Christmas Eve

Date: 2000-12-24 13:10:36

Yesterday evening I headed over to the Louisville Compound, but not before renting Alien Resurrection on DVD at the One True Rental Store, otherwise known as The Video Station. I had a free punch on my DVD card, so I didn't have to pay for the rental. bouncing joined Bitscape and I for the viewing. I managed to see the entire quartet in sequence, unlike some other poor deprived souls. This also means that Neelix has seen two popular sci-fi movies that Bitscape and bouncing haven't. (And me, too, but Neelix is more impressive.) Conclusion: Ellen Ripley really is plagued by these aliens.

After Alien Resurrection, we watched Princess Mononoke, which Bitscape happens to own on DVD. It was great watching it again. The last time I saw it was the Sunday before finals my last semester at Union. After watching it, Bitscape changed the audio to the original Japanese and the subtitles to literal English, which was enlightening. I eventually started to leave but got sidetracked for a while. Bitscape eventually offered bouncing and I Bawls. We learned that bouncing hadn't seen Dark City, so Bitscape put it into his DVD player and proceded to watch. It was already after 0200, so I exercised restraint and stayed only until the beginning of the third chapter. Truly a great movie.

Back in the Boulder Compound, around 0230, I did the usual e-mail thing and read a few pages from Bruce Sterling's Distraction. I wanted a good way to check the time from my bed, so I plugged Ganges in (which involved stringing cat5 and power cables across the room; I gave up on hiding them and strung them directly in front of my bed) and proceded to write a curses-based console binary clock. Seventy-seven lines of C source later and a bit of debugging (it helped when I didn't have x and y reversed) later, I had my working code. here, if you're bored.