Laserdisc Rot

You've Got Mail  (1998) is one of my wife's favorite films. I love it as well. I honestly think its Nora Ephron's strongest work (I will argue if you think Sleepless in Seattle is stronger; I will not  argue if you think How Harry Met Sally  is stronger - that's an incredibly valid opinion). I'm not here to pontificate on the pop cultural history of it - though I do love that this is the third cinematic rendition of a (at the time) 60 year old Hungarian play. If you have never seen it and have the time, I recommend watching it before continuing - it really  is  a good film. I am about to spoil certain plot points. You've been warned! Gotta love a meet-cute that has kids in it. In the film, Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, who runs the independent children's book store, The Shop Around the Corner. It was her mother's dream, but its very easy to see that Kathleen happily inherited that dream - that store is her life and she's passionate about getting kid...

It's been a while! Sorry about that. I tried to write on one of my book ideas and ran out of spare time. Part of the reason is that I am in an absolute crisis of faith with my current career path. I got fifteen years of Ruby on Rails under my belt. I picked up Ruby because I was fascinated by object-oriented programming (I still am all these years later) and right when I slipped into the career every  startup was told Rails was "the thing" to use, so I was high in demand. Ruby on Rails was made by David Hamburger Helper (not his actually name but it doesn't matter, we'll just call him DHH cause that's how you've heard of him). In the Open Source tradition, since he made it, he was crowned the benevolent dictator for life. Turns out... the benevolent part of that equation was optional. He's explicitly racist and fascist in thought and action. This article is a year old so just imagine DHH has only gotten worse (he has). I needed an image and since I...