Month: July 2004

Categories
Media Weather

Cooler weather

Clouds rolled in yesterday and brought cooler weather. Thankfully. It’s still quite warm and humid, but I won’t risk collapse just walking to the mailbox.

I have made good use of this enforced at home time, though. Spending a little time here adding yet another modification to my WordPress installation; a little time there working on the Redland RDF wrapper in Visual Studio.

I’ve also been catching up on all these movies I’m getting through Netflix, though we don’t get as many movies a week as we could. For instance, we don’t sit down immediately and watch a movie when it comes in; sometimes I’ll skip movies for a couple of nights, and my roommate might wait for the weekend. But we’ve both found the service to be a good value, and we’re happy with it.

It’s changed, too. To compete with the new movie service from Blockbuster and Walmart, Netflix is now offering an option that allows you to have five or eight movies out at a time, rather than three. I’m trying to imagine why a person would need to have eight movies out at once. But then, I don’t understand someone who has a thousand feeds in their aggregator either.

Anyway, back to the movies. This week I watched Timeline, Mystic River, The Last Samurai, and the Fog of War.

Timeline wasn’t bad, but was somewhat predictable. The kind of movie you can watch while you’re coding.

The acting in Mystic River was very good, especially Sean Penn; but there was something about the movie that didn’t click with me. I didn’t think it did a good job connecting the events in the past with the events in the present time. It’s as if the past events were incorporated just to add an element of angst to the movie – hip pedophile movie moments.

I’ve never cared for movies that introduce elements and then don’t tie them together intelligently. It just didn’t happen with Mystic River, numerous awards or not. However, I liked the actors, and they played Charlestown dwellers to a tee.

Turning to The Last Sumurai. This movie has some very pretty scenery, and impressive scenes, but what’s with Tom Cruise and the poses? On the ship, pose. Teaching the Japanese, pose. Not just Cruise – the whole movie seemed posed somehow, starting with the Samurai kneeling on the hill and the breathless pause before the word “….honor”.

I found myself soon tired of the scenes that seem to be contrived, to pull every last ounce of Honor from each. The whole movie could be summed up as follows:

Man captured by enemy becomes one with his captors through a shared sense of Honor, and joins his new brothers in a fight where the odds are all against them.

Why must movies always use extraordinary characters to demonstrate honor? If Cruise starred as a teacher, and those in battle, plain farmers, I think I would have appreciated the movie more.

I was somewhat surprised at my reaction; after all, the movie is very popular. Perhaps I’m just not in the mood for Tom Cruise. Or perhaps it’s really just a dude flick. (Notice I refrained from a more colorful description that would have involved a word representing males that rhymed with ‘flick’. I hope you all appreciate my delicacy of mind.)

If I wasn’t overly enamored of The Last Samurai, I found The Fog of War to be a fascinating documentary. However, I’m saving my discussion of it for Sunday’s American Street essay.

Categories
Connecting

Tech lists

I have rediscovered today why I don’t like technical email lists. Not to say the lists are wrong. I think it has more to do with personalities, and some people are comfortable with lists, others not. I am not.

So why do I, or should I say, did I go out out to the lists recently? This week, in all cases, it was because someone thought I might be able to help with something, or that I should share the code I’d created. So I ended up in three lists, two of which didn’t go well. The third did. One out of three isn’t bad. Not for me.

The two that didn’t work out have terrific people, and great stuff going on, as does the third. So why did the one work for me and not the others?

Much of it has to do with my perception of the third list as much quieter in tone than the other two. In some ways, I didn’t feel as if I was ‘on stage’ with the third, whether this feeling is backed up by reality or not.

I wonder if my discomfort with mailing lists has something to do with the fact that I don’t like IRC, either? Could it even be extended to that age old question of introverts or extroverts? In other words – extroverts do well in IRC and in email lists, introverts don’t? This could be a fascinating little study. We always assume extroversion/introversion has to do with being with people in person. Be interesting to find out if this extends to our online interactions.

Categories
Weblogging

Tweaks and talk

If this had been MT I would have been hammered with comment spam tonight. I added a little watcher on my logfile, and when it receives so many POST commands in a period of time, it sends me an email so I can monitor what’s going on.

It looks like I had about 500 POSTs, but nothing came through in a comment, because the POST is going to the wrong file. It was interesting watching though. Scattered amidst the spam POST attempts were referrer spams. The comment spammer is using a variety of proxies; the referrer spammer is using an open proxy from a Texas school district.

I’m also getting a lot of hits from Google for the phrase, “Google Email”.

Between all of these are hits from Googlebot, MSNBC bot, Yahoo bot, and various RSS aggregators. The Web never sleeps.

I re-implemented my Backtrack feature at the end of any posts that trackback to other weblogs. The only problem is, as I found in the last post, that WordPress doesn’t implement the “?__mode=rss” aspect of trackback. So now I have to decide the direction to take the tech. Should I add in the rss mode, and submit it as a change to WordPress? Or do something different with Backtrack? Regardless, I think I’m about due for another documentation update of my changes.

Speaking of changes, Marius Coomans wrote a note in Jonathon Delacour’s most recent post (which wiki fans will enjoy reading) about his dislike of the small comment boxes. He gave me an idea that I’m now in the middle of implementing. I was glad of this little inspiration, too, because I was beginning to think I didn’t have anything left to tweak with my weblog.

Since I brought up Backtracks and trackbacks, earlier, I wanted to mention that John Dvorak liked my ping from the last post. No seriously! He wrote me a note with Ha Ha. He deleted the ping, of course, but I did get the Ha Ha.

Which all you old time gardeners will recognize as a garden structure, usually consisting of a border or boundary that doesn’t block the view, but still keeps out the sheep.

Categories
Weblogging

Kind people, neat pictures, and Kookaburra

It wasn’t hard to tell that I was in a pretty bad mood last night, was it? Not just yesterday, my mood has been down for a few weeks. Stuff.

But I thought I would start practicing some of that discipline I wrote about earlier, and rather than wax maudlin here in the weblog, pull my droopy jaw up. After all, a frown is just a smile upside down, so turn it up!

I dusted off my old version of Visual Studio 6.0 today and I’m wrapping Dave Beckett’s RDF tools, Redland and Raptor into PHP extensions. Doing this, those who want to work with RDF in PHP can do so with a to-the-metal library. What’s rather astonishing about the whole thing is that I’m actually enjoying working with the C code, and my old version of VS. It’s like eating liver – it’s okay every ten years.

I had a kind note from Robb Beal today, so I thought I would embarrass him by saying hi here. Hi Robb. I really like the design of your weblog.

I braved the miserable heat and went to the store and it was full – full! – of local produce. I came home loaded down with bi-color corn on the cob, huge tomatoes, tree ripened nectarines, and sweet, huge dark red cherries. Nectarines and cherries for dinner tonight.

Not only that, but the store finally had my favorite candy in today – Kookaburra licorice. Both strawberry and traditional licorice flavors. They don’t get it in very often–there’s been some problems with bringing foods in from other countries because of increased security–and it’s not cheap, but I love the stuff.

I’m sitting here eating my nectarines and cherries and licorice, and looking at photos in other weblogs. Loren Webster has a great shot of a water fall from a hike this weekend. And Jeff Ward has the funniest photo of a truck that miscalculated the height of power lines it drove under. Dave Rogers has cute photos of his cat and little girl online. Notice that I mentioned the cat first.

John Dvorak has a new new weblog and he posted what he had for lunch today. He should like being pinged by this post.

I also get to go on my first airplace trip since 9/11 sometime in the next few weeks. I don’t know what day for sure, but I am curious what it will be like flying with all the new security.

Ah well. Good licorice.

Categories
Connecting

If only we didn’t have to live with decisions

’ve upset, disappointed, or angered people recently, through action and decision. However, lest you think this is a po’me writing, with me crying on your shoulders, think again–these folks are right to be mad at me. To them, what I’ve done is wrong, and I’m not going to disagree with them.

I didn’t act as I did because I felt morally superior, or justified. I didn’t trip about lightly because the act was easy, and had no costs. I am aware, daily, in the silences, of what was lost. I knew all the consequences of my actions before making a move. And I still moved, not because I felt my way was the only right way, and others were wrong; but because my way was the only right way for me.

And I have no regrets. Well, no regrets at the decisions.

See you next week.