Ultimate Soccer
Scott points towards Ultimate Soccer, a game I spent all together too much time playing. When I finally beat it, mozilla crashed. Damn. Still fun though.
Here We Go
Working seems to suck the internet life out of me, although it’s totally unrelated. I get home and avoid the box. But it’s time for a holiday weekend in Canada and I happen to have Sunday and Monday off. And the weather forecast is calling for five days of sunshine, yeah yeah! That was two sentences in a row that began with conjunctions.
Eilis was in town for a couple days at the beginning of the week, it was nice to see her again. She’s headed off to McGill for the next year, so I probably won’t see all that much of her. I know a bunch of other people headed off on exchanges and transfers, it’s going to kind of weird not having them around. I’d consider doing one myself but never got off my lazy ass. The long weekend also has the potential to bring other people I haven’t seen in awhile into town.
I’ve been doing a bit of work on a new photo section (here), trying to make it easier for myself to update and easier for people to look at. I decided to go with MiG, it can generate its own thumbnails and whatnot. The only drawback is the use of really long links but I think I can probably figure out how to mask them if they’re bothering me that much. Now I just have to plow through the last couple months worth of photos and get some new content up.
Minority Report
I went out and saw Minority Report tonight. I heard a lot of mixed reviews coming out of the theatre, mainly people complaining about the length. Personally, I enjoyed it and thought the movie and a lot of the concepts contained within were well portrayed.
One of things that bothered me initially was subtle product placement that started popping up part way into the movie. And then more and more and more. But you realize that it’s meant to be that way, pervasive and invasive. I came home with the goal of hitting the internet and searching for an interview or press release by Spielberg, explaining what he was doing. I found an article outlining some of his views concerning the future of privacy and George Orwell’s vision of 1984. The movie paints a somewhat bleak view of the future depending what way that you want to look at it. It’s comes down to a paradox between safety and freedom (visible in the tagline Safety IS Freedom) in which everyone wants both but you really have to give up one to have the other. The same way that I’m a somewhat staunch advocate of privacy but keep a public weblog. I don’t mind telling people about myself but don’t want other people using the details of my life as a commodity. What wonderful times we live in.
I digress. The movie is solid, one that I would recommend to other people and will probably have to see again. The cinematography is well done, although iit’s somewhat odd for a dystopian sci-fi movie; muted blues and overexposed whites rather than the typical browns and dark s. Overall, the story/plot wasn’t bad and not rife with problems associated with many films that try to tackle a take on temporal mechanics. It probably ranks up there as the best film I’ve seen in theatres so far this summer. I could probably ramble on about privacy and dystopian sci-fi worlds but I need to get some sleep. There are always more reviews out there; sf gate, ny times, usa today.
A Quality Afternoon
It was one of those days when you wake up and the outside world calls your name. Not as muggy as the last couple but enough to make you sweat if you weren’t in the shade. I dropped some laundry off at the laundromat, which is a sort of godsend well worth the extra six dollars. They take the laundry off your hands, supply the soap and dryer sheets, and wash your clothes. You come back later and pick up your neatly folded clothes after enjoying an afternoon downtown kicking around stores and parks. Beyond the bag of folded laundry, the only other tangible thing was a few abulms I picked up on vinyl from the bargin bin: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, Supertramp’s Crime of The Century and The Who’s Tommy.
The Death of VHS
Canoe reports that VHS is going to be phased out of many major retail stores. With DVD and the advent of ReplayTV, TiVo and the like, people should be able to get by without it. It can all be done with a computer as well; I have a television decoder card that can record to the harddrive and a dvd drive for watching movies. Convergence is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around a lot, but things are coming together now. At some point in the relatively near future we’re going to be able to function with one box, one remote. It will be wild.
Weblog Review
The website ended up getting a review, not all that favourable but on the money. Lack of substance, lack of substantial posts and writing. I think that I need to get things reorganized so it’s easy to get things done and doesn’t feel like something I have to do. I also have to figure out the parts that I enjoy doing. Facilitation, that’s key.
Bathroom Reading Week
It’s National Bathroom Reading Week, some of the recommended reading material: Spirituality For Dummies: Leave the bathroom feeling enlightened in more ways than one.
New Links and Music
I updated the links section and the music sections. I have some more links to put on the page, I just have to find them again. And for some reason I decided on six new songs instead of the usual five.
Mozilla Tabs
Earlier today, I was wondering if there was a keystroke to switch between tabs in mozilla. Sure enough there is, use Ctrl and PageUp/PageDown on a Windows machine.
Unix Boxes
Here’s a place in Toronto that you can get used Sun and HP Unix workstations. I’m considering picking up one of the lower end HP boxes, I could use it with my current monitor.
Friday Five
1. How often do you do laundry? Once every couple of weeks. I try to wear everything so I end up at the laundromat as little as possible.
2. What’s in a typical wash load? Clothes. Clothes. Some more clothes.
3. Front or top loader? Powder or liquid detergent? I think the front loading ones look cooler. Liquid detergent, no sticky clumps in the clothes.
4. Do you use fabric softener in the rinse cycle? Nope.
5. Dryer or clothesline? Dryer, it’s a laundromat.
The Tire
I think that I successfully managed to get the tire on the back of my bike. I’m going to set off for work shortly, so we’ll see if my mechanical skills hold up. I fear speeding along along the side of the road and having the wheel detach, sending me into traffic. Well not really, but that wouldn’t be too hot.
At War
I’m in the process of trying to fix my bicycle. At some point last week, it decided that it needed more attention and proceeded to pop my back tire. You think that changing a tire would be easy. It’s not. Sort of. It’s easy enough to get it off, change the inner tube and get tire back on the wheel. The hard part is making sure the wheel is straight and doesn’t wobble and so on and so forth. I’m having some troubles with this last part. The wheel is fighting me. I shall prevail.
Work and Star Wars
Right, it was supposed to be a day off. I went to bed at four, expecting to sleep until noon at least. The phone woke me up around 9:30 and a voice told me that I was wanted at the course soon. Bah.
Afterwards, I ended up going out to see Star Wars. I watched it awhile ago on my computer and was aware that the movie itself is awful. But the look of it on the big screen combined with the sound is amazing. Visually stunning, verbally challenged. Lucas could have handed me the script the night before he started filming and I could have come up with better dialogue. It doesn’t help that two of the principals seem like they wouldn’t be able to act their way out of a box in this movie.
Hoowah
That was three days in a row of being up before the sunrise to be at work for 6am. It’s not that it was difficult, I’d just rather be in bed. They let me off on the early side; it was a tournament day with more people than usual on (just to get things opened up quickly). So, I chilled for a bit and took off with Cameron to hit up a Bruce’s party near Bowmanville. Work hard for a few days and party harder. It appears that I became obsessed with the fire at some point, judging from the number of pictures I took. Lots of fire. I’ll sort through them and post a few later.
Exploding Whale
It looks like the exploding whale has been around for a long time. Apparently mixing dynamite and whales isn’t the brightest idea.
Pegball
It’s not foosball, nor soccer, it’s pegball. Another internet game that will keep you entertained, for a few minutes.
Mozilla
Mozilla has gone gold, 1.0 baby. Standards compliance, people who listen to bugreports and fix them, what more can you ask for? Go get it.
SLC Punk
I ended up watching SLC Punk last night. I’m sure that some people will find dozens of clichés and such buried inside this movie, impacting their overall enjoyment. If you’re going with plot, the movie isn’t really that good. If you’re going for comedy and subplots, it was great. That is all.
Themes and More
Here’s a nice theme for mozilla, it’s the one I’m using right now. I’ve been enjoying mozilla; the tabbed browsing, pop-up killer, sidebars. You can make groups of bookmarks too. Say you had five news sites that you visited every morning, you could bookmark them together and open them all up at once in tabs.
On Vinyl
I ordered some singles on vinyl from gbv, they came promptly and I was impressed. However, I don’t actually have a record player. Small problem. Something to seek out during the summer months, and an amp and some speakers.
A Crowd
Not a whole lot going on. I have three operating systems installed; windows - working but on the g: drive, mandrake linux - installed but not booting properly, and beos, working but no internet. So, I have some things to play around with. I’ll probably be spending most of my time in windows for awhile longer.