Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
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’m not entirely sure if Robin Williams is the funniest man on the planet or not, but after being able to see him live tonight — it wouldn’t surprise me!
A while ago, Chad surprised me by letting me know that he’d picked up tickets for Candice and me to go along with him, Don, Rick, and Meagan to see Robin Williams’ standup routine when he came through town. I was pretty floored by this (tickets were $100 a pop!), but there was no way I was going to say no! So, tonight Candice and I wandered down to the Paramount (just a few blocks down from my apartment) to meet up with the gang, and found out that Marty and Aimee had shown up for the show also! We all hung around outside for a bit, then wandered our way in for the show.
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. ;)
The radio at work was trained to The Buzz, a local talk-radio station, and I heard a good talk show tonight that carried with it some extremely good news — apparently the Supreme Court today upheld a ruling declaring the 1996 Child Pornography Protection Act unconstitutional.
I’m actually in the midst of making an entry right now, but I had to say something about this. I’m currently using the Opera webbrowser, which uses built-in banner advertising to generate revenue to keep the software free. I can live with that, as Opera is a very good web browser (and when I have the money, I can purchase it to get rid of the banner), but the banner I’m currently getting is really annoying me.
Rather than car, credit, or casino ads, I’m currently getting a banner that starts with a picture of the American flag. The next frame says, “Own a piece of history…”, and the third frame offers, “Own a plaque made with the metal from the World Trade Center”. It then closes with, “WE WILL NEVER FORGET”.
Part of me knew that there would be people capitalizing on the tragedy as fast as they could — and, true to form, postcards featuring the WTC became hot items within hours after the attacks — but this one just makes my skin crawl. Personally, I think stooping to this level of crass commercialism and exploitation is just horrendous.
Guess I wouldn’t make it in the advertising world, huh?
Incidentally, this is the page that you get when you click on the banner, just in case you’re curious enough to check.
This is mostly just me being silly — I wanted to grab a chance to make a post to my blog from within the Microsoft domain. ;)
I’ll get back and put some actual content up soon, I promise.
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.
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….
Well, here’s some early morning excitement. Apparently the apartment building next door to me is on fire. Sirens got my attention, and I just counted 6 fire engines, 2 Fire Dept. blazers, a FD van, and an ambulance all around here right now. Only one engine is down by the building, and I can’t see any flames, so I guess things aren’t too bad, though they are running hoses into the building. I’m trying to snap some pics, if they come out at all decently I’ll get them up.
(3:11) Another van just showed up…along with a news crew.
(3:15) Looks like things must be getting under control…some of the firemen are packing up, the newsperson is wandering away, and some of the generators have been shut down. There’s still hoses running into the building, though.
(3:56) Well, things seem to have calmed down. Maybe I’ll get to sleep again now.
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….