Mars and More

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Well…the Mars night didn’t go off as well as I’d hoped, unfortunately. Made it through Mission to Mars relatively unscathed, aside from the fact that it was a fairly amazingly hideous movie. I think if it had tried any harder to be 2001, it would have been truly laughable…as it is, it’s just kinda sad.

After M2M, I popped in Red Planet. This one started out much better. It was actually keeping my interest, and had been fairly entertaining…up until the halfway point (chapter 19), when the DVD I’d rented was scratched badly enough to completely freeze up my player, to the point where it wouldn’t even turn off! Ugh…so now I’ve seen the first half of Red Planet, and really want to finish it up one of these days!

Oh, the newest addition to the movie collection: Tank Girl, all around fun, great one-liners, and Lori Petty! Fun fun fun….

And, that’s all I can think of to put up here for the moment…more when I think of something, I guess.

Downtime, upgrades, moving to Mars

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Grrrr…frikkin’ bills. I dunno why everybody’s so picky about wanting their money on time.

Um…yeah. If you haven’t guessed, the reason for the recent downtime was nothing more than my own stupidity when it comes to billpaying. Sorry about that.

However, bills are paid, and everything’s back up and running again. I took advantage of the server going up and down to install the 10.0.1 update to Mac OS X that hit the ‘net today…and, have to admit, this is nice. Not sure what might be there as far as new features, but it’s a heck of a lot faster. Woohoo!

Anyway, not much going on at the moment — since Studio 99 switched me to Saturdays, I’m not dj’ing tonight…so actually have a night to relax. Went out and rented Mission To Mars and Red Planet to watch tonight. Going off to Mars this evening…see y’all when I get back!

I love finding things like this…

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…I found this over on /. in the middle of a discussion about Mac OS X. While probably only of interest to my more ‘geeky’ friends, I think it’s damn cool….

Mac OS X is better than I could have imagined!

Let me begin by saying that I used to be a rabid, frothing at the mouth Linux/UNIX advocator. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for nearly two years.

Anyways, when I found out about Mac OS X, I was very excited. I wanted to try it. The interface looked so incredibly well done. Whoever says that Windows has a nice user interface must be joking; I think that the Windows GUI is extremely bland.

So I bought an iMac 233 for a steal over at eBay. I ran Mac OS X Public Beta for many months in anticipation of the final release.

The day the final release came out, I was so impressed with Apple hardware and the beta, that I ran out and bought one of the new iMacs just so that I would have the extra speed boost in running OS X.

Anyways, let me say that I have not been disappointed in the slightest! OS X is everything that Linux should have been. It’s powerful enough for the command line lovers, but elegant enough for the common desktop user. I don’t care what anyone says; Linux is not ready for the common user.

Common Linux scenario. I’m running KDE with some GNOME apps, along with Netscape 4.77 and emacs. Say I want to change my computer’s theme. That means I have to find a KDE theme, a GTK theme (and figure out how to install it from KDE), and edit my .Xdefaults file, testing new values for Netscape and emacs until everything is the way I want.

That’s just too inconvenient. In fact, after running OS X for a week now, I found that there were a lot of annoying inconveniences that I put up with in Linux that I don’t have to deal with in OS X. It got to the point with Linux where I was saying, “I’m so tired of constant sysadmin battles…I just want something that works.” You know what? Mac OS X just works.

Not to mention the fact that I find Apple hardware far superior. There’s none of the Intel Driver Hell that I’ve dealt with using other OSes. I plugged in my iMac (which was equipped with CDRW, ethernet, modem, etc…) and everything worked, no tweaking necessary.

What I like the best is the XonX program that a bunch of sourceforgers are working on. By hitting Command-Alt A, I can switch back and forth between my old XFce desktop and my new, spiffy Aqua desktop.

To those who say that Apple hardware is too expensive…yes, the powermacs and the cubes are still fairly high in price. If you’re looking to play around with OS X, pick up an iMac. They’re very reasonably priced machines that pack a lot of power.

— vorpal^

Wudicam down

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I’ve taken the link to the Wudicam off the page for now. I’m now running Mac OS X 10.0 about 95% of the time on this machine, and there aren’t drivers for the iRez KritterCam for OS X just yet. I can still turn the cam on if I really want/need to by booting into OS 9, but these days about the only time I do boot into OS 9 is when I want to watch a DVD on this machine…and if I’m watching a movie, I’m not likely to have the cam on. So…until drivers get released…no cam. Ah, well. Y’all will just have to satisfy your voyeuristic urges somewhere else for now. ;)

Renee…yum…

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Not much big going on today — other than that I was the only person in my close circle of friends who went to work today. Loren just got back from his job working on an oil rig for one of the slope companies, and Rick, Erika, and Miranda were all here at home sick. Bleah. I dunno who got the better end of the deal…probably me, though.

It was, however, something of a Renee Zellweger day for me — picked up two movies with her in it. Not really setting out to do that, just that they both got released today.

First off is Empire Records, a wonderfully silly little story of a bunch of kids working in a record store. Mark and Lucas are hilarious, the eye candy is nice, the script is fun, and a lot of the music is great. Unfortunately, the soundtrack for the film only featured music by today’s “hot” bands, so all the really good music is only in the movie…but at least it’s there.

The other I picked up is one that I consider to be one of the best, if not the single best movie to come out in 2000 — Nurse Betty. While it’s definitely a (very) black comedy, it’s one of the few I’ve found that manages to be a black comedy while still retaining a real heart of gold at the center and doesn’t just descend into full-out nihilistic cynicism — which a lot of black comedies do, much as I enjoy them. When I saw this film in the theater, I literally walked out of the film with a huge grin on my face — not because of the dark humor in the film (though I did enjoy that), but by the wonderful (and, dare I say it, sweet) ending that wrapped it all up. I really think it’s an absolute treasure of a film, and am all sorts of happy to have it.

In case you haven’t seen it, Nurse Betty is the story of Betty, a sweet and incredibly naive housewife (Renee Zellweger) who quite literally mentally breaks down when she witnesses the murder of her husband by a couple of con men (Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock). She retreats into a world where she is in love with the character of a doctor on “A Reason to Love,” the soap opera she watches daily, and sets off to drive to Hollywood to meet her long-lost lover. Now, read that last sentence carefully — she’s not in love with the actor who plays the doctor (Greg Kinnear) — she’s in love with the doctor himself. Meanwhile, chasing her on her road trip are the two con men, who want something her husband had put in the trunk of the car she’s driving. There’s a lot more to the film than that simple summary can do justice to, and the cast plays it to perfection — there is a scene where Betty comes back to her senses and realizes what has been happenig which is just heartrending, to the point where it’s almost painful to watch as the real world comes crashing back in to her. However, with all that, as I said, I walked out of the theater with a huge grin on my face, marvelling at the work I’d just watched. Well worth finding, in my opinion.

So, that’s it for today….

Been a busy weekend

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Been going pretty strong all weekend long, so this is my first update for the past few days. I’m sure that there are just multitudes of people anxiously awaiting the next episode in my babble here, though, so I figured I’d try to get something up.

Right.

Anyway.

I’m rapidly discovering just how amazingly long Fridays are going to be for me for the foreseeable future — in essence, I’ve got a gauranteed minimum of 22 hours up every Friday. As my shift at GCI starts at 8am and I am hardly a morning person, my alarm starts going off at 6am. I work my shift at GCI, get off work at 4, get home, get some food, change, and get myself to the club around 7/7:30pm. The club doesn’t close until 3am, so I’m not likely to get to bed until around 4am — 22 hours. Uff-da.

However, it’s not something I’m going to give up…been anxious to get back into DJ’ing, and a little sleeplessness is a relatively small price to pay in my book.

Friday night went pretty decently — Samurai showed up to guest again, so he and I traded off through the night. We brought attendance up a few more — I think it was somewhere between 130 and 150 people all told — hopefully that number will just keep growing as things go on. Looking good so far, though.

Neil Gaiman’s ‘Goliath’

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I just wanted to throw this link up really quickly before I crash for the night.

If you enjoyed the movie The Matrix at all, you really should check out the official website. Rather than just using it to promote the movie and its upcoming sequels, they’ve got a whole section of the site devoted to exploring the universe of the Matrix, primarily through online comics, with a few short stories.

There’s a lot of really neat stories in there — while not dealing directly with Neo or the other characters from the movie, all the authors have been given free reign to explore the possible storylines of this fictional universe.

The one I’d like to point out, however, is ‘Goliath’, by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman has in recent years become one of my favorite modern authors — as well as the Sandman comic books (which are just incredible, by the way), he’s written some fiction, both on his own and with other authors (the book Good Omens was written with Terry Pratchett, and is just hilarious). With ‘Goliath’, he contributes his own take on the Matrix with a short story that I find to be one of the best contributions on the Matrix site.

In any case, if you’re at all into The Matrix, Neil Gaiman, or just really well-written short fiction, I highly suggest you take a few minutes and give it a read.

So, I’m curious…

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What’s up with all these DJ-friendly themed songs hitting the radio lately? By ‘DJ-friendly’ I don’t mean they’ve all got 32-beat drum-based intros, or anything like that (though they might, I haven’t listened quite that closely) — just that, well, they’re all thematically very similar.

  • Madonna’s “Music” — “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on…”
  • Black Eyed Peas feat. Macy Gray’s “Request Line” — “Hey DJ…hey DJ…just one desire from a hip-hop fan…”
  • Jennifer Lopez’ “Play” — I just heard this one on the radio today, so I don’t have lyrics running through my head, but it’s along the same theme.

I know songs like this have come out from time to time in the past, it just struck me as I was listening to J-Lo’s song how closely these three came out to each other.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you! ;)