Advogato blog for timg

11 Dec 2000

Mon, 11 Dec 2000 05:06:15 GMT

D&D movie spoilers ahead!

Well, I saw the D&D movie today. I liked it, but I didn't come in with very high expectations. The story was extremely generic. Bad guy wants to take over world, outcast kiddy meets somewhat powerful girl, fall in love, beat bad guy. Cheeky sidekick gets smacked around and makes lots of wisecracks.

Ignoring the weak story, the movie was a lot of fun to look at, and had relatively few groan moments. Just two small cliches that I recall offhand. Well, cliched lines. The whole story is a cliche, with the exception of the dragon battle and the queen lady.

Story: Poor to fair. Sort of a cross between Star Wars and Indiana Jones, with less original plot.

Looks: Excellent. Lots of lush fields, big dragons, magic spells (the lighting/fire stuff was especially cool.), castles, dungeons. I just wish the thieve's guild maze sequence was longer.

Characters: Blah...Standard fare. Two young robbers meet young mage girl, save world. The three can beat down a squadron of the evil head mage troops. Mage girl can kick the young robber's butts in the beginning with no trouble, but is helpless against a few soldiers. Empress Savina was pretty pointless...I don't know why she even existed. The bad guys were pretty cool, acting-wise. No crappy trade federation ambassadors here. (puke)

Loose ends: Why didn't Damodar turn on Profion after he was let off the curse? The scene in Marina's cell seemed to indicate that he would. False foreshadowing, or something.

Last notes: Go see it if you're a fan of the genre. Don't expect a cool story.

23 Aug 2000

Wed, 23 Aug 2000 00:25:48 GMT

Dum de dum, been slacking again. Advogato-wise, that is.

Gtcd3 is going really well. Python kicks butt. Now I just need to figure out whether or not this bug that shows up on my desktop but not my laptop is the fault of failing hardware...My 4x6 NEC changer has seen a many good years.
Started working for the UMC helpdesk today. It's not bad. We're loading Windows 2000 on thousands of laptops. They've got this system with two floppies and two cds...I'd have created bootable cds and so forth, but anyway, it's good money and not too tough work. Good break from my MINOS stuff.
I have found musical nirvana here and here.
I like Gabber.

15 Aug 2000

Tue, 15 Aug 2000 06:55:31 GMT

Whee, long time no advogato.

Saw Dream Theater Saturday night. Awesome show...DT's musicians are fantastic. THe only complaint I had was the venue..Hot and poorly laid out. Oh, and they had some stupid dance party right after the concert, so the opening band Spock's Beard) didn't get a chance to play. 2.25 hours of DT though.
Been working on a Python version of gtcd. I have some preliminary CD audio bindings written for Python, and you can see a screenshot of Gtcd "3". Soon I will have the bindings available for download.
Too tired to type anymore.

3 Aug 2000

Thu, 3 Aug 2000 07:09:17 GMT

Oops, I've been slacking off diary-wise now...

I've been learning Python. Very nice, so far. I started on an interface to the tcd2 code in gnome cvs, I want to rewrite gtcd in python. Whee, another day off of work, more floor wax work.

27 Jul 2000

Thu, 27 Jul 2000 05:52:48 GMT

Well, my music review site mentioned a few weeks ago is live. Check it out. Hey, this might be a good way to tell how many people actually read this diary..

Anyway, I'm posting it here to see if there are any bugs and see if people really hate/love it before I start entering data and opinion in earnest, and stick it on Yahoo. So if you have any strong feelings either way, or manage to break it, let me know! Or don't even click on the link. See if I care.

So I went to work today, and the boss wasn't there. Oh well. Turns out I'm staying home tomorrow, since they're waxing the hallway floor by the office..

I've been seriously considering signing up for Emusic's subscription program. They've got thousands of albums available for download on mp3 for about $10 apiece, or you can download individual tracks for about a buck apiece.

But with the subscription program, which is $10 a month per year, you have free run of everything! There's tons of good stuff on there, Fates Warning, Galactic Cowboys, some classical, and a ton of undergroundish punk/ska. Mogwai also sells their albums on there. Even some mainstream bands, such as the Goo Goo Dolls and Mighty Mighty Bosstones have their older catalogs available.

The only thing stopping me is the lack of a CDR drive. I'm also sort of a purist when it comes to music--I like to have the whole package..The liner notes, jewel case, etc. Some of the emusic albums actually have liner notes in PDF format, but not all. I'd also like to burn the discs so I could listen in the car... Maybe one of these days.

25 Jul 2000

Tue, 25 Jul 2000 06:25:49 GMT

Took some Benadryl last night due to a headache and random ailments, probably some allergy or something... Knocked me out hard until noon, and I had weird dreams about fist-fighting Rush Limbaugh. I won. If I don't get up by 11:00, Rush comes on the radio, and then I have to either turn off the alarm and get up, turn it off and go back to bed, or just go back to sleep. This morning I went back to sleep. It's funny how much outside stimuli can affect dreams. I'll have to experiment with looped tapes of random things some day.

Wow, big old flamewar on g-h. I guess my opinion is that widgets and so forth should be put where they belong. Gnome-Canvas is a widget that doesn't contribute to GNOME policy, so it should go in Gtk+. Gnome-dialog does, so it should stay. Libgnomeui is about policy, from what miguel says. Gtk+ is about widgets. Oh well.

Ho hum, boring day
I've got nothing more to say
Before I know it
I'll be a poet
But my meter's flawed
And my words don't rhyme
All the time

23 Jul 2000

Sun, 23 Jul 2000 05:52:48 GMT

March of the Bullets

Played some Starcraft with a bunch of friends today. Lost one game right off, then we had a 2 vs 2 ally game where I and my teammate cleaned up. I was Protoss, a race I usually don't do well at, and my teammate was Zerg. Vs Terran and Protoss. Fun fun stuff.
We also played some Monopoly. I lost. Hard. Remind me not to go into any field involving large finances and shady deals.
Then we went to Pizza Hut at about 11:30. Not very busy. Mmmm, heartburn!
As you might imagine, not much hacking or real work today. But it is Saturday.
Decided to crown Neal Morse of Transatlantic and Spock's Beard either my #1 or #2 rock vocalist, depending on my mood. Whee! And I'm seeing Spock's Beard and Dream Theater (with James LaBrie is my #2 or #1 rated rock vocalist) in August!
Church tomorrow, and since I type up the program each morning, I leave early. So I am off.
Hey lewing, get better soon!

22 Jul 2000

Sat, 22 Jul 2000 06:04:50 GMT

Tried to do some Galeon hacking today, I managed to get a decent open location dialog up, and fought with glade a bit...It's biting me back now, unable to find signal handler or something. I'll go back to it Sunday I guess.
Whee, tomorrow I'm going to hang out with a couple of guys from school, whom I haven't seen since spring. Should be a good day.
I guess I did go into work today...Didn't get much done.
Hmm, one of the household computers seems to be randomly deleting files...Windows was completely buggered. Reinstalled. Seems better now. I don't like Windows' file association system, way too clumsy to edit things or fix stuff it trashed. For some reason zip files were associated with MS Help...Rrriigghhtt.
Darn, it's supposed to get warm again tomorrow. I liked 60-75 degrees F in July! I really don't like Minnesota weather...Evilly hot in the summer, similarly cold in the winter. Gah.
New music; Shotgun Innocence from Savatage, a demo from Edge of Thorns. Cool. Want more. Mogwai Fear Satan by Mogwai, really weird ambient stuff with a very strong tonal center. I want to go find a guitar and play along, just so I can hit the tonic once in a while.
I should stop eating out at Subway and buy cds with my extra cash. Yeah. Something like that.
Night. Going to sleep to the soothing sounds of Radiohead.

21 Jul 2000

Fri, 21 Jul 2000 07:55:16 GMT

Back to the bullets

Late morning...Took Tylenol PM last night for a splitting headache and other ailments. Feel better this morning.
Goodish voice lesson this afternoon. Browsed a CD shop, heard some weird instrumental fuzz-rock playing. Wondered what it was. Turns out it's Mogwai..Gotta get me some of that. Napstered one song.
I was browsing Iain's diary entries, just because he's an interesting guy, and noticed that he mentioned Mogwai more than once. SHall have to talk to him about his musical taste.
Funny. Very often when I've just heard of something new, a concept, word, place, band, person, frob, I'll see it pop up someplace and recognize it. Just chance, but it's still trippy when it happens.
I was going to say something else here..
Working on a Netscape -> Galeon bookmark conversion tool. Got it almost done except for Perl's evil XML packages, they're way convoluted and overengineered. I can't find a simple "Encode this text nicely for an XML attribute". Grr. Surprised to find not 1, not 2, but 3 different Perl modules to work with Netscape bookmarks. Boggle.
Oh, and XML::Parser doesn't seem to work cleanly with XML::Writer. Double boggle.
Skipped piano lesson and went out doing some proselyting Latter-day Saint style with one of our missionaries. Met a lady who is a Jehovah's Witness, and all she wanted to do was battle points of doctrine. Learned afterwards that JW's aren't allowed by their religion to take books or info about other religions, especially the Book of Mormon. Logical oddness like that bugs me. If JW is a true religion, then what's the harm of learning about others? Boggle again.
Grrr, IE's backspace binding just bit me again. Glad it keeps the contents of forms across cached pages, though.
Off to read new SciAm and get some sleep.
Wow, this is getting long.

19 Jul 2000

Wed, 19 Jul 2000 06:20:37 GMT

I found Advogato through Salo...er..wait..

Dum de dum. Went to work late today. Got some stuff done. Locked my keys in the car yesterday, felt pretty smart about that. Got it open in about 10 minutes with a coathanger though. Got Galeon working. Using it as my primary brower on the laptop side. Needs cookies and ssl support though. Better transfer stats would be nice, too. Oh, and lots of other stuff I could theoretically code but figure "why bother" because someone else is probably already doing it and could do it better than I. There's my cynical runon sentence for tonight. Hope you enjoy it! Mozilla's menus are slower than Gtk's. Ugh.

OK, enough mindless blathering. I think I'm catching a cold or something, so I need some sleep..

PS: IE is stupid to have the backspace key bound to the Back button.