Darn; the census asks me about things that happened “last week”, defined as May 7-13, so I have to stop filling it out…
* very high winds, potentially damaging to kites, but fun anyway (I flew the cheap kites just in case)
* phone calls with work
* much fun tangling my spinners into other people’s kite lines
* seeing people I haven’t seen since September (sometimes caused by the previous item)
* 7 hours of code wrangling to refactor error handling and reconfiguration logic
* slightly low winds, but enough for the 5′ and 6′ deltas, which stayed parked in the sky all day
* two-line foolishness with Norm
* Gareth got a pie in the face for his birthday!
Yes, another fabulous start to the kiting season :)
I got the long census form! I got the long census form!
(I love filling out forms; it’s a weakness :-)
“Film of the Book: Top 50 movie adaptations revealed”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1756384,00.html
I’ve marked the one’s I’ve seen (any version of) and/or read (12 books, 20 movies, including 10 “both”):
1. [BM] 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [M] Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. A Clockwork Orange
9. Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. [BM] The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [BM] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. The Godfather
21. [BM] Goldfinger
22. Goodfellas
23. [M] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. [B] The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [BM] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. LA Confidential
29. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. Lolita
31. [B] Lord of the Flies
32. [M] The Maltese Falcon
33. [M] Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. [M] The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. To Kill a Mockingbird
49. Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. [BM] Watership Down
:: rogerebert.com :: Editor’s Notes :: 101 102 Movies You Must See Before…
bq. This isn’t like Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series. It’s not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there’s some overlap here), or that they were my favorites or the most important or influential films, but that they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
Of course, I just love movie-list memes, so here’s the list with the ones I’ve seen marked. 34 out of 102; more catching up to do :-). I know Rob & CL have some of the movies I haven’t seen; I’ll have to borrow them sometime.
I was a little surprised by the smattering of movies I have and haven’t seen, both before and after the early 1980s (when I started going to movies regularly). Although, many of the “classics” are actually Andy Beaton’s fault, via the old rep theatres in Toronto :-).
“*2001: A Space Odyssey*” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“*Alien*” (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“*Annie Hall*” (1977) Woody Allen
“*Apocalypse Now*” (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
“*Bambi*” (1942) Disney
“The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“*Blade Runner*” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“*Blue Velvet*” (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“*Casablanca*” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“*The Day the Earth Stood Still*” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989 Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“*Dr. Strangelove*” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“*Duck Soup*” (1933) Leo McCarey
“*E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial*” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“*The Empire Strikes Back*” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“*Fargo*” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“*Fight Club*” (1999) David Fincher
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“*Gone With the Wind*” (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“*The Graduate*” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s a Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“*It’s a Wonderful Life*” (1946) Frank Capra
“*Jaws*” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“*Lawrence of Arabia*” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“*Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior*” (1981) George Miller
“*The Maltese Falcon*” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“*Modern Times*” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“*Monty Python and the Holy Grail*” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“*Pulp Fiction*” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“*Rebel Without a Cause*” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“*Schindler’s List*” (1993) Steven Spielberg
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“*The Seven Samurai*” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“*Singin’ in the Rain*” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“*Some Like It Hot*” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“*The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*” (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“*West Side Story*” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“*The Wild Bunch*” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“*The Wizard of Oz*” (1939) Victor Fleming
I remembered to set the clocks forward.
I completely failed to reactivate the alarm before bed last night.
Getting out of the house this morning was merely fast, not frenzied, only because the boy (who has to be at school earlier than the girl) was sick today, so I got a half-hour back.
I found it wonderfully ironic that this appeared in my inbox on the same day that we are moving into a new cubicle farm:
must … not … strangle …
Huh?
Okay, so was this about the banbdwidth theft?
I went to log on to my Group RRSP provider’s website today Thanks to a misguided policy that HR introduced this year, my January RRSP contributions ended up in a non-registered plan, and I wanted to fix it. It turned out that I can fix this particular problem on the web, but that’s beside the point.
When I logged in, I was informed that my password had expired, and must be changed. It’s been 18 months since I logged in (yes, I check my quarterly statements, but I’m happy with the results; no changes required). I dutifully filled in the boxes, only to be faced with password strength requirements. Now, the whole point of these things is to prevent high-speed, dictionary-based password guessing attacks. You can’t launch a high-speed guessing attack against this website because it’s really slow, and after a certain number of failures, your account is locked out. And we have the research to prove that these kinds of passwords are less secure, because people cannot remember them and are forced to write them down. But a bunch of security consultants are getting paid to write password policies, and they’re an insurance company so care greatly about liability, so there you go.
Anyway, for as yet unknown reasons, I managed to fumble the password change, so I couldn’t get back into my account. So then I trundled off to the password reset page. And it occured to me:
* My password expires regularly. The problem is, I don’t login regularly (who moves RRSP funds around that often, anyway?).
* Password strength rules are enforced (mixed-case, numbers or symbols, minimum length, etc.)
And yet, the password reset page does none of this, and doesn’t have any other security checks! At least they used to make me phone Ireland to change my password. Now, I type in the answer to my challenge question, my date of birth, and instantly a new password is printed on the screen. The answer to my challenge question doesn’t have to be mixed case or have numbers, and never changes! They don’t even take the minor step of using e-mail to send my either my new password or a temporary, expires soon password reset URL. Granted, this is a minor security enhancement, but it does keep the amateurs out.
Does anyone else see a false sense of security here?
The irony is that I spent the rest of today fighting with our own password reset implementation :-).
Bill Gates has promised that the password will be obsolete in 2007; I’m beginning to hope he’s right…
Jeff K says: Yeah, the false sense of security is that you don’t need to watch your RRSP. I trade in it almost every day. I locked in $10k of gains on Valentines in fact. I also unloaded Petro Canada for a 2x gain. I think I’ll be busy for at least 2 weeks moving stuff around for this year’s contributions.
Most Canadians don’t realize the foreign contribution limit is gone and even more don’t care, even though their resource mutuals / stocks are sky-high and the dollar is sky high and it’s time to get out there and pillage the foreign markets. Aye matey! I made a few hundred in just a couple of a days on a couple of Taiwanese ADRs this week (still holding), and I’m getting excited about raping the Japanese market in a little while, down 6% or so after a rapid rise from the depths in the last 2 months. The Japanese finiancial sector is not good, and for example, Toyota is already sky high, but there’s got to be some curvascious stock just waiting for me.
Disclaimers: It’s probably better to earn capital gains outside an RRSP, I’m no adviser, I just think trading is better than sex, and since its all in an RRSP, I can’t even pay for, um… things I might want, with the money.
Jeff K says: Er, that was “curvaceous”.
Jeff K says: If you do trade foreign ADRs or stocks on the NYSE inside an RRSP, since the rules don’t allow you to have a US$ SDRRSP, you can direct the proceeds of a sale straight into a US$ money market fund and bypass the forex spread.
The best is to trade in-trust-for a child in a US-denominated account, then the tax is lower, but I imagine most folks’ liquid capital is in RRSPs. RESP rules are even worse — I hate ’em.
I laugh everytime I see that Scotia Bank ad during the Olympics where some dumbass can’t figure out more than one mutual fund. ..then I cry when I hear how many people lost money 2001->2003 in mutual funds, bailed, and lost out on the 2003->2006 escalator-ride when they went back up. Scary stuff.
Disclaimer: I know nothing and give no advice. What was one Toronto paper’s marketing slogan… hm, “They don’t read us for the financial pages.”
It figures. After doing a bunch of work to move my backup mailserver to a “virtual server”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/01/29/power-and-virtualisation/, it worked fine for about 10 days, and then suddenly I was seeing no incoming email in the logs. This is a sign of a problem; even when the primary server is working, spammers are always connecting to the backup (in the hopes of getting past filters).
Much testing has determined that rogers is now blocking inbound SMTP on my portion of the network (something they’ve apparently been rolling out for over a year now). The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that…
Is there a way to specify the port in an MX record? That would be sweet.
Harald Koch says: Not yet, but if enough ISPs start blocking, I’m sure it’ll appear…
Shop around for ISPs. I left bell when they cut off inbound SMTP. Now I’m with Magma.ca. But, i1f you don’t want to switch ISPs then there are forwarding services like dyndns.org’s mailhop.
Harald Koch says: My friend Reid is with igs.net; one of their selling features is “no bandwidth cap”, but I don’t usually get close to the 60Gb/month that rogers allows, so I’m not sure if that’s an actual feature for me or not. On the other hand, 3.0Mb + a static IP for $45/month isn’t too bad. dyndns.org wants $30/yr/domain for the service I want, which is almost the difference in price… hmm.
It looks like Magma has the old istop bandwidth policy; limited during the day, unlimited between midnight and 7AM. Their prices are good, except for the static IP option. Unfortunately, the packages list doesn’t specify a monthly cap, and the FAQ only says “see the package list”. The only misread I can see is that the main packages don’t have a bandwidth cap?
I have three (linux) servers in the office, stacked in the corner behind the desk.
One is my original server, an old P-75 that I bought from Secure Computing seven years ago. It’s been upgraded over the years; I added a new harddrive, a bit more memory, and I upgraded the CPU up to the awesome power of a P-133. These days, it’s stuffed in the corner as a firewall and my wife’s email server, and is otherwise consuming kWh and manufacturing dust-bunnies.
The second is the backup mailserver. A while back my 486-based backup box coughed up a harddrive-ball. In the search for a replacement, I found a whole machine for $10 more than the harddrive it contained, so I bought it. It’s a P-100 with 48Mb of memory and 1Gb of disk; more than enough for its single purpose. It used to be offsite, but I lost my free hosting when Baltimore became HP, so I took the backup server home, and moved the primary over to where the backup used to be.
The third is a machine I inherited from Baltimore; a Dell server, P-733 with 128Mb and a 40Gb disk. Recently I upgraded the OS to Ubuntu, which I love! Over the last couple of years this box has become the primary internal network server. I’ve added disk, memory, and CPU; moved services (email, house control, yadda yadda) from the old server.
Anyway, back to the subject. I was chatting with my brother-in-law before Christmas, and the topic of electricity came up. He has been aggressively replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, installing timers, and so on. His hydro bill was almost a third less than mine! Now, my kids are the ones who run into the house and turn on _every_ light, and are atrocious at turning them _off_ again; I’m sure that accounts for a significant portion of the difference. Until the recent window upgrade my house was a sieve, so I’m sure my furnace runs a lot more than his does. But nagging at the back of my brain for a long time was a comment I saw discussing computer power use. Estimating the power consumption of my servers suggests they account for somewhere between 10% and 15% of my total power consumption!
Obviously, It was time to do something. Solar panels were briefly considered; I have a beautiful expanse of southeast facing roof, but cost and ROI still aren’t there for southern Ontario. And besides, it should be relatively easy to reduce the power consumption of my computer network without inconveniencing anybody; if I start small, the task is likely to get finished. As an added bonus, reducing the server load means that the UPS will last longer during a power outage, and the room will be cooler in the summer.
Also just before Christmas, I read that Linksys had introduced a new model (version 5) of the WRT54G wireless gateway that did _not_ run Linux. So when I saw a stack of version 4s on sale at Best Buy, I snagged one. I’ve moved e-mail to the more powerful server, and installed OpenWRT on the Linksys; ta-dah! One server eliminated.
Also before Christmas (coincidence? I think not!) we filled up the server disk (the new camera takes _large_ pictures :-). I’m not quite ready to drop a wad of cash on a proper RAID array, but I did pick up another disk for the server.
Which brings me to the second half of the subject line. I’ve been a big fan of Vmware and related technologies for a long time. After listening to a seminar on Xen and virtualisation at work, it hit me; I could move the backup mailserver onto the P-733 box! So, that’s my next IT hobby project.
One more bonus? When I’m done, I’ll have enough spare hardware to start building a replacement for persephone (the main webserver)… (ducking)
Jeff K says: Hm, 3 computers * 300W * 24h / 1000W/kW * 31 days * $0.08 kW/h = $53.50 / month. A bit high, I guess, but in the winter that power warms up the house a bit, saving on natural gas bills. I was surprised you didn’t do that all with 1 computer. I used to have many more natural gas appliances than I do now, because the price of gas keeps going up. 16 years ago, my dryer and oven were gas — for the last 7, I’ve been back on electric. I’ve been running CFL’s for possibly 10 years. Anyway, my DVD habit of $60/week is where I should look to save money. Which reminds me, “The Island” is on HD pay-per-view in 20 minutes…
Harald Koch says: My computers are down around 75-100W under normal use. That 300W on the power supply is a maximum, not typical (but you knew that :-). Also, two of these machines are _old_, and only have 200W power supplies :-). Still, the ~ $20 / month adds up…
More and more of our electricity is coming from natural gas, so I suspect that the gas – electric appliance tradeoff will swing back to gas soon.
I’ve been wondering about setting up a super-low-power (as in Watts) machine to be the only always-on server, effectively replacing both tnir (for web/email) and the G5 (for BitTorrent downloading). I am thinking of a hopefully cheap TransMeta chip or perhaps a Pentium M?
Smaller, cooler, less power-consumptive would seem to be the watchword here. Of course, then there’s the DSL modem, which is always on as well, but there’s not much to be done about that.
Are LCD monitors a lot lower power than recent CRTs? Or did all that Energy Star stuff actually make a difference?
Harald Koch says: Monitors appear to be energy pigs when in use, but use almost no power on standby. Since I rarely use the console on my servers, that wasn’t an issue for me. Yes, LCDs are supposed to use a lot less power than CRTs.
I found one site with some representative power readings; unfortunately, he doesn’t give hardware details: “http://w9if.net/iweb/cpupower/”:http://w9if.net/iweb/cpupower/.
There’s some good low-power hardware out there these days; Shuttle PCs were the first, but some people have been poo-pooing them lately. There’s a whole site for VIA’s “EPIA” Mini-ITX boards at “mini-itx.com”:http://www.mini-itx.com/ ; I’ve read about people using both for MythTV boxes, so they have reasonable capacity with lower heat and lower power consumption.
A typical 17 inch CRT consumes about 75W with a mostly white background,
65W with mostly black background and 0W in standby. A typical 15 inch flat panel
consumes about 17 W.
I was kind of shocked by the power consumption difference
but the sticker price still keeps me away from LCDs.
Ottawa City Hall rents out Kill-A-Watt devices so you can discover
such trivia yourself. I’m in Toronto, so I just picked one up last
time I was there for about $50 (ridiculously over priced but it’s worth a bit of fun).
A VIA 10000CL mini-itx system uses 35 Watts when idle, hovers around 38-41 W
when web browsing and playing music, but under load, can spike to 53 W.
Those are all instant readings, after 2hours 30m of light use the cumulative reading was 0.09 kWh. So 36 W average.
EPIA Center’s power simulator
shows much lower numbers, 37 W peak and 23 W when idle (2.5 HDD and 40mm Fan EPIA CL10000).
But the difference is likely because EPIA Center is quoting the consumption as measured post AC-DC conversion.
My measurements are from the 113V wall socket.
wjr says: The low-power always-on server is the approach we took – a VIA EPIA 800MHz processor (mini-ITX form factor motherboard), 120G disk. No display, keyboard or mouse – it just sits on a shelf. It’s our mail host, it serves http://www.flopcat.org, and also is the Slimserver music server. Very nice. It’s not fanless – there’s no CPU fan, but there are two small case fans that run constantly. I tried running it with them off, but the internal temperature got higher than I’d like. I also tried getting the disk to spin down, but I couldn’t stop it spinning up once an hour, which doesn’t sound like much but most drives are only rated for 10000 spinup cycles… I’m guessing it’s 25-30W constant draw.
I also have one of the Linux-based WR54G routers acting as a firewall. The whole setup works nicely; once a week or two I back up the server’s drive to my desktop machine.
wjr says: Oh yeah – and $CDN0.08 per kWh? Argh. We pay about $US0.19. That’s the marginal cost – the first 300ish per month are $US0.11, then the next 100ish are $US0.13, then it jumps to $US0.19. There are more brackets if you keep sucking down the power. Every marginal watt helps.
Harald Koch says: FWIW, I’m not terribly happy about our cheap electricity. Sure it means my bills are lower, but it also means that investors are not willing to build the new power plants that we need, because there’s no profit in it. The doom-and-gloom people are predicting California-style rolling blackouts in a few years. It also makes alternate energy too expensive. For example, a personal solar power system in southern Ontario doesn’t break even until hydro gets up to around $0.12/kWh, last time I checked.
On the other hand, we’re moving slowly to a competitive market. Commercial users (and distributors) already pay the floating market rate for electricity. Consumers still pay a fixed flat rate, and the province makes up the difference from general revenue. Anyway, at least for a while, electricity rates _dropped_; I just received a refund of the difference between what I paid and what the distributors paid for my electricity in 2004…
[…] It figures. After doing a bunch of work to move my backup mailserver to a virtual server, it worked fine for about 10 days, and then suddenly I was seeing no incoming email in the logs. This is a sign of a problem; even when the primary server is working, spammers are always connecting to the backup (in the hopes of getting past filters). […]
We were in and out of ER this morning (including two sets of X-rays) in less than two hours.
(Yes, he’s fine. A really bad bruise, but no breakage or dislocation.)
Yikes! So you’re saying we’re made of indiarubber until we hit adolescence or something? Glad things worked out all right…
Harald Koch says: Pretty much. “Kids bounce” does come out of our mouths a lot…
So.. what happened?
Harald Koch says: G. had a spectacular wipe-out at shinny-hockey this morning, and landed on his left elbow…
There were three party representatives at my polling station. Two Conservative, and one Communist.
There was no Communist Candidate on the _ballot_, mind you…
Jeff K says: You sure about that? Have you asked either of the left-leaning parties about their true adgenda? (That’s a joke — Its too bad the NDP doesn’t have the balance of power, the communists living in Toronto might have been able to look past their selfishness and prevented a Bloc-balance-of-power situation). Um, that was another joke, um, I hope. I’m happy for Alberta. They’ll get a few good policies for a couple of years. I hope they realize not everyone in Toronto is against them, and know that Harper has a whole country to run for a short while.
Greg says: You mean, there were none that were *openly* Communist… ;-)
A most excellent, if short, time off was had.
It was busy, of course, but a different sort of busy than work, which was very nice. After the usual flurry of family Christmases, I spent a couple of days helping my dad move his office and put up window blinds, and a day of computer maintenance. We spent two days finding our house so that we could host a New Years Eve party (we still hadn’t found all of the rooms after the Great Window Replacement of December 2005 :-). C. was a real trooper; she tidied up two _rooms_ all by herself! I’m hoping to keep the house tidy; we’re back down to having three rooms that need major work, which is nice.
The NYE party was smaller than usual, but that was ok; I think we had almost as many kids as adults in the house! Let me tell you, 4 girls jumping up and down and screaming at midnight is a terrifying sight. Sunday was the annual (legendary) CFRQ brunch of champions, where I ate too much and then spent half the day holding tools and flashlights for the intrepid electricians. An abortive trip to IKEA yesterday completed the week, and now I’m back in cubicle hell.
bq. Mummy, I suck more than you do!
— C. and M. playing C’s new dance dance revolution game…
bq. …like it or not, we spend most of our lives in the fat, undistinguished middle of the bell curve…
– “A. O. Scott, Where Have All the Howlers Gone?, The New York Times, December 18, 2005”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/movies/18scot.html
(via “The Quote of the Day Mailing List”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html)
Having windows installed during the second and third weeks of December makes the house very cold :-)
wjr says: Strangely enough, we’re having windows installed too – in fact, the installers just showed up to work for the day. It makes the house chilly and drafty, but not what any proper Canadian would call “cold”.
It will be nice to have double-paned windows, though.
In a wide ranging discussion about endangered species, overpopulation, and the enviroment, I mentioned the “rabbit problem in Australia”:http://www.csiro.au/communication/rabbits/qa2.htm.
bq. H: Unfortunately, rabbits have no natural predators in Australia.
bq. G: Except the Tasmanian devil. But I guess Tasmanian devils don’t actually eat rabbits.
three seconds later, M bursts out laughing….
(think about it :-)
The patches originally scheduled for June are finally done! Causes were many; a steady stream of new defects, staff defections, and general overload (both my team and QA :-). Now we just have to get all of our other “before the end of the year” commitments done before the end of the year.
That’s part of the lack of activity around here; another part is persephone 2.0, currently about half-constructed in a VMware partition on the home machine. I’m upgrading all the way from RedHat 7.3 to Ubuntu 5.10. That’s not really an “upgrade”; instead I’m building a new disk image from scratch, and then carefully migrating the configuration and data for each user and service. I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year…
I’m sure it’d be easier to just buy a new machine and put them up side-by-side. I’m not sure how Michelle would feel about that, though :-).
Greg says: Congrats on getting the patches out! I’ll miss ye olde persephone…
Also from John Scalzi, here’s the comedy list. Again, bold the ones you’ve seen (27/50), and mark the ones you own (3).
*Airplane!*
All About Eve
*Amelie*
Annie Hall
*The Apartment*
*Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery*
Blazing Saddles
Bringing Up Baby
Broadcast News
*Caddyshack*
Le diner de con
*Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb*
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
*Duck Soup*
*Ferris Bueller’s Day Off*
*Four Weddings and a Funeral*
The General
*Ghostbusters*
The Gold Rush
*Good Morning Vietnam*
*The Graduate*
*Groundhog Day*
A Hard Day’s Night
His Girl Friday
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Lady Killers
*Local Hero*
Manhattan
*M*A*S*H*
*Monty Python’s Life of Brian*
*National Lampoon’s Animal House*
*The Odd Couple*
*The Producers*
*Raising Arizona* *
*Roxanne*
Rushmore
Shaun of the Dead
A Shot in the Dark
*Some Like it Hot*
*Strictly Ballroom* *
Sullivan’s Travels
There’s Something About Mary
*This is Spinal Tap*
To Be or Not to Be
Tootsie
*Toy Story* *
Les vacances de M. Hulot
*When Harry Met Sally*
*Withnail and I*
Some rather more obscure ones in there – The General is 1927 – and some real dogs too. Tootsie? I think personal taste has a lot bigger role when it comes to comedy. And several of these are as much drama as comedy – like The Graduate.
Jeff K says: I think we need to rewrite this list. Easily 50% are dogs, but maybe I missed something. Why is the slow paced “A shot in the Dark” any better than one of the “Pink Panther” movies? Also, owning comedy is like retelling the same joke, but fortunately, most of that list is deliberately serious satire.
That list has a Saturday afternoon “I’m bored”/headache feel to it, especially without “The Matrix” and some other notables and anime. Also what’s with Jaws, Halloween & Hard Day’s night…? *gag*.
I stole your meme and put in the URL for this posting but no track-back happened. Ah well, I guess thisd is a manual track-back!
My score seems to be 63, and I have a few of the ones you haven’t seen:
The Big Sleep
Bonnie and Clyde
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
Maltese Falcon
Metropolis
Once Upon a Time in the West
Rashomon
Rear Window (which Luisa and I watched just last night, me for the 1st time!)
The Third Man
So let me know if you want to borrow them!
Yes, I’ve turned off trackbacks completely, because I was getting nothing but spam, spam, all day long.
Man, do I love lists like this .. If I may be so bold as to make a recommendation from the ones you haven’t seen yet, check out Godard’s Breathless .. pure movie magic
Cool; thanks, Keith!
72. Could have been better, but there’s a few there that I didn’t finish watching because I didn’t like them. But Jeff, you disappoint me greatly. A Hard Days Night is not only delightful, but enormously influential. It’s worth 20 Matrices. Halloween and Jaws, well, they’re more there for historical purposes, being the roots of the Horror-Slasher-Franchise film and the Hollywood-FX-Blockbuster.
Erum, “A Hard Days Night” was conceived prior to it having a script or a soundtrack and I wasn’t much of a Beatles fan. However, I just rented “Hard Days Night” for the prurposes of this discussion, and must say it’s an okay music video. I hate almost all Beatles songs except for “Revolution” and “Hard Days Night”, both of which are fantastic and tend to be on my mp3 player a lot. Anyway, aside from slighting a great movie like “The Matrix”, why didn’t you take a moment to comment on “Breathless” by Godard. The reviewers of “Hard Day’s Night” said it pioneered “jump cuts” in 1964, however “Breathless” 4 years earlier is regarded by reviews as the pioneer of “jump cuts”. Anyway, I am hopeless behind in my movie watching and have not seen “Breathless” yet, just that in my research of why “Hard Day’s Night” was influencial, I keep coming across stuff like that.
[…] 102 must-see movies Filed under: friends, entertainment — rae @ 9:02 am Stealing a meme from Harald, here is my version of the list: […]