Blog

verily, so says this tidbit on yahoo news via i forget who…

heros of mine, they are…
so, i thought of the link in our little orrl thing…

the writings of Penn Jillette
(yes, the big one of Penn & Teller)
Philosopher Warrior Extraordinaire… from his articles for PC-Computing, dating back to 1990, his Excite articles of the late 90’s, plenty of various writings, articles, columns, on a wide variety of subjects, and his wonderful “Road Penn” journal, beginning in april, 2000 and continuing to this day… also has interviews, chat scripts, and more….
jan30,03 – they lost their domain name, so, for now, this link goes to the wayback machine’s archive of the page…

and it still does as their new site seems to no longer have their writings…
(btw, the most recent link there on web archive is to a copy made AFTER a porn site got their domain name, so, go for second most recent or older…)

one of my favorites, of course, is one he did in ’92, i believe, for pc computing, called “We’re All Going to Hell”…

ok, i was wrong…
his writings ARE on the new site…
well, good…

Vinyl Data [via BoingBoing]

“One strategy that major record companies have been employing lately to deter downloading is adding bonus computer content to new CD releases. I recently discovered that this technique is not unique to CD’s, but had in fact been practiced in the vinyl era as well. That’s right: there were a handful of records released in the late 70’s and early 80’s that contained computer programs as part of the audio. This is totally insane, and totally great.”

alas, no mention of the TI-99/4A…

[moved from my LiveJournal]

well, here is Premiere.com’s idea of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time (via Fark)

though, i found fark’s comments thread about this article to be a much better read, with many more suggestions i agree with than premiere’s…

(btw, both fark links above go to the “Avantgo” versions, which is a very nice lite alternative…)

[moved from my LiveJournal]

firstly, i finally got Opera to work out… it is very nice is some ways, very awful in others… but, it lets me do some things i could not before, so, i see keeping it handy for some jobs…

for one, i can finally log in to yahoo groups…
hell, i can’t even go to yahoo groups on the default browser…
so, here is dcbg…

on the next two, a couple shots i posted before, comparing opera to “Web”, the default psion browser…

my livejournal…

and what it looks like on the default browser…

our homepage…

(btw, this is already out of date, we are about to put version 3 of our hp online, as soon as we are done with it…)

and on the default browser…

and a couple shots of apps i have been trying lately…

here is nIRC…

it is nice, but, very prone to frequent crashes, so, it is almost unusable…

and here is a “planetarium-in-your-pocket” i got…

and the same thing in inverse mode…

these have all been added to our screengrabs collection…

[moved from my LiveJournal]

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Space Channel 5 Remix Soundtrack

i read this one long, long ago and tought it was perfect, and i was relating it to the folks a little while back, so, just had to get the full text for any and all to see…

stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Ed finally decides to take a vacation. He books himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeds to have the time of his life –until the boat sank. He found himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies…nothing… only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to him. In disbelief, he asks her, “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”

“I rowed from the other side of the island,” she says. “I landed here when my cruise ship sank.”

“Amazing,’ he says. “You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you.”

“Oh, this?’ replies the woman. “I made the rowboat out of raw material I found on the island. The oars were whittled from gum tree branches. I wove the bottom from palm branches. And the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree.”

“But, but, that’s impossible,’ stutters Ed. “You had no tools or hardware. How did you manage?”

“Oh, that was no problem,” replies the woman. “On the south side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware.” Ed is stunned. “Let’s row over to my place,” she says.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As Ed looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, he could only stare ahead, dumb struck. As they walk into the house, she says casually, “It’s not much, but I call it home. Sit down please. Would you like to have a drink?”

“No, no, thank you.’ he says, still dazed. “Can’t take any more coconut juice.” “It’s not coconut juice,” the woman replies. “How about a Pina Colada?”

Trying to hide his continued amazement, he accepts, and they sit down on her couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces,
“I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom.”

No longer questioning anything, Ed goes into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet, is a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge are fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. “Wow! This woman is amazing!” he muses, “What next?”

When he returns, she greets him wearing nothing but vines, strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her.
“Tell me,” she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, “We’ve been out here for a really long time. You’ve been lonely. There’s something I’m sure you really feel like doing right now, something you’ve been longing for all these months. You know…” She stares into his eyes.

He can’t believe what he’s hearing:
“You mean—“, he swallows excitedly, “I can check my email?!”

[moved from my LiveJournal]

CHUD.com (Cinematic Happenings Under Development) brings us 100 Movies That Deserve More Love and there are some interesting ones…
we own several of them and i agree with much of what they say… most of them are not on “the shelf” (eg, our shelf o’ favorite movies), but, here is what we have from the list and lots of comments…

5. In The Mouth of Madness
dunno’… haven’t been too fond of john carpenter, but, we came across a very cool-looking special edition laserdisc, so, we got it and haven’t watched it…

7. The Arrival
meh… saw it once on cable, it didn’t suck TOO bad, saw it on laser for $4 and took it… haven’t watched it yet, either…

8. Time After Time
hey, nicholas myer… as much as i love The Wrath of Khan (and the commentary by nick myer) and what he did for star trek as a whole, i will own any of his stuff… this one is a staple of my childhood, seen it dozens of times, we watched it recently so she could see it and i was not as impressed, but we had just watched the entire back to the future trilogy, so, we continued the time-travel theme…

10. Gattaca
love it… it IS on our shelf… may get the superbit dvd eventually, but, the beautiful ld is fine for now…

15. Space Truckers
no, don’t own it, but, i wanted to point out that this movie has a billboard for a Psion 3 in it!

17. Contact
philosophically hollow (dumb, one might say), but, a great movie… one of the best looking laserdiscs ever, we have the dvd with all the commentaries on it, but, prefer the ld, which IS on the shelf…

19. Frequency
what a movie! we have the dvd… we rented this, can’t remember why, and loved almost every minute of it… another great time-related sci-fi… if we had the lasrdisc, it would be on the shelf…
(anyone else notice the movie divided into three parts, each with slo-mo shot of an object falling?)

20. Alien 3
own it, somewhere over there in “the pile” (the 300 or so laserdiscs that are not worthy of being on “the shelf”), watched it once, may never again… not horrible, but, in no hurry to see it again…

41. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
ugh… a few cool things, sure, but, it is only on the shelf to not break up the set… either of the other two are far superior…

48. LA Story
love this movie, love this movie, love this movie… as a romantic love story, it really works… the walk through the garden thingy, the way she is stopped from leaving… and, yeah, if you lived in l.a., you get a lot more of the jokes… personally, i come for the romance stuff… never got the laser, we have the dvd for the commentary… and i agree with what they say in the article, it is sort of the last of “classic martin”…

56. The Money Pit
don’t own it (grrrr), but, undoubtedly in need of more love… another from my childhood, seen it literally hundreds of times… not as many times as CE3K, star wars, or 2010, but, a lot…

65. The Mosquito Coast
oh, what a movie… it IS on the shelf… you want so bad for this guy to be right, you believe in him and his put-what-you-believe-into-practice determination and energy, yet, we watch him become obsessive and do one dumb thing after another, applying good ideas in bad ways… for this movie i say see also fight club…
(and, of course, river pheonix plays son of harrison ford and later plays a young indy in last crusade… i think he was perfect in both roles…)

66. Ed Wood
another great… also on the shelf… they call it “Tim Burton’s love poem to a kindred spirit” and i agree… not laugh-out-loud funny not, mind-bendingly weird, just being told about a person that another person admires… and, who would have thought martin landau could do such an acting job? same thing i say of jason robards in Magnolia (currently my favorite film i have ever seen)…

71. Jackie Brown
well, we have a great laser of it (in the pile, not on the shelf with reservoir dogs and our FOUR ld sets of pulp fiction)… and A LOT of it really works… but… a lot of it does not work… like ed wood, we are being shown what a great person the title character is, but, i just don’t see it… take the title character out and i will love this movie, i think…

75. Clean and Sober
got it, in the pile, never watched it, but, all for any addiciton movie, so, we will get to it sooner or later…

78. Point Break
in the pile… jumping “out of a perfectly good airplane”, the skydiving photography, patrick swayze actually doing some impressive freefall stuff, keanu jumping out without a parachute, confident he will get his man or die trying… all reminds me of that tbs series “movies for guys who like movies”… take out the skydiving and i doubt i would care much about this one…

82. Testament
HELL YEAH! embarassingly, all we own is the vhs and i have no idea where it went… when we heard a lot about Requiem For a Dream, everyone said it left them depressed, or at least strongly affected, for weeks afterword…
hogwash!
Testament will leave you affected for weeks, maybe forever… what a depressing movie… and i agree with every word they say about it in the article…
i showed this movie to quite a long time ago and she has never quite forgiven me… she still tears up just talking about it…

93. Pump Up the Volume
eek… in the pile… she wanted it…
but, it is allegedly about radio and i am a radio addict, so, maybe i will like something about it, should i ever watch it… but, i doubt it…
and i can’t stand christian slater… he was the worst thing about true romance, for instance…

97. A Life Less Ordinary
damn, don’t own it, but, i really want to see it…

98. The Hudsucker Proxy
damn right! got a beautiful laser of it on the shelf… love this movie, more brilliant coen stuff…

99. Breakdown
on the pile… want to see it… will eventually…

and, btw, i noticed that, mostly, if it is not listed above, we have not even seen it (not even me!), so, we may have a look at a few…

i am not going to spend much time thinking about it for this post, but, if i were to add to the list of movies that need more love…

Friday
i hate to admit it in public without hours to justify and debate it…
firstly, i like any movie that starts at the beginning of a day and ends at the end of a day (cf. Oscar and Murder by Death), but, i think there were great characters in this movie… it is all about the characters in this one… when ice cube pulls that trigger, ANYONE with a heart should have cringed… and, in that moment, realize that you actually CARE about these people… maybe you weren’t enjoying the movie, but, you found you CARED more than you realized…
no, not a great movie, but, the characters are very memorable and mostly easy to believe in and therefore care about…
bleh, anyway… just flame me and get it over with…

The Stand
yes, the made-for-tv mini-series of the stephen king book… i thought the casting was nearly brilliant, the pacing was pretty damn good, considering the length of the source material (the “don’t dream it’s over” scene came way too early in the movie), i just love this movie… we have the big ld set (with lobby cards) on the shelf, and the dvd…

Spaceship
sci-fi parody extraordinaire…

and i have to add…

Star Wars, Episode II, Attack of the Clones
all you up-with-ep1-and-down-with-ep2 people are messed up in the head or something… (or are too young to know good star wars from bad…) and i cannot believe how many people hated hayden whatsizname as anakin!
watch the “i killed them! i killed them all!” scene a few times and tell me he can’t act!
watch the scene where anakin describes his idea for government and the last scene with the empire now birthed and tell me this one isn’t better at foreshadowing the original trilogy than ep1!
(erm, just don’t watch the scene with r2d2 flying and c3po going for his wild ride… it was the low point of the movie…)
this is a noble movie and a worthy addition to “the holy trilogy” and i hope ep3 has more in common with it than with ep1 or return of the jedi, with all the comedy attempts and cutesy stuff…
this movie undoubtedly needs more love!
(now if only there was a laserdisc of it to go alongside the ep1 laser!)

meh, if i try to think of any more, i will be over there, looking through titles and i will come up with 20 of ’em, so, i will leave it at that…

[moved from my LiveJournal]

well, most of the stuff has been situated, a few things still need to be tackled and then the decorating… this place is so big, we seem to not have enough stuff to fill it… last night, we put up the movie posters, but, i took a few pics before we did that to show the layout of the living room…

check out the pics…

we are going with all of it sort of wrapping around the room… i also left about a foot and a half behind the shelves to have access to all the cables and such…

on the right is most of our laserdiscs and all our movie books… center is components, console software, and our favorite laserdiscs on the bottom shelf, like we had it before… the left is all other stuff, like dvd’s, movie soundtrack cd’s, some audio stuff like audiobooks and “audio theater” stuff, game magazines, and more… speaker stands on either side, subwoofer on the floor between the main center and the “various media shelf” over there…

so, the shelf with all the media and print stuff on it… it has two sides… from the back, it is the big collection of hand-labelled, hand-recorded stuff on vhs, like nasa tv, court tv, and audio-on-video stuff like art bell… we own almost no original vhs (yuck!), but, the couple things we have (like our freaks and geeks emmy submission tape) are on the front side of the shelf…

above the tv there are the ps2 games… in the background, you can see the other bookshelf (for non-media-related print stuff) and the beginnings of her new corner…

and finally, all our movie posters needing to go up… we found places for them all, but, that is another batch of pics… and we like to keep those photos subdirectories at 30 pics or so and /2004-march is around there, so, we will probably wait until the /2004-april subdir is started to post more…