Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Not Another Teen Movie

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I’m not normally one for many of today’s ‘comedies’. Humor, for the most part, seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into the lowest forms of sophmoric bodily-function humor (something I mentioned briefly in the next-to-last paragraph of my post regarding Evolution back in January). My dad and I often have very similar opinions on movies, which is why I was somewhat suprised a while ago when he told me that Scary Movie was worth a rent — and even more so after I’d seen it. Admittedly, much of what he related to me as what he enjoyed about the film was amusing (a girl running from a killer comes to a signpost with two signs, one pointing towards “Safety” and the other towards “Certain Death”, and she follows the “Certain Death” path, and similar such silliness), however the majority of the film entirely failed to impress or amuse me.

A while ago, though, I started seeing trailers for Not Another Teen Movie, and they actually caught my eye. I didn’t ever get around to seeing it in the theaters, though, so Candice and I rented and watched it a couple nights ago. Surprisingly enough, for the most part, I wasn’t let down — I had a grin on my face for the majority of the film, frequently giggled, and even out-and-out laughed at a few moments. This, then, is my counter-recommendation to dad’s recommendation of Scary Movie. In my opinion, a much smarter and funnier spoof film, and well worth watching — especially if you’ve seen any of the many ‘teen films’ from the 80’s through today.

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Neverwhere

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Neverwhere tells the story of Richard Mayhew, a Londoner who stumbles ‘between the cracks’ of the city to discover London Below, a magical (and none-too-friendly) alternate London hidden beneath the streets.

I first discovered Gaiman through the Sandman series of graphic novels, and later his short story ‘Goliath’ that can be found on the Matrix website. I’d also read Good Omens a while ago and greatly enjoyed it, though at the time I didn’t connect Gaiman’s name with anything. He’s got a wonderful eye for the dark and the bizarre, and I’ve found his work quite good so far — but Neverwhere just didn’t quite grab me as much as his other work has.

I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I was expecting. It was an extremely quick read (I read it in two days, with my only reading time being on the bus to and from work and at lunch), and was a lot lighter than I expected. I believe it was Gaiman’s first novel after his years of work on the Sandman comics, and I’m wondering if that may have affected his writing style as he got used to stretching away from the necessarily sparce narrative employed in comic work. I’m not at all sure, but that was how it felt to me — just a little rushed, as if there were a lot more details there that weren’t being presented. It also wasn’t quite as literary as I’d been hoping — one of the hallmarks of the Sandman series that sets it above so much other comic work in my mind was the great depth and background to it, drawn upon from myths, legends, and stories of cultures throughout the world. Neverwhere, despite being a novel rather than a series of comics, didn’t have that same expansive feel to it.

Still, an enjoyable, if light, read, and I’ll continue to track down the rest of what I can find from Neil Gaiman.

Life or Something Like It

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Candice and I had been talking for about a week now about trying to take some time out of our schedules to wander down and see a movie, and finally got the chance last night. It was Candice’s turn to pick, so we ended up watching Life or Something Like It, with Angelina Jolie.

While it wasn’t anything amazing, it was certainly a very cute little romantic comedy, and I think it might be the best role I’ve seen Jolie in (and a very welcome change from the dreck that was Tomb Raider). An enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, at the very least.

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ISSN 1539-4387

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Back in March I found out that I could apply for an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for my blog, legitimatizing it as a serial publication in the eyes of the U.S. Government. I figured what the hey, I might as well, applied — and just got the noticed that I’m registered!

This doesn’t really have any truly major benefits or consequences for me, other than the fact that librarians everywhere can now look me up in the ISSN database, but what they hey — I’m official. Why not?

I wanna go!

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This may surprise some of my friends, as I’m not generally known as much of a country listener (you can thank/blame [depeding on your preference] many of the women in my life for that little quirk), but there’s a show at the Gorge that I really wish I could afford to see, and had the transportation to get to.

Saturday, May 5th: The Brooks and Dunn Neon Circus and Wild West Show, featuring Brooks & Dunn, Dwight Yokam, Gary Allan, Chris Cagle, and Trick Pony (one of the best country bands I’ve ever heard – I babbled about them in March of ’01 when I discovered their album).

Ah, well. Just thought I’d whine for a moment. ;)

Blade II

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Candice and I went out to see Blade II this afternoon. Candice didn’t think to highly of it (she likened it to a “Popeye on crack” film — just substitute Blade for Popeye and blood for spinach — and called it the “silliest vampire movie [she’d] seen in years”), and while I can’t really refute her impressions, I had a lot of fun with it. One of the few sequels that I think comes close to matching the original.

The original Blade was one of the better vampire/action films (as if that were a genre in itself) I’d seen in a while, and Blade II does a fairly good job of continuing the storyline from where the first movie ended in a plausible way, and taking the action quotient up a notch. Icky new bad guys, fun fight scenes, and Wesley Snipes being a badass — you can’t really go too wrong with that!

Good bits: the new baddies, the ‘Reapers’, are all sorts of cool. Similar to vampires, but faster, stronger and — most importantly — much ickier, I was more impressed with how they turned out than I expected. The trailers were savvy enough not to show off the Reapers’ most defining characteristic (a wonderful thing, as it made for an actual moment of surprise when it was first revealed, and too many trailers these days are less previews than they are visual ‘Cliffs Notes‘ for the films themselves…but I digress), and the effects for that were extremely well done. Once I got over the ‘ick’ factor and paid more attention to the work, I was impressed at how seamlessly they were integrated into everything else, and how they fit the characters themselves.

Kudos also to the writers — the same writers as the first Blade, which I think helped — who were able to preserve continuity for the characters, the plotline, and the tone of the film from the first one. Kris Kristofferson had what could have been a thankless task of returning as second fiddle to Snipes in his role as Whistler, but they were able to give him a role that actually had more meat to it than I had expected it to after hearing that he was coming back for the second film.

For the most part the fight scenes were a lot of fun, though they did at times succumb to the two pet peeves I have about modern action filmmaking — hyperactive over-editing, and the ‘stutter shutter’ effect. There were also a couple instances where key characters (Blade and his opponent) were entirely computer-generated, which didn’t quite look real. Things in this area are definitely improving over time, but it’s still not to a point where it can fool the human eye.

Overall, Blade II was pretty much exactly what I was looking for — a fun romp, with fun special effects and action. Easily worth my time and money to go see.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

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First off — wow.

I thought I’d read The Lord of the Rings a long time ago. Now that I’ve just finished reading it, I’m not sure if I ever actually had or not. It may well be that I’d read The Hobbit a long time ago and over the years thought that I’d read the entire LotR series. It could also be that I’d seen the animated version and assumed over the years that I’d also read the book. Now I’m not as sure, as far too much of what I read was entirely unfamiliar to me.

Either way, though, I’ve now read it — and if I hadn’t read it before, it’s a shame it took me this long. It really is as good as people say it is. Not that I ever really doubted that, however, it’s far different to have so many people hold it up as a masterpiece of fantasy, and to be able to actually form that opinion for yourself.

There’s a lot more information and reviews of LotR available on the ‘net (a quick Google search for “tolkien lord of the rings -movie” turns up around 125,000 hits) that are very likely to be much more well-written and in-depth than this little bit of babble is, so I’ll just stick with what I’ve got.

I was promped to pick it up and (re?-)read it after watching Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (which I apparently didn’t post any comments on, though I did mention it a couple times beforehand…). I’ve definitely got a lot more respect for Peter Jackson‘s ability to translate the books to the screen — and I’m really jonesing to see the rest now! Just seven more months until The Two Towers comes out, and nineteen until The Return of the King. Going to be a long wait, that’s for sure….

Site statistics are back

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It took a while, and I had to reset my server logs to do it, but the site statistics page is live again.

Getting it running was a bit of an adventure, that’s for sure. It’s something of a geek milestone for me, however — in the process of getting Analog up and running, I ended up doing my first compile of a *nix command-line program from source code!

A bit of background…

I generally like to have Analog set to run daily at midnight on an automatic schedule, so that my statistics page is automatically generated every day, and I’ve always got the most recent statistics available to me (or anyone else, if they’re that bored). However, until now the only version of Analog I’d had was the Mac port, where it had been given a (minimal) user interface. Nothing really wrong with that, and it is more familiar to long-time Mac users, but it meant that for me to run it, I had to leave my webserver logged in under my username, as the Mac port wouldn’t launch while the machine was sitting at the login prompt. It was only a minor security risk, sure, as the webserver itself resides in my apartment, but hey…I wanted to “do it right,” so to speak.

I knew that the original version of Analog ran from the command line, and that I’d be able to have it run in the background no matter what state my server was in…but I wasn’t sure how to go about getting it running. There was a pre-compiled command line version for OS X, but when I first started looking at this there was a typo on the page and I wasn’t sure if it would work for me. I e-mailed the guy behind the pre-compiled OS X version to ask (and he’s since fixed the typo that had me confused), but in our correspondence he recommended that I go ahead and give compiling Analog myself a try. Well, heck, why not? Ya gotta learn sometime, right?

So, yesterday evening, I spent a few hours installing the developer tools onto my server (necessary to compile software under OS X), downloading the Analog source code, mucking about with configuration and make files…and ended up with a working version of Analog that I built myself! Sure, by many geek’s views this is simple, entry-level stuff…but I hadn’t made that entry yet, so I’m pretty happy that I managed to get it all working.

I did end up nuking the Apache log files in the process of this (quite intentionally), so at the moment, the statistics page looks pretty empty, but it’ll become more useful over time.

So…that’s my latest excursion into geekdom, and my initation into compiling source code. Fascinating, I’m sure….

Update: The site statistics discussed here were for my old webserver. While it’s still up and running, they no longer have any real sigificance to this weblog. So it goes….

Smileys!

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I found a fun little hack for MT over on So Very Posh today, and thought I’d give it a shot. So — my site now has smileys! :D I can use them in my posts, and they’ll also show up in comments — read on for instructions.

So here’s the deal. Using the hack has allowed me to set up certain text strings that my server will automatically translate into graphical smileys whenever they’re used — in my posts, in people’s comments, wherever. To use each smiley, just type the code for the smiley, and the rest is taken care of automagically!

Addendum: As of August 30, 2002, the available smileys and the codes to use them changed. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, please jump on over to the updated list. Thanks!

Update: Now that I’m on TypePad, I’m not using this hack anymore. ’twas fun while it lasted, though.

New toy

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This is too cool. Yesterday evening I was talking with Melvin (my landlord), and he gave me a new toy to play with! We were talking about Palm devices, and I mentioned that mine died a while ago. Turns out that when he got his post here at the Park Seneca apartments, the company gave him a nifty little cell phone/Palm combination device. The thing was, he already had one — so he gave me his old one! Really surprised me, but he had no use for it anymore, so he figured he’d rather have it be used by someone than just sit unused in a drawer.

This thing is a nifty little toy, too — it’s a Kyocera SmartPhone. I’m not using the phone part of it yet — I’ll have to call Qwest when I’ve got some more stable income and investigate that — but for now, I’ve at least got a very functional PDA again.