Recent Life

Started: 2002-11-12 11:19:51

Submitted: 2002-11-12 12:01:26

Visibility: World-readable

I'm feeling slightly uninspired to throw together a billing system for a certain web hosting company, so I think I'll do something else pseudo-useful: document my life. At least, key things that have happened in my life recently.

I recently discovered Plucker, a way-cool PalmOS program. I'd try to synopsize it, but their webpage says it much better:

Plucker is an off-line web and eBook viewer for Palm OS-based handheld devices and PDAs that comes with Unix, Linux Windows and Mac OS X "conduits" that let you decide exactly what part of the web that you want to view on your PDA. Plucker includes programs that let you specify exactly what part of the World Wide Web you'd like to download onto your PDA (as long as they're in standard HTML or text format); these web pages are then processed, compressed, and transferred to the PDA for viewing by the Plucker viewer.

Basically, Plucker is one of the PalmOS programs I wanted to write myself, because I thought it would be incredibly cool. It's kind of a hybrid between AvantGo and other standard PalmDoc readers. It gives me complete control over what to download and when and spits out a .pdb file with the contents that I can transfer to my unit, complete with hypertext, and beamable to anyone. It does http authentication, so I can download e-books from an unnamed individual's site. The first thing I did was convert the Jargon File to a Plucker document. So just in case anyone cares, here it is. (Version 4.3.3, 1.6 megs) Now I can read the Jargon File wherever I am. I don't think I'll ever be able to get anything done again.

Speaking of not getting anything done... I recently addicted myself to the Railroad Tycoon demo that managed to show up on my computer. (Some time ago, back when Loki was actually still doing business, I downloaded the demo downloaded and told it to go off and merrily download a few demos. I played Kohan and enjoyed it, but never got around to checking if anything else got downloaded until recently.) Someone or another loaned me his cd, so I may not get anything else done for a while. (Which could be a problem, since I have a feeling that doing useful things would be, well... useful.)

I acquired Plan 9 from Outer Space in time to watch it for the premier of The Worst Sci-Fi Prequel Ever!, but Willy thought that was a bad idea to have a double-feature, so our next plan was to watch it on Halloween night, as a scary movie. Except that night, the friendly Buildmeasite server broke horribly, so it was a Really Good Idea for me to spend the next two hours fixing it. Which did bad things for my ability to watch the movie that night. So Willy and I ended up watching said movie the following Saturday night, 02 November 2002. As I expected, it really truly was the worst sci-fi movie ever. It kind of tried to cross The Day the Earth Stood Still with horror movies... and failed miserably. It's not even worth watching. Trust me, it's bad; you don't need to inflict it on yourself. You won't get that time back. I think Gem had the right idea that night -- she read instead of watching the movie.

Later that night, Gem and I watched a most excellent sci-fi movie: The Andromeda Strain. I was quite impressed -- hard sci-fi movies are few and far between. This movie definitely shines. (For some odd reason, the audio refused to play in xine, which forced me to use ogle. I'm still undecided about my favorite DVD player -- I prefer ogle's navigation (I can actually jump to menus I can't explicitly reach), but xine gives me a better all-round media playing experience -- I can hit 'q' and actually quit. (The last three times I tried that in ogle, while it was full-screened, I had to switch to a text console and kill each ogle process manually, which was far from fun.))

Then there was B5, now on DVD! I've only made it to the sixth episode, but I'm immensely enjoying the series, and look forward to the next four seasons. (Anyone out there listening to me?)

This last Saturday night (09 November 2002), Gem and I watched The Professional, the American version of Léon. Gem presented me with a list of movies she wanted to watch, and this movie was on the list for some reason she's not quite able to quantify when queried. I enjoyed the movie, and it was especially interesting to see Natalie Portman in her debut role.

Last night, Gem decided that we should see No Such Thing, another of the movies Gem listed. She heard about it on NPR sometime early this year, and I read about it on Salon about the same time. (NPR's native search successfully pulled up the hit I was looking for on the first page, while I failed to construct an appropriate Google search for it; Salon's native search failed miserably at producing my desired result, but Google pulled the result up number one.) Bitscape stuck around for the movie. It was an interesting movie that raised a few interesting questions, but these questions were buried deep within the rest of the movie. The plane crash sequence made no sense to me -- why bother including it at all if it didn't have any bearing to the rest of the movie? (Or if you were going to include it, at least spend a few ten million dollars on making it look exciting -- although that wasn't the movie this was trying to be.) Once Beatrice made it to the monster -- after a six-month ordeal in an Icelandic hospital -- the movie picked up as they began verbally sparring. There's a kernel of a good movie buried deep within, trying to get out, but it remains buried beneath the script. (I think a Phantom Edit would help -- chopping off the first twenty minutes -- but even that wouldn't be nearly enough to salvage it.)