Everybody Staze...

So yeah… figured it was finally time for a new update. Tonight I head off to see RotK, but last night I went and saw Last Samurai. Very Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall). Very good movie as his other ones were. Also in a very good position for some awards. With Tom Cruise as the star, and some great cinematography, I think it will do quite well. While the historical aspect was adequate, it wasn’t quite a history movie. Some things bothered me… but they did not try to make Cruise too native. When speaking Japanese, he sounded white, and he didn’t learn to read Japanese. That to me seems accurate and believable. The interaction with Emperor Meiji seemed somewhat accurate for the time and the Westerisation of Japan. The dwindling population of the Samurai seemed accurate… their desire to remain. Their Loyalty to the Emperor obviously was something that would have only appeared since the unification of Japan. Ken Watanabe, who plays Katsumoto, does an excellent job.

Really, i would suggest the movie to anyone if only for the extremely vivid battle scenes, and the cinematography. But I would say in hind sight, don’t expect anything truly great if you’ve seen Zwicks other movies… while it isn’t quite like Braveheart and The Patriot, there are some simalarities.

As for personal things, not much is going on. Val is home for break and I plan on going and seeing her this weekend. The Con was great, we ended up making about 2k… which will shortly be dumped into reserving a hotel for the next con. I am now the Communications “officer” for the con. I am incharge of making sure people know how to talk to eachother, and keeping the website, etc up and running. I am not sure if I am supposed to take care of content for the site or not… but that will be sorted out in short order.

My 23rd birthday was a short while ago (Friday the 12th). Many people showed, and I thank them all for coming and buying me Kitchen Gadgets. And while I continue to be annoyed at a friend of mines insistance at becoming the female mirror of her beau.

Well… I will be posting some more stuff shortly about my experiance at the Con. I was going to backpst it a while ago… but I’m lazy, so I’ll just post it as an insert for my next post.

I’ll be at the theater tonight at 20:00… and the showing is at 00:05, and being a 3:42 movie… I should be home about 04:00. I am going to be D-E-D dead tomorrow… so don’t expect a post again uuntil Thursday.

Be well everyone… and have fun at the movie. =)

So, this post has been coming for a long time, but I really haven’t had any reason to post. I’m quite sorry about it, and I realize that my last post rolled well over a couple weeks ago, so yeah… I’ll work on it.

My weeks in movies, that’s one topic I decided I wanted to cover with this post. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve seen 4 movies, I think. Underworld, Lost in Translation, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Intolerable Cruelty (in that order). Let me cover them all real quick: giving a quick opinion.

1. Underworld. Good, the female lead is cute, the supporting actor that plays the head Vampire is quite cool. Would I pay full price to see it again? no. See it when it hits the cheap theater.

2. Lost in Translation. See it. Amazing movie. Sophia Coppola has 2 great movies under her belt, and I can’t wait to see what she produces as she goes on in life. She is going to be like her father, produces little, but all of it quality. Oh, and the female lead… HOT.

3. Kill Bill Vol 1. What can I say? Covert and I (and Outlaw too to my knowledge) love revenge movies. There’s so much potential there for truly brilliant action, and gruesome actions toward other people (mentally and physically). This movie is very Tarentino. Great shots, amazing soundtrack, and really, I have to agree with Gene Siskel, this movie was very much about the genre of Samurai movies of the 50’s-70’s and not so much about the story. Nevertheless, since I have seen the movie, I have wanted to go see it again and again. Not for the hemophobic, but I will say that while there is a huge amount of blood in the movie, almost all of it is humorous in nature. Then again, I was shown in Psychology that laughter is a common human response to an uncomfortable situation… so it could be that it was humorous only for that… but I tend to think just because most of the bleeding was such an exercise in hyperbole as to be hilarious rather than grotesque.

4. Intolerable Cruelty. Coen Brothers to the core. As usual, a story that may have been covered before, but not to the level that they cover it. A tried and true story, often almost Shakespearean with humor infused throughout. Amazing fight scene as seen in Raising Arizona, or the couple in Barton Fink, or the rather violent/graphic one in Fargo. This one involving a rather lovely character named “Weezey Joe”. Clooney plays his part wonderfully and very reminiscent of his role in O Brother Where art Thou. Catherine Zeta Jones does a wonderful job, even without her husband. 😉 I highly suggest going and seeing this movie if you’re a Coen brother’s fan. If you’re not, or are unfamiliar with their work, see it anyway… and if you’re a cheapskate, wait until it hits the $1.50 theater and see it there. Then go rent the rest of their movies and see those. Please don’t ask me to rank their movies, I don’t think I could.

If I was to rank these four in the order I’d suggest seeing them, then I’d have to go: 2, 3, 4, 1. But 3 and 4 are very close. And 2 is my main suggestion because I think it’s amazing… Bill Murray is wonderful, Johansenn is amazing, and Coppola is perfect. I hope it gets some nom… though I’m not sure what. Kill Bill will, and Cruelty will too… but they are mainstream movies. Lost in Translation is just now getting main stream coverage at major movieplexes, so my hope is that it will gain the acclaim it deserves. Though, I will say, it takes a few minutes to get over the Japanese references.

School is interesting. I’m taking a whole lot of chemistry, and when I can convince myself to go, I rather enjoy it. Really, I’m pretty burnt out. I know it’s just a whining, but I really haven’t had a good long vacation in a long time. I really just need to go somewhere. But, I really don’t know where. Work is interesting, and overall pretty uneventful, but building up to to Winter Break. For those of you who have seen the Jschool, we will be upgrading our really old shitty lab (full of 7500s and beige G3’s) to be all modern. Flat Panel 17″ iMacs. The bitch is still going to be print accounting, but hopefully we can get that taken care of. It will so speed up the lab. I’m not sure what we’re going to do about quark or pagemaker, but that’s all Andre’s job to figure out.

On that note, I must say I love MacOS 10.3… I have been running the final build for some time. The biggest thing, I must say, is that on my 12″ powerbook, it makes my machine run much cooler.

Some of this post was done while I was in Central Oregon over the weekend. Could be the last time I go over there. My Grandparents put the property up for sale. Really has me pretty upset. I’ll miss that place a lot if I can’t go over there anymore. It’s been around longer than I have, so I always remember going over there and enjoying the dry heat, thunderstorms, beautiful landscape, etc. Probably one of the main reasons I believe Oregon is the most amazing and pretty state there is. And I’ve been to a lot of the states, though I must admit, not all of the areas within them.

Well, anywho, I should go. I’ll try to make another post by the end of the week, but I’m not making any promises. Thank you for being so patient and not bugging me about my lack of posting, or the nice black background you see since my last post rolled. I think I might have some different posting topics if I get a chance to post again. Partially sparked by books I’m reading, and partially by what’s taking up a lot of my free time at work and home… watching Good Eats.

See ya.

So, yeah, I let it roll again. so sue me. I’ve been busy at work, and when I come home all I want to do is sleep or play with linux. There are 3 laptops all wandering around the palce with various ssh sessions logged into the TiVo box I’m working on, or the server, or whatever. It’s relaxing. And I’m learning from it. That and and all the patches are starting to get on my nerves. But, I’ll say one thing, I’m a whore. I find a distro of linux, and I fall in love with it, and then wonder how all the other distros aren’t this cool. This month/year it’s gentoo. Debian is cool and all, but it’s so friggin’ behind the times with versions, and just is overall not quite as friendly to installing software that there aren’t .debs for. Sure, gentoo may take a long time to install, but it’s so much fun to have a completely optimized and custom system at your fingertips. Eh, geek.

Work has been hell. And I hate Microsoft with all my blackened heart. We are trying to move people off an Exchange 5.5 mail server running on an old DEC Alpha Box, with NT 4.0 on it. We’re moving them to the campus mail server. A good move, but a bitch to do. Exchange doesn’t want to let us go… so it throws these phantom messages into people’s mailboxes that the mail transfer program freaks out about, and then bails. The sooner we’re off this thing the better. We finally killed the other NT4 box, and it’s so much quieter in here. Once we kill the dead UPS and the Alpha box, it’ll be quiet quiet in here. I so want to put linux on the alpha… but, that’ll have to wait until we’re quite done with it.

Lets see, what else. I got my bike. Oh gods, do I love it. And shoes, it’s so much different to ride a bike with clipless shoes. The official line is 40% more efficient… but there’s just something really cool about being able to push and pull yourself up a hill. They really have a learning curve… not just the whole method of clipping in, and then clipping out (else you fall over… which I have yet to do). Those both come fairly easily. The much longer process is learning to use both the down and the upstroke to create an equal energy stroke, and create a nice very low impact ride. That takes months… so, I’ll keep that part up, and getting to the point that clipping in and out are 2nd nature. I have some accessories to buy (shoes, a purse to match my top… lol), like a saddle bag, some fenders (a stratocaster, a precision bass, hehe). A light will be a fairly major purchase because I want to buy a nice halogen with a rechargable pack. Those usually run 80-120 bucks, so that’s a bit later (like, when I have to start riding in the dark). Also a must is rain gear… I think I can see my birthday list coming.

So Covert is gone, Kat is gone, and Val is gone. And of all of them, I’ve really only talked to Val since she left. Kat has net access (since she posts to her blog), but Covert seems quite preoccupied. I mean, the least he could do would be to tell me what’s going to happen tomorrow. To answer his question, or rather, statement, I don’t think I’m quite like a Californian with a recall ballot. I didn’t get this pushed on me by someone else. I wanted the job. And like all the people that hopefully will be voting for the elected and rightful governer of California (no, not Arnold Schwartzenegger), I will stick it out. I’m just frightened to see my schedule for this upcoming year. Yes, that’s right, I haven’t registered yet. Why? cause none of the classes I sign up for ever fill up. And I’m lazy.

I would post pictures of my bike, but I haven’t taken any yet. I really just need to get the pictures part of my site up, but I keep forgetting to do some brain storming with Kilo to figure out how to do what I want to do. In the interim, I will put the stuff up manually. gah, I hate doing manual work when you can write a perl script to do it better. The main bitch is, Kilo will probably either A. do all the work himself and I will learn nothing from it. 😉 or B. want to use MySQL to do it, when a few simple text files will do. Either way, I should have a test page up, maybe, within the next few days. I just need to find what pictures I want to populate it with. I also need to get the personal info up, which likewise will require some newer pictures of me. Gar…

Well, I think that’s it for now, I can’t really think of anything else. Tom is on vacation this week, so my previous week of hell can no go into the nether regions of my mind… ah, /dev/null