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WEEK 7 2005
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Saturday 19 February
2005
Saturday - not a lot to say. Rain, rain, rain. I'm usually a fan of rain, here in the desert, but this is getting silly.
This is the 60th anniversary of the battle of Iwo Jima - I wrote a bit about it last year, after reading Hansen's Ripple's of Battle. A year ago this week I posted one of my fathers stories of WWII.
And, a year ago we were watching Leahy, a musical group well worth seeing.
I read Iron Sunrise, which was better than Singularity Sky
to my way of thinking. The main drawback is that the plot relies a bit
too much on a bad guy that falls in love, and a disaffected teen. Maybe
it was going to be a juvenile originally? Anyway, I enjoyed it.
Friday 18 February
2005
Friday - Apparently Roger Ebert didn't like 'Napoleon Dynamite', the movie I mentioned Tuesday, but the movie is ably defended here by Jim Treacher. He even uses bullet points: Loyalty, Dedication, Courage, Passion, etc, to make his point. [via Tim Blair]
Went to the LPAC for a performance - 'Tony Kenny's Ireland". It was terrible, terrible, terrible.
Bad music, bad singing, mediocre dancing... After a while it was all I could do to keep from laughing.
There was the show emcee, (Tony?), who did an uninspired patter
obviously crafted to what he thought Americans would like. Occasionally
in the first half of the show he would murder some inoffensive
Irish-American staple, then the dancers would appear to distract the
audience from the bleeding in their ears. Overweight, dressed in the
cheapest possible outfits the five women and five men would prance
about to pre-recorded music for a minute or two, before - wheezing and
huffing - they made their way off stage to applause.
Applause.
"No, no, you'll only encourage them!" I wanted to yell, but didn't. (I was brought up polite, and sure, while the ushers looked like frail refugee's from the nearest senior center, who knows, they could be ninja seniors with deadly name badge skills!).
Tony would then reappear. His shoe's would glitter as he made little
pirouettes and sweeps whilst butchering another ballad in his best
Tony-Bennett-I-Am-Not style.
Then, once again, the Gay Irish Review would appear on stage to dance
their way into my heart. Honestly, I really began to appreciate their
true worth after a while - every minute they were on the stage Tony wasn't.
After a while Tony proudly introduced one of the dancers as his
daughter, and she came out and sang. Several times. As a singer she
made a very good dancer. Several people in my party had the same
thought at this point - where is Simon from American Idol when you need him? If she lost twenty five pounds and gained a couple of octaves she might stand a chance with him...
Then, oh dear god, Tony and daughter performed a duet. ( I think it was at this point the eleven year old in our party was described as "trying to tear his own head off."
He then spent most of the rest of the show with his head under his
coat. As an adult I didn't have that option, but a battle-to-the-death
with the ninja ushers was starting to look good.)
To be fair, there were a fiddler and accordionist who seemed to be
pretty decent. Generally forced to accompany the recorded music they
really didn't much of a chance to shine, a solo each, but that's not
their fault.
Then there was the interlude with a Irish Comedian from Branson, Missouri.
The second half was almost all Tony. The grand finale was a 'Tribute to America" medley...amazingly bad.
After which, at the show's conclusion, Tony took the opportunity to try to sell CD's of his singing, and tours to Ireland...
In conclusion; the LPAC generally books pretty decent acts - but this show we must gleefully place alongside the Infamous Mime Show and the Partially Trained Housecat Act as the worst of the worst.
Thursday 17 February 2005
Thursday
- watched The Return of The King last night, in the extended edition. So...I'm wondering: why is there a penquin in Shelob's cave?
Upside down in Shelob's lair...a
penguin?
A close up.
I blame global warming.
Wednesday 16 February 2005
Wednesday - heh, synchronicity at work. Jerry Pournelle had his router go bad on him - partially:
We did
some things including one I should have done, to wit connecting one computer
directly to the cable modem without the router in the loop; and Lo! it
worked. The DI-604 seems to be at fault; it simply stopped resolving DNS
inquiries. It has now been replaced by a DLINK DI-624 (with the wireless
capability disabled) with the same exact settings that the DI-604 had; and
that did it. All my internet problems went away.
I say partial failure is worse,
because with a complete failure it's obvious where the problem is, and
so it can be easily fixed. Intermittent and partial failures are the
very devil to figure out.
The USS Jimmy Carter, SSN-23,
a massive SEAWOLF class nuclear submarine will be commissioned on the
19th. I suspect that from the day of her first voyage, to the day she
goes to the scrappers, that she will be fondly known as the "peanut".
At 12,000 tons her displacement exceeds the 10,000 of the World War II cruiser San Francisco, CA-38 that I mentioned a few weeks ago.
I read somewhere (can't remember where right now) that she will probably replace the famed USS Parche (read Blind Man's Bluff
for a good description of cold war submarine intelligence efforts),
which was the goto submarine for spying on the eastern bloc during the
cold war. She's big, and that means lots of room for specialized
equipment, and the base boat is the very best technology (expensive,
so this is the third and last of the class), and I assume - very very quiet.
U.S. govt photo
Tuesday 15 February 2005
Tuesday - when I tried to log onto the
internet this morning I got my router setup screen instead. Somehow,
during the night, it completely reset itself to base configuration.
Great, just great. I was able to reset it but now have to wonder what
is next. It was probably just a bad router; this page
has posts from many people that have the same drop-off problems that
I've had under load, or late in the afternoon when the house is warm.
It sounds as thought the SPI might be overtaxing the cooling limits of
the small plastic encased router. No-one reported a spontaneous reset to
base configuration though. So, I reset it and turned off the wireless
portion (that I rarely use) and am considering upgrading the firmware.
I am running v5.02, there is an upgrade page for v5.04, which, when you click on it, downloads v5.07.
This mismatch between documentation and a software patch does not
inspire confidence in me. Bad firmware updates can completely wreck a
system.
I finally saw 'Napoleon Dynamite' the other day. What a nice movie, I can see why it became a sleeper hit. A very low key sort of humor...
A new local radio station is playing some b-side stuff, from the 1950's
to the 1970's. It's fun, some of this stuff I haven't thought of
in years. For example, from the 1960's 'Some Velvet Morning'
came on the other day. Turns out that it's an old Nancy Sinatra tune,
written by and sung together with Lee Hazelwood. Having now read the
lyrics I can say that I heard them right and that I still don't know
what the heck the song was about.
Monday 14 February 2005
Monday - working. Keeping busy. Went out to the Thai Cafe for lunch with some friends.
The Onion has an amusing Valentine's Day article, purported to be Osama Bin Laden saying mean things about Valentine's day - and I quote:
"The teddy bear that holds the 'I love you' heart does not love you
at all," Bin Laden said. "It is an unliving, unholy thing filled only
with stuffing. Just as the Western infidel is not bestowed with the
blessings of Allah, so shall he go unloved by the false bear."
The release of the bin Laden tape is consistent with the al-Qaeda
leader's inclination to speak out before major American events, such as
the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
"Perhaps whoever told bin Laden about Valentine's Day exaggerated
its significance," departing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge
said. "Or, I don't know, maybe he was just itching to release another
tape."
In other news life imitates art as Reuters reports that the religious police in Saudi Arabia are trying to stamp out all signs of the holiday:
Valentine's Day (news - web sites), or the "Feast of Love" in Arabic, is
beyond the pale in a country where women must cover themselves
from head to toe in public and be accompanied by a male
guardian.
"For the last week, we've had no red in the shop," said
Ahmed, a flower shop manager. "You can't even have red cards."
Despite the prohibition, demand for the banned roses has
been strong and unofficial business was booming, Ahmed said.
"Wait 10 minutes," he told one customer as an assistant
slipped into the shadows to collect a bouquet of crimson
flowers. At 10 riyals ($2.70) each they were double the usual
price. "They would put us in prison for this," he smiled.
Love conquers all, I guess.
I got some cupcakes for Valentines, which is pretty cool:
Sunday 13 February
2005
Sunday - not a lot to say.
