I watched “Falling Down” this weekend for the first time and it was great. Rent it if you haven’t seen it. Not unlike two of my other favorite movies, Fight Club and Office Space, the hero of “Falling Down” decides not to put up with the day-to-day stress that the rest of us constantly struggle against. In other words it is about an ordinary guy that snaps. Here is a great scene from the movie:

Most of us are pretty good at staying calm under normal conditions. It takes something out of the ordinary to get us worked up and we all have different triggers. Traffic, work load, poor service, stupid people… whatever. You could almost say that we are all ticking time bombs waiting to go off. Maybe you could go your whole life without ever losing your cool, but most of us have lost it at some point. We are human and we have limits. We have an ugly side that most of us try to keep hidden. Unfortunately, I think I am better than most at hiding it.

Not very long ago I was under more stress at work than I have ever been before. A day before a huge project needed to be completed my computer crashed. Then in the afternoon while I was installing an update to our company’s server something went wrong and our email was down for about half a day. It was the worst possible timing and I really surprised myself by how I responded to the stress. I should say how I didn’t respond to the stress. I could be wrong, but other than the perception that I was a little grumpy, I don’t think anyone would have known that my world was falling down around me. It was kind of disappointing. It is nice to be known as “cool under pressure” but I wish I could just lose it like normal people. I know a guy that doesn’t control it nearly as well as I do. You just know that inches below the fake smile is an angry little man who is one step away from losing it. I wonder if I would be happier if I was more like him. Wouldn’t it feel better to blow off some steam now and then rather than keeping it bottled up?

The downside of being able to control your reactions is that you don’t give off the signals that tell people to keep their distance. This can be a problem when you barely keeping it together and people are walking up to you asking how to help them add an attachment to an email. You want to say “figure it out yourself you idiot!” but instead you help them out like a nice guy. I think I am going to stop being a nice guy from now on. Maybe I will go to McDonalds for breakfast at 10:35 tomorrow just for fun…

Stop reading if you aren’t prepared to lose a few hours of your life on one of the best little Flash games I have ever played. Seriously, I just went back to the site to make a screen capture and replayed the first ten addicting levels. The name of the game is called Bloxorz. The goal is to roll the rectangular block into the square hole. Sound simple? The levels get progressively harder and harder and there are some serious brain teasers along the way. Enjoy, and don’t blame me if you get addicted!

My computer at work crashed last week. Thankfully, other than half a day of work, I didn’t lose anything. I was able to do an “archive and install” to get my operating system back up and running and you can only imagine how glad I was to see my cluttered desktop appear on screen.

The worst part of the computer crash was that it really screwed up my Adobe products. Just when I thought I had recovered everything I opened up InDesign only to be greeted with a “Licensing for this product has catastrophically failed.” I love that “catastrophically” part. The other Adobe products just said “Failed” but InDesign has to be the drama queen. I figured that I could simply reinstall the Creative Suite and get back to work. I got the same error. After three calls to Adobe’s tech support I was able to clean all the licensing junk off my G5 so that I could get CS3 reinstalled. The support people were nice and spoke good English and they knew what they were doing. The problem is it never should have happened in the first place. Why was the licensing so deeply embedded in my machine that it couldn’t be easily removed or overwritten? The techs told me this happens all the time.

It seems that each year Adobe products get more and more overrated. Generally they are the best thing on the market, but I never get the warm fuzzy “the designer of this software really cares about making a beautiful application” feeling. Upgrades always seem so minor and unless you count acquiring Macromedia, there really hasn’t been a major innovation from the company in recent memory.

For anyone that doesn’t think that there is room for innovation in the Adobe product lineup I point you to a web editor called Coda. I have been using this beautiful application instead of Dreamweaver for about a month and I absolutely love it. If you try hard enough, you can do everything you need to in Dreamweaver, but in Coda things are where they need to be and everything makes sense. Read about it here and download a demo to try it for yourself. And at only $79 Coda makes the case for how inflated and overrated Dreamweaver at $400.

I guess it must be difficult for an innovative company like Adobe to maintain their edge. Rather than reinvent and improve their software there is a temptation to protect their lead. Instead of competing with their rivals, they absorb them. Rather than making their products more appealing they focus on making sure that everyone is paying full price. Why change a product when you can add a couple bells and whistles and promote it as a major upgrade. I am hoping for more applications like Coda that make it easier to not rely so heavily on Adobe.

Like the set of my own movie, I have a lot of dreams that take place in Wentzville, Missouri, where I grew up. Many of them are set at Immanuel Lutheran Church where my family attended weekly and where I went to school from 2nd through 8th grade. Since my mother taught there I vividly remember killing time sneaking around the hundred year old church and adjoining buildings. I remember the church had a bell tower with a thick rope that was pulled weekly to announce the start of a service or the death of a member. The ancient leaky pipe organ squeeked out hymn after hymn. Little boys in itchy pants could slide across the creeky wooden pews and occasionally catch naps during slow sermons. I remember dark stained glass windows, heavy curtains behind the alter, a towering pulpit, and a storm shelter below - empty exept for a few dusty hymnals.

What does it mean to dream about a church? If I am in the sanctuary I am usually in the loft in the back next to the bell tower. Often I am in the annex off to the side where people congregated after the services to shake hands and chat about whatever it is grown ups talk about. As a child I could escape this ritual and run across the railroad tracks to a flee market where I could empty my pockets on baseball cards.

For some reason the parking lot is a popular dream setting for car oriented dreams. I have the ones where I lose control of my vehicle. The brakes stop responding and I steer my way back to that parking lot where I first learned to drive.

The church still survives, although it looks like there are plans for a new building in the works. A google search reveals that the campus has expanded since my school days but it is amazing how many memories come back as I retrace the steps of my childhood. I am hoping to travel back to Wentzville this year for my ten year high school reunion. I plan on visiting that church and see if I can make some sense of the dreams and maybe figure out why my brain takes me back there at night.

For me the best thing in music right now is a few leaked tracks from Iron and Wine’s new album, The Shepherd’s Dog, which comes out in September. I don’t know how people find the entire leaked album, but hypemachine has delivered a few gems. Here are some of the other things I have been listening to lately:

We Can Create, by Maps
This is a pretty great album by a band called Maps. Check out the track I posted a copule months ago if you are curious.

The Mix-Up, by the Beastie Boys
The second instrumental album by the Beastie Boys, the first being The In Sounds from Way Out. If you liked In Sounds then you will like this one. Pretty decent, but can get monotonous.

Icky Thump, by the White Stripes
It seems like the same thing happens when I get a White Stripes album. For the first week it is the greatest thing. Then it starts getting annoying and except for a few tracks I don’t listen to it again. Hopefully this one will have some staying power.

Other recommendations:

New Moon, by Elliott Smith

Boxer, by The National

The Boy With No Name, by Travis