The Blog of Harald

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 :-).

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*

The list is from “The Science Fiction Film Canon”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003785.html, from the book “The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843535203/103-9758806-6427829?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance by “John Scalzi”:http://www.scalzi.com/. He describes it as “Reviews and commentary on the 50 science fiction films you have to see before you die”…

I’ve bolded the ones I’ve seen, and marked the (two) that I own. 31/50; Not too bad…

*The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!*
*Akira Kaneda!*
*Alien*
*Aliens*
Alphaville
*Back to the Future* *
*Blade Runner* *
*Brazil*
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
*Close Encounters of the Third Kind*
*Contact*
The Damned
Destination Moon
*The Day The Earth Stood Still*
Delicatessen
*Escape From New York*
*ET: The Extraterrestrial*
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
*The Fly (1985 version)*
*Forbidden Planet*
*Ghost in the Shell*
Gojira/Godzilla
*The Incredibles*
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
*Jurassic Park*
*Mad Max 2*
*The Matrix*
Metropolis (Extended version)
On the Beach
*Planet of the Apes (1968 version)*
*Robocop*
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
*Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan*
*Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope*
*Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back*
The Stepford Wives
*Superman*
*Terminator 2: Judgement Day*
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
*Tron*
*12 Monkeys*
28 Days Later
*20,000 Leagues Under the Sea*
*2001: A Space Odyssey*
La Voyage Dans la Lune
*War of the Worlds (1953 version)*

I can’t believe I didn’t link to this before!

“Squirrel vs. Biker”:http://www.hftonline.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16501 subtitled ” And people ask me what I need a Browning .338 Winchester Magnum for… ”

It’s apparently from “The December 2004 newsletter”:http://www.victoriagoldwings.org/newsletters/dec04.pdf of the Gold Wing Road Riders Association of Victoria, BC, but the html link is easier to read.

other than the chest cold :-)

Saturday we arose long before dawn to get the boy up and dressed for his soccer tournament. Dropped him off at the school bus, spun past Tim Hortons, and watched the sun rise somewhere around the QEW and Ford Drive. Fortunately, the day was sunny and warm. The kids played four awesome games, and BVG ended up winning the first ever Under 10 “C” tournament! This was the first year they had enough “C” teams for a tournament; in previous years they’ve had to mix the “C” and “B” teams into a single tournament. Naturally the kids were very excited…

After that, we dropped by the Dyments farm near Dundas to select pumpkins. Of course we had to ride the haywagon, and play in the hay fort, and run through the corn maze… fun was had by all.

As if that wasn’t enough to cram into a single day, we then flew home to Fairview Mall to watch Wallace and Grommit (and yes, the adults laughed at all of the adult-only jokes. “May contain nuts” indeed :-).

Unfortunately, all of that running around left us tired and grumpy, and we had a group fight before bed. Other than that, a perfect day…

Today was pumpkin carving, and a spot of laundry, and lawn mowing, as October continues to be unseasonably warm. And with the time change, I hope we won’t have trouble getting out of bed on Monday, for a change!

So the car wasn’t stolen after all.

The night guy at the parking lot realized that he still had a key and a car, so he locked the key in the little safe in the booth, called his boss, and headed home.

The boss concluded that while nobody was at the lot, Michaela would have arrived at her car, found no key, and headed for home some other way. In an unusual display of customer service, he came downtown, retrieved the car key, and parked our car in an underground lot across the street so that it would not get broken into or stolen. (Oh, the irony :-)

He fetched the car this morning, so when Michaela drove up in her rental car she found our missing car right where she had left it…

It could be argued that the parking attendant should have left a note or something. However, his intentions were good, and apart from some _panic_ on our part, nothing is damaged or broken; all in all, a happy ending.

Apparently we’ve been Noticed.

Last month a bunch of fraudulent charges showed up on my Visa card, and I was forced to replace it.

Last night, one of our cars was stolen from a downtown parking lot.

Where is my herd, and how can I go hide back in the center?

Did you know that in 1977, a U.S. Patent was issued for the combover? Yes, it’s true, “Patent 4,022,227 – Method of concealing partial baldness”:http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,022,227.WKU.&OS=PN/4,022,227&RS=PN/4,022,227 was issued to Frank and Donald Smith, of Orlando, FL.

I read about it at Damien Katz: Combover where there’s also a link to Combover: The Movie…

Who knew that the fortunes and misfortunes of America were directly tied to the television career of David Hasselhoff?

Now you too can read all about it at Damien Katz: Who moved my Hasselhoff?

bq. I’m sure if there’s something out there they’re wise enough to stay away from us.

— Gil Grissom, Las Vegas Crime Lab

bq. Change is mandatory, survival is optional; choose wisely!

atrributed to François Tavenas, but I think it’s actually older…

In a wonderful parody of art, an expert conman has disappeared with more than €5 million by persuading banks that he was a secret service agent investigating terrorist money-laundering:

Banks caught by €5m spy sting

What happened to jack-fm? Since Friday there’s been nothing but music, commercials, and those inane “we play what we want” snips. What happened to the personalities? What happened to the *news, weather, and traffic*, for goodness sake?

Grr.

tremble.com: we clap on the downbeat

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

Andrei Zmievski: How to Sell a Bulldozer

The upgrade to WordPress 1.5 was painless. I had to:

* backup :-)
* install the new version
* run the database upgrade script
* get a new version of the textile 2 plugin
* copy my old index.php etc. files into a theme directory, edit them, and activate the theme

That last step took most of the time, but it now seems that the old blog and the new blog look the same, so…

tah-dah!

Interesting description of near-future events:

deconsumption: Timeline for Unfolding Crisis of Mankind

via “How to Save the (World”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2005/10/01.html#a1290)

Ok, the “PowerSquid Outlet Multiplier”:http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/powersquid-outlet-multiplier-no-more-wasted-outlets-126065.php is not only useful, it _looks_ cool…

I finally figured out “where all the spam is coming from”:http://www.google.com/blogsearch.

The coincidence is too perfect to ignore.

Ain’t progress grand?