Let’s see, what all has happened in the sixteen days I haven’t posted… Well, opening night of The Dark Knight, I went with a group of folks to see it. We got there half an hour early, having already bought our tickets earlier in the day, and there was a gigantic line just to get out of the theater lobby. We checked with a couple of folks and, yep, that was The Dark Knight’s line. When we finally got into the theater, there was no way our large group was going to be able to sit together; we ended up splitting into twos and sitting mostly down front, which is where the only seats were left. Todd and I got stuck way down front and on the rightmost side, which isn’t great for seeing the screen, but we made do. They even had the theater ushers out, making sure people found seats and that no one who wasn’t handicapped took a handicapped seat.

It turned out to be one of the best films I’ve seen all year (it would be the best, but I’ve also seen Wall-E and The Incredible Hulk, and it’s a toss-up), and I enjoyed it so much that I went back to see it a second time with Jessica. I found out when buying tickets with her that she hasn’t seen Batman Begins, so now that’s next in line on our Netflix queue. She thoroughly enjoyed the movie as well, and we both agreed that Heath Ledger makes a surprisingly good Joker. He was my favorite character in the film because he was like sadistic-charismatic, however that works. I remember when I first heard Ledger had died that I was surprised and thought it was sucky, of course, but I wasn’t too upset about it. I hadn’t seen enough of his movies to be a big fan of him at the time. However, after seeing his performance in The Dark Knight, I got to feeling glum about the fact that, in subsequent Batman movies, he’ll never be the Joker again. He was so ridiculously good at being creepy, seeming unhinged, and doing evil things but still somehow making me laugh. I loved the part when the gangsters first meet with the Joker, and he does his “disappearing pencil” trick; I laughed my ass off, along with the rest of the theater, at that.

The other day, I ended up part of a very funny and impromptu mailing list. I got to work and checked my Gmail, as always, and saw I had a message about a Ruby on Rails position from a Pradipta Archiputra. I’ve gotten word about RoR job offerings before, most likely due to my Working with Rails profile, but this was something else, because in addition to the initial email (which simply said “I have a couple of Ruby on Rails position, wanted to know if you are interested?”), there were hundreds of responses. Wondering what the devil was going on, I checked the email headers and, sure enough, the “To” field was massive, and many people who had received the email had hit Reply All to give a response. One Mark Coates said “this is fun. it’s like a message thread i did not subscribe to. please no more ‘reply all’s. thanks,” and David Gibbons said “Mr Pradipa needs to learn how to BCC,” and Anders Combere said “Please KEEP ME ON THIS CRAZY LIST!!!”. I read through many of the responses and got a kick out of them. So many people responded, introducing themselves and joking about the craziness of a social network starting because of some nerdy recruiter copy-pasting to “To” instead of “Bcc”.

This craziness extended so far as to inspire the creation of a Google Group titled Pradipta’s Rolodex. I got another email from ol’ Pradipta, this time issuing an apology:

First of all I just wanted to say I apologize for the emails I sent. As of today I promise to stop the Email marketing campaigns. And I do believe it was a very…very..stupid mistake, this is the result of working late.

Also, I am deeply amazed of how talented you guys are. I mean seriously all this happened in less than 24 hours. I hope this mishap would create a benefit for all of us.

…

P.S: this time I used BCC. :)