This gallery is really impressive. Be sure to enjoy how abstract and innocuous the paintings look at the size you’d see them in most homes or museums. The 2004 gallery seems to have a bug, but earlier galleries will let you see each painting at a larger size. From The Reverse Cowgirl.
In a failure unrelated to the blown capacitor, I also lost my jabber server this week. There was an upgrade to the FreeBSD port for the daemon and when it came back up, I couldn’t talk to it. It’s always been shaky, and I finally decided if I was going to have to fix it again, I would spend that effort fixing it in a way that helped in the long term.
The result is that I’ve jumped over to ejabberd which is being actively developed and supports some gateways. We have lost the ability to bridge messages to Yahoo, buit other than that things seem OK. If I seem slow to respond to jabber or AIM, drop me an e-mail.
You may have noticed that ylum’s been a little shaky this week, staring on Labor Day or so. The good news is that shakiness should be abating. The bad news is that I’ve had to work some to get that to happen.
I opened it up on Sunday (the 3rd) to put a drive in for backups and get them running again. On the way, I found that my case fan had seized up. You nemember that 100+Â degree week at the end of July? I imagine that’s when it seized. The bad news is that’s also probably when the capacitor blew on the main board (see the image). 
Surprisingly this didn’t just shut down the machine when it happened, though the hardware has been sensitive, and I haven’t been able to reliably talk to my iriver. Well, I couldn’t leave it like that once I found it, and I really wasn’t happy with the cooling properties and general crumminess of my case, so a new case was called for as well as a new mainboard.
The new case is pretty spiffy – black with two cooling fans and real mounting hardware – and after a wrestling match with the AML on the BIOS chip, I’ve got FreeBSD booting and running credibly on the thing. This needs a little more tweaking, but it’s servicable.
Now proper backups are running as well, so there’s some hope that if my disk fails, some of this stuff will survive. Overall, things are better than they were – faster CPU, more memory, better cooling – but it was a pain getting them here.
I’ve got a cell phone again. I finally found time to go down to the Verizon store, find out that I was out of my contract period and that they would replace the phone I lost in <cough> January, and get a new one. It cost me $20 and I have a simple clamshell phone from Samsung that looks like a little Star Trek:TOS communicator. I really like it, though it’s positively quaint by the standards of the nerds I hang out with.
After I got the phone I decided I should check my messages. After all, I’ve been without a phone for 7 months.
Of course, no new messages. At least I know my friends know me.
My jaunt to do approaches Saturday was also interesting because it was the last entry in my first logbook. When I started taking flying lessons on 12 Feb 2000, I bought a student pilot package that included a Jeppesen logbook. Now the first 6 years of my flying experience are in one place, with a bow wrapped around them.
I’ve got an electronic copy of all the stuff, but the physical book is an interesting artifact in its own right. There are the out of order entries around 9/11 that show how desperate I was to fly, but how I couldn’t look at my logbook while I was grounded for fear that I wouldn’t get to add another entry. After I got to fly again and started instrument training I added the missing entries, but in the excitement I’d forgotten to add them in order.
There are a lot of firsts in there, too. First passengers, first flight in 32169, first trip out of state, first everything, really.
As a nice coincidence, I didn’t get to make the last entry. Flying with Andy as a CFI he gets to make and sign the entry. Just like he made and signed the first one in 2000.
Now I get to start another one. I’m a lucky guy.
My CFI and I were up shooting approaches Saturday morning. We actually filed each leg IFR through the tower entoute control (TEC) that the LA basin employs, which makes it super easy to fly IFR legs locally. We filed 3 legs, the first two one after the other and the last one after an hour or so break for lunch.
I was issued the same squawk code for all three legs.
I don’t remember ever getting the same squawk for 2 legs, much less 3 with an hour between two legs. Weird luck.
Apparently I mostly read the blogs of people who show me distrubing things. I don’t know is that says something bad about me or them.
In any case, Jeffrey Rowlands disturbed me today by showing me a site where you can pay to be responded to.
I’ve posted a review of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass on BBC.
I’ve managed to take Hellblazer and 100 Bullets off my pull list. I know you’re all very happy for me. Seriously, they just weren’t enjoyable any more. I’m sure I’ll buy another Hellblazer before I die. I like the character too much, and he occasionally draws great aritsts and writers. But I need a break.
To assuage my guilt (at leaving Constantine? I must be crazy), I picked up the first four issues of Desolation Jones and an issue of Nextwave. Both are written by Warren Ellis, so I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. Jones was stronger, but then I had 4 issues to play with. I think Nextwave could become a guilty pleasure in a hurry, though.
While I’m thinking about Snakes on a Plane and good ideas gone bad, I think 100 Bullets was a good idea that’s execution hasn’t lived up to its promise. The idea is great pulp: some fellow steps out of the shadows with ironclad proof that the worst thing in your life wasn’t your fault, proof of whose fault it is, and a gun with 100 untracable – and I mean untracable – bullets in it – do what you will. As an author, you can’t lose. You get to tell a bunch of tense action-packed stories on that premise alone all the while stringing us along about who this shadow-lurking guy is, how he does this, and why. It’s a brilliant structure to hang a series on.
The execution hasn’t worked for me. The pacing is too slow. We got out of the short stories and into a maisma of conspiracies too quickly, and the conspiracies aren’t being resolved quickly enough. It doesn’t help that although the art is distinctive and stylish, it can be hard to tell the bad asses apart. With months between slow-moving arcs, it’s easy to forget who’s who.
I stopped buying at issue 75. Sandman was finished at 75, and it’s a sprawling series by any standard except Dave Sim’s. Preacher was also 75 issues, and IMHO was a nice size. There’s no sign of 100 Bullets coming to a head any time soon. I’m outta here. Execution matters.
I saw this today, because I was sure they would mess it up and I wanted to see how. I have to say, I was wrong. IMHO, they nailed this movie. It’s exactly what the title says it is: pure mindless action and entertainment.
Aside from following Jeffrey Rowland’s Overcompensating, I was pretty isolated from the hype over the film, other than that vague buzz that one can hear whenever something gets hold of the Internet. As such I didn’t realize how much of a slasher movie it was going to me. Once calibrated, though I was fine.
Of course it’s not a good movie, in any kind of sense but being a good slasher/shoot-em up movie. That’s to say that if you’re a sort of geeky 16-year-old-boy, this is your movie. Other than a few slaps at the really amazingly bad aviation references, I won’t even poke holes at the many errors in the movie, except to say that the characters are one-dimensional, the physics are unreasonable, continuity is questionable, and believability is right out. But, unless you’re a movie critic (who has to look for that stuff), looking for any of that in this movie means that you really have a problem connecting with your culture. Snakes on a Plane is going to be sophomoric by definition.
As sophomoric ideas go, the idea is killer. The slasher formula is basically creepie crawlies (or a maniac with a chainsaw and supernatural determination or powers) locked in an enclosed place, eating their way through a crowd of bystanders while a lone hero helps the survivors band together to get out alive. Once you recognize this, snakes and an airplane are such good choices it’s hard to go wrong. Then picking Samuel L. Jackson to be your hero, well, it’s tough to do better there, too. You’ve basically laid out your perfect slasher film (though it’s not far from your perfect action film – substitute terrorists for snakes and you’ve got Die Hard).
A specification for a movie’s not a movie, though, and many great ideas have gone awry. As John Landis said to the AV Club, “people don’t understand this: Ideas are important, but they’re not essential. What’s essential and important is the execution of the idea.” Many if not most really horrible movies, even the horrible sophomoric ones that need barely rise to 16-year-old notions of quality, sound great on paper. The ultimate example of this for me is Revenge of the Sith, which one really shouldn’t be able to screw up as badly is it was. More than anything else, Sith got me to see Snakes, just to see if Hollywood can hit even that low target.
As an aside, the reverse can happen: a weird or lousy idea can be turned into a great movie by suberb execution. I have a friend who heard the pitch for Speed as it was being filmed, and never was able to discuss the movie without giggling. It’s an action movie about high-speed thrills set on a bus. But it works fine because of the execution.
So, if you believe me that character development isn’t important and plausibility doesn’t matter, what’s there to execute? The heart of the slasher movie is to make things creepy and frightening while drawing the watcher into the struggle for survival. Also, there are a lot of genre conventions to play to and riff off, not the least of which is the implausible but excruciatingly painful execution of various victims. None of this could really be done better. The CGI snakes are creepy enough to frighten, but they don’t look entirely real; the situations are nail-biting enough, and the shocks effective enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and there are many moments of uneasy laughter to hide a cringe – even when you know that the cringe-causer is about as plausible as a Ralph Nader presidency. Excellent job.
I’m not a 16-year-old boy anymore, though I still had a good time. I actually found some of the violence and gross-outs, well, violent and gross. There were many times where I realized that I would have laughed at something as a kid, but it was unnerving to me as an adult. And I’m sure that the creators of Snakes expected the laugh and got it from their audience. It’s strange to realize something about yourself from Snakes on a Plane, but there it is.
Can’t recommend it to everyone, but 16-year-old boys who think it sounds good will love it.