Fragments

Haven't been blogging in awhile. I've been busy. Looking forward to another 4-day weekend, one day of which is already mostly gone.

My cable company was bought out by Time Warner. They neglected to mention that they'd be renumbering my IP space. Fortunately, rebooting my router brought Internet connectivity back online and the necessary DNS changes propagated within a few hours. Unfortunately, I was so busy as work that my home network was down for about 13 or 14 hours. I'm still getting backlogged messages delivered to me.

Watched Deep Red today. It amazes me that this Italian horror/murder mystery offering was so cutting edge that audiences didn't see the ending coming a mile away. These days, movies like Scream have already become so metaintelligent that the new frontier in American horror is just increasingly elaborate torture porn. Evidenced by films like Hostel and the Saw series, we don't really get any real suspense anymore, it's just "Look, that lady is in serious jeopardy because someone stitched a live cougar onto her ribcage." I was hoping for more to the plot of Deep Red, as it came highly recommended because of the first scene, but I don't feel it was as good in retrospect as it may have been when it was first made.

Jess was kind enough to lend me two Transmetropolitan trades. I have no idea when I will have the time to read them.

Erica is on the road right now headed for home. She'll be doing about 12 hours of driving in the next four days going to our respective houses of our youths. I'm on-call on Christmas Eve, which kind of puts a sucktastic kink in our holiday plans. (Update: After I wrote this, but just before I published this entry, Erica called me to let me know she's home safely.)

I don't recommend drinking bourbon at 10:30 in the morning.

If there's one thing that's tons of fun and a total pain in the ass, it's pushing bubble wrap through a shredder. Fun noises for three seconds, forty-five minutes of disassembling my new shredder to pull the plastic off of the blades. Totally not worth it.

Body of Evidence marathon on CourtTV? I'll allow it.

My new favorite show for the next 15 hours is probably Identity, where Penn Jillette compels no-names into randomly associating 12 strangers with vague descriptors like "guitarist", "eats fire", "has five kids", or "is Jerry Mathers from Leave it to Beaver". A favorite moment from this game show is when an FBI behavioral expert points at an attractive woman in a blue bikini and says "I'm just going to guess on this one, but I'd say she's the one who's the virgin". The woman just rolled her eyes, failed to resist subtly shaking her head, and tried very hard not to start laughing.

up2date is no substitute for not writing amazingly excellent code in the first place.

I'd like to start playing with ReiserFS 4, and not because it was developed by a man who allegedly murdered his wife, but because Hans is selling the company to finance his "I didn't kill my wife" defense, and the code could go just about anywhere. I liked what I saw of ReiserFS 3, even if SuSE is jumping ship and moving to ext3. I'd like to have the holy trinity of "speed, flexibility, and reliability", and I'd like it to work by default on my root partition. Preferably during the installation of the OS.

Tomorrow consists of: being on-call, dishes, laundry, wrapping presents, packing for PA. I have a feeling this is going to be as quick a four-day weekend as the Thanksgiving I spent with Erica's family.