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i got a ride to belmont in the early afternoon. originally i was supposed to have dinner with my parents and a family friend of theirs, until i found out it wasn't at a restaurant but rather at his house. a restaurant you might expect to stay an hour or two, but a house dinner would take longer and require hours of idle chitchat. i still had a lot of coding work to do so i opted to stay in belmont instead while my parents went to the dinner, waiting for them to come back later in the evening to drive me back to cambridge.

i made some good progress but by evening's end i still wasn't finished and was too burned out to continue. i've been coding all weekend since friday. given that this one interactive was originally scheduled to be developed over a period of several weeks, i say i did pretty well. my plan is to have a good night's rest, wake up refreshed tomorrow morning, code for 4 more hours, then go visit the client in the afternoon with another in-house delivery. i'm about 80% done, and since this is only the first pass, i know even if i finished i'd still have to make some changes within the next few days.

fresh snow in the backyard is good because that means when hailey comes back into the house her paws are just wet, not covered with mud. i was outside with her briefly before my sister came home and took her "into the woods." hailey came back exhausted and impatient for her dinner (it was still too early). as for me, i just had some leftover noodles and a container of soup.

earlier i watched some football game. with the new england patriots not even making the playoffs, i don't have any personal interest in the outcomes. i find myself more rooting against certain teams, for instance the new york giants. it was pretty satisfying watching the eagles stomp their post-season dreams into the ground. in the back of my mind, last year's super bowl is still asterisked. later i watched the pittsburgh-san diego game. i rooted for the steelers because i remember the bill cowher days; that coach was a real caricature of what a tough NFL football looks like. if i knew it wouldn't kill dan to learn i was rooting against the eagles, i think i'd pick pittsburgh to win it all this year.

it's awesome that slumdog millionaire won for best motion picture at the golden globes tonight. hopefully it'll mean good things when the oscar nominations are announced. despite the awful economy, i think people are hopeful (in life as well as in politics) and a movie like slumdog is at the heart of why folks go see movies, for escapist fun and to be enthralled by a beautiful story. you knew something was in the works when slumdog kept racking up the awards, sweeping in all its categories. of the movies that received nominations, i've only seen a handful (i could literally count them all on one hand). i was really surprised to see both brendan gleeson and colin farrell nominated for best actor in a musical/comedy. in bruges was a fun flick but i don't know if those two performances were worthy of nominations. perhaps it was just a slim year for comedies and musicals and they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. when colin farrell actually won, it could only be because he slept with everyone in the hollywood foreign press association, that's the only explanation. another pleasant shocker was kate winslet winning for both best actress and best supporting actress. conventional wisdom says that never happens, and could potentially be detrimental since the dual nomination ends up canceling each other out and the actor wins nothing. heath ledger winning best supporting actor was a touching tribute, although i'm not sure if he actually deserved to win. was there any doubt that wall-e would win best animation? in television, 30 rock once more swept in all its categories, and likewise so did the HBO miniseries john adams (i thought HBO's generation kill was much better, although it got no nominations). how gabriel byrne beat out michael c. hall, jon hamm, and hugh laurie was sort of a surprise. also surprising was anna paquin's win for true blood, trumping mariska hargitay who seems to win every year for SVU.