February 2004 Archives
The Da Vinci Code is one of the most annoying books movie pitches I have ever read. The (stupendously flat) characters bore each other, themselves and the poor unfortunate readers to death with their endless expositioning. It's a sweet 'n' lo version of Foucault's Pendulum.
Dan Brown's writing reminds me of PG-13 fanfic and children's literature. The hero of the story, a poor man's Indiana Jones, is supposed to be a Harvard professor. He quotes from a copy of 'My First Symbology' with the depth of Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and runs around Paris with his very own Mary-Sue-type heroine encountering comic book villains left and right.
Whodunnit? By the end of the story I couldn't care less. Dan, seriously, if you want to write fanfic, at least make it a hard R and let your heroes shag already.
That'll teach me picking up a book with a cover that says "The Number One New York Times Bestseller".
From Dutch teletext :
"Iranian state radio claims Osama bin Laden has been arrested in Pakistan. Pakistani and American officials deny the news. They do say chances Bin Laden will be caught have increased.
Iranian radio bases its news on two sources. They claim Bin Laden has been in American hands "for some time" and that President Bush wants to announce the arrest shortly before the USA elections.
I think the photos in the previous post bear some resemblance (in mood / colouring) to Anton Corbijn's photoshoot with U2 in Berlin in 1991.
Holland woke up to find the world covered in a 20 cm blanket of snow. I shuffled and slipped and hopped on a metro for a reasonably easy trip to Duivendrecht, only to find the trains indefinitely delayed.
45 minutes later and no sign of normal schedules resuming, mobile contact confirmed most of my colleagues similarly stranded.
For the next 24 hours, I am science's bitch. I am a guinea pig in a friend's friend's stress profile research.
I have 6 electrodes stuck to my body and wires that lead to a device I carry on my hip. A second device sits on my table, it has a switch and a mouth piece that I get to blow in whenever a piece of Palm pilot software tells me to.
When I go to sleep tonight, I will do so with plastic tubes up my nose, attached to a third device which will measure the gasses I emit while breathing.
Every hour and a half, the Palm pilot guides me through a routine and asks me questions. ("Who are you with?", "How do you feel", "Where are you?") From time to time, I will have to chew on tampon sized piece of cotton wool.
Tomorrow, I get to carry all the gear into work with me.
... are essentially naked.
Apologies if you were served a peek up the skirts of prolific.org earlier today. I was toying with Textpattern's Gamma release in the root of my account and its .htaccess file affected all the underlying domains. Brrr. And duh. Needless to say, when moved to a more appropriate spot, Textpattern works very nicely indeed.
It's just that 'root' thing in the installation instructions. Ignore it and install in a subdirectory of your choice. (Though this might cause some path problems, as I'm experiencing now. fixed.)
Nothing much to see there, but I'm testing Textpattern at log.nu/tp. There's no documentation yet, so don't install if you're even lazier than I am.
{ My house, back view, click to enlarge and embarrass. }
They've torn down the long abandoned buildings behind my house. For weeks I have woken up to the rumbling of heavy machinery. The pictures on my wall hang crooked and I've felt the building shudder on its foundations through forces akin to minor earthquakes.
Now most of the buildings are gone, the ground is levelled and my kitchen's got more natural light than before. From the street we now have a clear view of my house in all its questionable glory.
While the woodwork of my balcony isn't much worse than that of the houses next to mine, it sticks out against those of my upstairs and downstairs neighbours who have recently renovated -- something we had all agreed on doing before summer 2004 (for legal reasons).
The pictures I'm putting up here are to shame me into taking action.
In an effort to fully enjoy what may well be the last few hours of the Buffyverse, I'm going spoiler free for Angel. (Sorry, Simon, you're on your own at the Wh'esque.) I only vaguely knew the plot of last night's funny and creepy 'Smile Time' (S5x14, hey wanna see some pretty pics?), which made it just so much more... well, funny. And creepy. The teaser alone had me gasping.
In other TV commentary, a big big 'heeeee' for the poster at TWOP who coined 'Ambercrombie and Bitch' for this season's May/December 'ship between The O.C.'s Luke and Auntie Julie. And does anyone really care about what happens to Ryan and Melissa? I think not. It's all about the Cohens.
And also: bye bye Oliver. Good riddance.
Remember our FUN "pizzamat"? The one that promised but did not deliver?
Well, here it is. After weeks of 'does it, does it not dispense the goods' one of our colleagues has finally coaxed a 'Verdura' from the hellish machine.
The verdict: "Hmm, yeah, edible."
I am looking for a copy of Hal Willner's Amarcord Nino Rota. I found one copy online that was a little pricey. If you have a copy, perhaps we can discuss a trade...
Why I should watch two films starring Nicole Kidman on the weekend when I have never felt any emotion watching her perform other than 'meh', I don't know, but I did.
Cold Mountain. Nothing more than airport novel drivel -- like Bridges of Madison bloody County. But beautifully filmed. Interesting cast of supporting actors (and thankfully no Meryl Streep) but I never felt more than a faint echo of passion between the two leads and certainly no reason why they should pine for each other as much as they do. As for Jude Law, eyes like a British Udo Kier, head shaped like a Roman bust. Brooding, distant, untouchable. Certainly a better face to see on the big screen than the wet blanket blandness of the Cruises and the Pitts.
I didn't watch Lars von Trier's Dogville, I had it on in the background. One step up from the so very annoying The Idiots. (I never saw Dancer in the Dark) Fascinating, a candidate for a longer, more concentrated viewing. I liked the one scene between kid and Kidman -- the innocence of children's always been overrated, how refreshing to see one evil adult in the making.
Valentine, pah! I'm not buying into that crap, blah blah blah commercial-cakes, yada yada yada...
Still... when you are busy trying to find out how your phone works and it rings and you somehow manage to answer the call and the first words coming from your brand new phone are: "Happy Valentine's Day!" it's kind of sweet.
Ahem.
I was skeptical about Friendster from my very first invitation on the day it launched. I joined kicking and screaming and never did anything with it. Friendster and its clones seemed primarily dating sites to me. I am not comfortable (in real life and online) in social environments. Making small talk online is as hard for me as it is off line so I wouldn't naturally join any site of its kind. I opted out of Orkut.
But Flickr's a little different. I joined despite its somewhat unfortunate name (especially in Dutch) because I "trust" the people behind it. Though Ludicorp's GNE wasn't my thing, it was extremely slick. It made Flickr worth checking out.
Now I've seen the light.
First of all, Flickr looks all kinds of sexy, runs smoothly (a few beta hiccups here and there) and so far it's been very easy to find my way around. It did take me a while to figure out there was more to it than the Groups and userpages and how to launch Flickr proper. I guess the huge pink button escaped my view...
I soon caught on that Flickr is useful outside the dreaded 'networking' area. I still have problems with the whole 'friends' issue. ("One or two e-mails and a night on IRC don't make you my friend.") This may wholly be a cultural difference, as others have noted. Fortunately there's an 'acquaintance' designation in Flickr. But it is Flickr's image sharing tools in combination with chat and IM that could be very useful to communities like the one we have at U2log.com.
Next year, U2 will start touring again. (U2 fans, don't laugh -- let's just hope they will.) Flickr will make it very easy (think 'effortless') for fans to share their photos immediately after and during the shows (using mobile phones and Flickr's 'upload by e-mail' service ) in the chat and IM environments.
Using Flickr this way can be quite useful to me, current author of "U2 Live: A Concert Documentary". I could verify events taking place at concerts. Fans will be able to tell me their stories and illustrate them at the same time. All this makes my information gathering for the book a lot easier.
I've set up a U2logTalk group at Flickr.com -- hopefully the U2log.com readership will 'get it' and join. I'm not saying it will all happen the way I dreamed it up, but it might.
'Course they'll all start discussing B's hair, rather than provide me with essential concert details...
There's a new browser in town. Actually, there isn't. This is Firebird, now Firefox. You can read about its rebranding at Hickdesign.co.uk and at BenGoodger.com.
This is part of my Amazon wishlist, imported using the MTAmazon plug-in. Just playing around with it, mind, I haven't thought of a useful implementation on this site yet - though I can see its value on a site like U2log.com (see below wishlist). Something for that site's impending redesign.
Example of U2 shop:
Price:
Last updated:
Readers won't notice this much, though comments should run a little better, but I finally managed to shift all the entries into a new installation of MT, this time with a MySQL database.
I had tried an upgrade a few times before, but there were too many entries and the process would be killed before all the entries converted. So I did an export, and removed all the 1999-2001 entries (which I'll later add in a separate weblog). I did a fresh install of MT and everything's running smoothly now - posting is quicker, though the category archives still slow things down enormously. I hope that is something that is seen to in MT 3.0.
... all finished just in time for the MetaFilter meet in Amsterdam.
temporarily added for blogstreet registration:
Top 3 questions and assumptions that tick me off.
- Why did you go see that band twice (thrice, etc) on their tour?
- Why do you write your book (in English)?
- Why do you have a website/write a weblog?
(All the gigs are the same, aren't they?)
(I can't write (in English), why should anyone else?)
(I couldn't do it, so it must be nonsense.)
I used to have a standard reply to this kind of thing: "Because I can." I can't even be bothered with that anymore. Now it's just steely look and a shrug and the hope the conversation ends. Not one of my more charming traits.
(See also: 'Why don't you go to Indonesia? (I went and loved it, so must you.) and 'Why don't you believe in God?' (I'm so bloody happy, you can be too.') )
I've looked at URL rewriting before and managed to implement something extremely dull (a very simple forward), but I can't really get my head around anything more complicated.
What I want to do is make sure that
http://prolific.org/?/archive/yyyy/mm/dd/title_of_article.html
gets forwarded to
http://prolific.org/archive/yyyy/mm/dd/title_of_article.html
Which probably isn't complicated at all. Except to me.
Tips?
I think back longingly to the time when this 'Valentine's Day' madness hadn't yet reached our European shores. When it was something odd you read about in Peanuts comic strips. That was back in the day when we thought sky scrapers meant 'progress' and you'd have to order baseball caps and linnen All-Stars from rich relatives who travelled on aeroplanes.
At least we've got (the-soon-to-be-married-but-probably-not-smug) Meg's VD cards now.
{"out of service")
We all chipped in to test the Pizzamat this afternoon and were very disappointed to find our new machine still hasn't been switched on. Yet somehow the 'tonno' sold out.
Our company installed a 'Pizzamat': a pizza vending machine. "The machine also dispenses the product frozen."
( ... )
I don't know how we survived without it.
Pivot 1.0 Final is out.
Pivot is a php weblog tool which is popular among Dutch webloggers (and beyond) because it's made in Holland. And because it's good.
I've toyed with it in the past (the last version I installed and worked with was 0.12.) It was still buggy then, but super fast and felt very powerful. I went with MT because development on that tool seemed to pick up a little faster.
This final version has evolved quite a bit. Check the screenshots -- it's a smooth looking app. The image upload function is especially nifty, as well as an optional wysiwyg editor.
I wish I had some kind of site lined up for it, but I don't have any plans right now. Maybe you do. (I'd wait for 1.1 though.)