Hello from Microsoft!

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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.

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….

Fire next door!

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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.

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….

Goth humor

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I was hanging out in the Yahoo! Chat Alaska room this morning, and ended up meeting Wytchmagick on there. After discovering we shared some interests, we started tossing some links at each other, which was quite entertaining.

She told me about the band Velvet Acid Christ, and I ended up picking their album Fun With Knives while I was wandering around today. She asked if I’d ever gone goth hunting, and while I haven’t, it certainly looks like fun. I mentioned how I really wished that they really made a Tamagothi, and then she pointed out the piece de resitance — “Lego People That Aren’t, Will Never, But Should Be…”! I laughed so hard at that last one — combine a love of Legos with a dark sense of humor, and how can you go wrong?

Since the conversation, I’ve been bouncing around and found some other fun stuff. Ever wanted to be Goth? Pick up the Insta-Goth Kit and never worry again (incidentally, I’ve seen every movie on the I-GK’s movie list — and own at least half of them…should I be worried?)! Not interested in being Goth? Well, then, the same site offers assistance with becoming a Rivethead, Raver, Prep or Punk — find them all on Sykospark.

That led me to a site which has nearly had me in tears for the past few minutes — Gloom County. In the words of the creator, “It’s all Grace’s fault. She and I were chatting, and she said something about Opus and the gang in Bloom County. She chose that moment to have a glorious and inspired typo, however, and it lodged in my head for a while. It got me to thinking…What if the residents of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County had been goths, punks, rivetheads, and the like?” The results are flat-out brilliant — for a quick example, check out Lord of the Dance.

Oh, and by the way — Jesus was gother than you.

While bouncing around the GothMafia site that the Lego people came from, I found a link to a zoo’s information page about their liger — an 800-pound crossbreed of a lion and a tiger. Wow. I also spent some time exploring Wytchmagick’s personal site, and thought it was nice that as a practicing Wiccan, she took the time to put up this page in response to the many over-zealous people out there who immediately assume that her beliefs condemn her to eternal torment after she dies. It’s a much more thoughtful and measured response than I’ve seen from others in her position — and probably better stated than many of the things people have said to her.

Anyway, that’s it for now….

I’m employed again!

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Well, after a whole week and a half of being unemployed, I start work again tomorrow! I’ll be working at the Xerox printshop on the Microsoft campus, the same place that I worked two days at last Friday and Saturday. I guess they liked me!

As I mentioned a few days ago, Today’s was able to put me in a short 2 day post. The printshop is on the Microsoft campus out in Redmond, so it’s a bit of a commute, but a little research with the Seattle Metro Trip Planner and I had my bus schedule down pat. I left my apartment at about 12:30, walked up a few blocks, and caught a bus out to the bus depot in Redmond.

At that point, things got a little dicey. One of the downsides to the trip planner is that when you need to walk somewhere to your next stop, it gives you the directions ‘WALK 0.2 MILES NORTH’ or some such. Thing is, silly me, I’d forgotten my compass (of course, I don’t actually have a compass, but hey…), and in my attempt to find my next bus stop, I walked the wrong way. I didn’t know this, however, until I got on the bus and started watching the street signs — and realized that the numbers were counting the wrong direction!

Oops.

The driver let me hop off, I walked back to the bus depot, and started walking the correct direction…and suddenly realized that I could see one of the buildings I’d been told to look for! Apparently all that second bus would have done was take me across the bridge over the highway, which I was in the midst of doing already. Well, cool enough — from there on, it was a fairly short walk to the building I was looking for, and I made it on time.

As soon as I walked in, I was pretty sure that this would be a print shop that would be fun to work in. The room is huge, and it’s got tons of cool toys to play with! One side of the room is the bindery area (cutting, binding, packing, etc.). The other side of the room had me practically drooling…(and yes, the following will mean very little to anyone who hasn’t worked in printshops before)…one DocuTech 135, five Docutech 6180‘s (all with BookletMaker extentions), one DigiPath workstation, one DocuColor 2060, plus four smaller color machines that I didn’t catch the model numbers for, and an oversize color printer. Yikes! Very cool. :D

I didn’t get to play with any of the big toys while I was there, though — I’d been called in to help out in the bindery area with a couple big jobs that they had in. Apparently I was a hit, though — when I first told Karen, the evening shift supervisor, that I had quite a few years of prior printshop experience, she was thrilled to get someone that she wouldn’t have to train. Then, throughout the night, I kept surprising her when I was done with something and looking for more to do. Saturday there was a different shift supervisor coming off the afternoon shift, but two hours after I’d gotten there, she’d declared that they were keeping me, and by the end of the night, Karen was slipping a note under the boss’s (boss’?) door to see what they could do to hire me on, as they’ve got one person leaving at the end of this week.

Yesterday I passed this all on to Terri and Sally at Today’s, and they said they’d be sure to get ahold of the powers that be at Xerox and see what they had to say about the weekend. This morning, then, I get a call from Terri, who tells me that I should show up at the printshop tomorrow at 2pm, ready to go! I guess I made the right impressions with the right people, as I’m now confirmed for a long-term posting (so now, rather than working for Today’s for Xerox for Andersen, I’ll be working for Today’s for Xerox for Microsoft…funny how this all works).

There are a couple caveats to the situation, of course.

It looks like I’ll be working Monday to Friday, 2pm-10:30pm. On the one hand, this is great, as I tend to enjoy evening schedules, and I’ll still have my weekends free — however, the bus jaunt is only really simple on the way out, by the time I’m coming back into town I’m well past peak bus time, and will be getting back home at around 1am each day. Candice has said that she’ll be able to give me rides some of the time, though, which should help out.

The biggest downside is that the starting pay rate is a whole whopping $9.74/hr. However, this also goes to show some of why I really like going through Today’s — as they were setting this all up, they did mention to Xerox that with the experience I have, I should be worth more than that, and managed to confirm a performance review after 30 days to see about getting the pay scale bumped up closer to what I’d like to be getting! I’ve gotta say, I’m am nothing but thrilled with the service I’ve gotten going through Today’s.

So that’s the big news. Pretty cool, I’d say. The next month might be a bit tight on funds, since my pay rate just dropped by $2/hr, and because of that I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to make the trip up this summer to see James and Stacy get married, but at least I have income again, and it’s not completely out of the question. Just gotta cross my fingers and see what happens!

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.

Happy birthday mom!

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I’m afraid that I’m a day late in posting this (which can either be attributed to my making sure I could find my way out to Redmond for work yesterday, or to my being a bit of a goof and completely spacing it — either of which would be at least somewhat correct), but yesterday was my mom’s birthday.

Happy birthday! :D