Last night I watched Robots. I was excited when it first came out, because it looked so wonderful, but I never went to the theater to see it. It's really hard for me to make myself go see animated films--it seems like kind of a waste of time to me. I remember making Bob go see The Nightmare Before Christmas with me, but I think that's probably the last one I saw in a theater.
I wanted to buy it on DVD, but just couldn't spend $20 on it, but Amazon finally put it on sale for $9.97, so I went ahead and ordered it last week, and sat down with Dinah to watch it on the laptop last night (she snuggles in under my arm and watches whatever is on the screen--I thought she would probably enjoy it because of the bright colors and the movement, and whether she did or not, I don't know, but she stuck there with me through the whole thing).
I really enjoyed it. It's so beautiful--sort of a combination of futuristic and vintage--a slightly decaying, degraded future, maybe. The story starts out with a young robot family--the father is, literally, a dishwasher--"making" a baby. Making it with a box of parts and a screwdriver. The little robot grows up, and, as times are tough, has to make do with hand-me-down parts. When he reaches young adulthood, he decides to go out into the world and make his fortune as an inventor, meets up with some sweet down-at-the-heels characters and some evil ones as well. I wasn't really as interested in the story as in the look of it, but I thought the story wasn't bad. Sort of simplistic, I guess. The selling point for me was just being able to watch the wonderful colors and animation.
When Bob bought me the eMac, he also bought me a .Mac account. It seemed like an unnecessary extravagance, but I really did enjoy it -- I didn't use the email address, but I used the backup capability, and I enjoyed being able to sync my Safari bookmarks between my computer at home and the one at the office.
It expired about a year ago, and I just felt like I could justify the expense, so I didn't renew it. It just seemed unnecessary, but I really did miss it . . .
We've gotten very at work lately, though, and I'm having a lot of meetings. I haven't missed anything due to not having it recorded, but I decided that it would be well worth it just to go ahead and renew the account. That way I could synchronize my calendars at work and at home, put files on my iDisk that I can access both at home and at work, and get some sort of organization going. In a perfect world, maybe I would go home and not think about work, but I at least need to know what I'm going to be doing the next day.
There's also an online backup utility, and while I'm pretty good about doing backups monthly, a little overkill in that area wouldn't be a bad idea.