Like many geeks, our entire office went out to see episode 3 today on the company dime. Reflecting on the experience during the drive home tonight, I realized that I finally understood Lucas’ vision.

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Once again (and hopefully for the last time), Lucas proves that his best movies are those written and directed by someone else. It’s very pretty, though.

It was difficult to keep from analyzing the gaping holes in plot and logic, but somehow I managed often enough to enjoy the experience. I suspect I’ll manage to watch it once more when it comes out on DVD, but that’s it. There’s not enough meat to it to reward multiple viewings.

After viewing the latest trailers, I just can’t decide which film is going to be worse, Nicole Kidman’s Bewitched (yes, that Bewitched) or Keanu’s Constantine. For a long time, I thought Constantine would set a new low in franchise abuse, but then I was exposed to the concept of Kidman as Samantha.

I have to admit that I can’t think of a better Endora than Shirley MacLaine, although I doubt that will be enough to save it. For me, Kidman’s best film will always be BMX Bandits.

Worth every penny I paid for the seven DVDs (but I am not, repeat not, buying the Noir otaku soap). There are a lot of things I could say about it, but I think it’s sufficient to say that the ending is driven entirely by the way the characters were developed during the course of the series. Nothing has to be explained in terms of “the director added it to make the plot work out” or “they needed a cool fight scene here, so X did Y”.

The plot does work out, and you definitely get the cool fight scenes, but it’s because the heroines and villains are doing what they should do, given the sort of people they are and the situations they’re in.

No, really. I can say no more.

Wow, the eyes really are the windows of the soul.

Good: releasing Aladdin on DVD. Bad: including a video of Jessica Simpson singing “A whole new world”.

I wasn’t surprised to find that my receiver takes a second or so to sync up to a new digital audio stream; this is not an unusual flaw. I was surprised that Airport Express isn’t sending a continuous audio signal to the receiver when it’s active, and that iTunes sends each song in a playlist as a separate digital stream.

Net result? My Kenwood VR-407 loses the first second or so of every song unless I set iTunes’ crossfade option to at least four seconds. With that, the first song is still chopped, but as long as I don’t change tracks manually very often, the majority are ok.

This would be acceptable as a short-term workaround, even though I despise crossfade, except that the device isn’t terribly stable. Several times in the first hour, the audio stream simply locked up and had to be restarted.

Bottom line, until there are updates for both iTunes and Airport Express, it won’t get much use at my house. I could switch the connection to analog to avoid the crossfade, but that won’t do anything about the unstable connection.