I saw Iron Man last night and enjoyed the movie. All jokes about Robert Downey, Jr. and how he didn't have to act aside, lets think about the boldness of the movie's construction for a second.

Most hero origin movies (Spiderman, Batman Begins) spend the early part of the film having the protagonist become the hero and then you get a bunch of bad-guy-butt kicking to fill the rest. Almost the entire Iron Man movie consists of Tony Stark building the Iron Man suit. The bad guy fights are essentially debugging. I can just see the writer/producer meeting now:

"Fans love superhero origin movies. Let's make the entire movie about Tony Stark building his suit."

"I dunno, can we really fill two hours with him building his suit?"

"I know! We'll have him build two suits!"

Kudos to Robert Downey Jr., who as a result of this writers' decision shares most of his screen time with robotic arms (whose last roles were suicial GM-car-building robots) and a cellphone. Even Gwyneth Paltrow takes her acting cues from the robotic arms, dutifully holding items for Tony Stark while he shouts orders at her.

But really, it works somehow.

Before Iron Man was the Incredible Hulk preview. It's the only movie I can think of where a remake was justified by how bad the previous movie was. Another Marvel property, The Punisher, comes to mind, except that I don't think that anyone expected either version to be good.

Our little girl is now one-year-old-ish. She's twice as big as when we got her eight months ago and a lot of that seems to have gone into her ears and snout. If her energy levels are any indication, she's going to be a puppy for quite awhile longer.

My hosting provider notified me Saturday morning that MovableType was consuming too much CPU by shutting off kwc.org -- a really effective notification mechanism. There was no actual spike in usage, just a gradual uptick, so this was a tad aggressive. At first I agreed to the upsell to a higher-level hosting plan. When their tech mentioned that I would still exceed limits on that plan and I should consider a $200/month dedicated plan, I decided to do some more investigation.

At fault was mt-search.cgi, which powers tags on MovableType Web sites. Between Google, Yahoo, and Cuill, there was too much pounding on the puny server I'm hosted on. I've added mt-search.cgi to my robots.txt file, so hopefully search engines will steer clear of it. I've also agreed to temporary suspend mt-search.cgi so that the various crawlers out there can get it out of their system. This means that all the tag links on the site will be broken until then. I need to avoid having my site suspended without warning again for a few more days, so probably not until next week.

See my spare cycles blog

I was photographing the courthouse in Washington, Georgia and noticed that the back of the courthouse is a jail:

Savannah straddled a fine line between old charm and decrepit, winning me over as I got to see more of the town outside the historic district. Tybee Island won me over more easily: Tybee Island Pirate Fest, Oct 10-11. Oh, and their mayor looks like Marky Mark.

Covering it over on my spare cycles blog