July alone will wipe out that money so every little bit helps. At my review last year, my boss pretty much called me a dweeb (his initial thought about me upon our first meeting). This year's was equally puzzling. He said he was glad my old boss chose me since if it were up to him, he was torn between me and another guy, but ultimately he would have chosen the other guy. Man, I'm just feeling the love.

Also at work, they are really, really picky about their parking spaces. I had just dropped off a co-worker at the auto mechanic and was heading back. It was almost closing time on Friday so I figure I'd park, run in, grab my stuff, and head out. The parking lot was pretty much deserted so I parked in the space closest to the sidewalk, a visitors parking spot. As I'm walking back from my office, a facilities guy was looking at me funny while I get in and drive away. Imagine my surprise when I show up Monday morning. A company-wide memo was issued informing us that the visitors parking spots were for visitors only. Seriously?

If you've never had to deal with AT&T/SBC outsourced tech support, consider yourself lucky. The Internet was down at the house and after checking out the router and modem settings, I figure it was their problem. So I call and check to see if there's a network status or something. The outsourced Indian guy I got to talk to had a cold so I could tell it was tough for him to keep his faux American accent going throughout the conversation. But listening to him, I don't think he knew what he was talking about. All I wanted to know was whether or not there's an outage in my area. So he asked me what state I lived in.

--California.
--Where?
--California, C-A...
--Thank you, sir.

So he goes straight to troubleshooting. Whoa there, I know everything's fine on my end.

--Do you have a router?...What kind of modem do you have?...What are the colors of the cords in the back?

The colors of the cords? What difference does that make? When I told him they were all beige, he was just utterly confused, either because he didn't expect that they were all one color or that he didn't know what beige was. I played dumb like this for a good 15 minutes before he finally gave up.

--What state do you live in, sir?

Didn't I just answer that? I thought I said California.

--Ok, California, what time is it over there?

What, no clocks? He proceeds to ask me this 4 times before he finally tells me there's an outage and to try again in an hour before pretty much hanging up on me.

Finally, to wrap up, we have the movies. Awfully slow out there in the movie world. Talked about Spider-Man 3 already, but I must say I had a much better time at Blades of Glory a few weeks earlier. Funny man that Will Ferrell is. On the Netflix front, Volver was mixed but it's always nice to see Penelope Cruz, Notes on a Scandal was interesting (I'm hoping that a certain someone at work doesn't turn into Judi Dench's character), The Pursuit of Happyness was good but the real guy looks nothing like Will Smith, Rocky Balboa was whiny in the first half and didn't pick up until the training began, Man of the Year wasn't as bad as people made it out to be, Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj was as bad as people made it out to be, Kate Winslet made The Holiday passable even with the presence of Cameron Diaz, and while Cars is still quality stuff, Pixar has made better movies.

Smashing Pumpkins! Playing at the Fillmore from July 22 - August 1 if anybody's interested. Man, July is going to be one busy month.

If anyone wants to get me this XBox 360, it'd be very appreciated. Quick, there are only 100 of them out there.

While billed as an action movie, director Sam Raimi and the screenwriters were obsessed with teasing the love story between MJ and Peter. Yes, it is necessary to tell, but it soon came to the point where I was indifferent to what happened to them. Yet, one look at Spider-Man shooting webs at buildings and flying right past them will have you hooked.

That's what I wrote here 3 years ago following the release of Spider-Man 2. The third installment suffers from the same problem of trying to balance a love story with the action elements. However, this time around, the audience loses. The indifference lingers as Peter and MJ's relationship is complicated by an amnesiac Harry and a new girl in Bryce Dallas Howard (who looks stunning by the way...in all her other movies, she's been really plain). With two villains to focus on (Venom and the Sandman), their on-screen presence is fairly limited as we follow Peter Parker and his road into darkness, portraying some sort of Jared Leto/Chris Gaines hybrid. What remains is an up-and-down picture trying to tell multiple stories of multiple characters and not doing a very good job of it. As a result, its usual pillars are weakened; the action scenes and fights are more cartoonish and not particularly convincing and the humor at times seems forced. At 140 minutes, your time may be better spent waiting for this DVD to come out.

Best attempt at a dunk, ever. With a trampoline no less.