Imperial cost cutting is what killed the Empire, not some whiny Jedi….
Year: 2005
Virginia Ave.
Despite catching up with wonderful Dayna Manning tonight, it’s been a very Tom Waits sort of evening.
I have a bad feeling about this
Perhaps I’ve forgotten just how bad Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2 were, but for my money Revenge of the Sith is the worst of them all. Wooden acting, incredibly terrible dialog (even for a Star Wars movie), inexplicable plot events (it’s impossible to refer to them as developments)… they’re all there, in spades. For me, one line sums the whole second trilogy up: How does this keep on happening? We’re smarter than this!
Hey, Alex!
Dayna is coming back to London on the 27th… as Stimpy might say, Joy!
Weird 304s
WordPress seems to be returning 304 Not Modified for my feeds even when it should be sending the content. Weird.
It seems to have something to do with not having posted for several days. It’s not really WordPress bug 1275, since after creating this post the feeds work again, but that’s the closest I’ve found so far. (And by the way, requiring cookies just to do searches sucks.)
Portrait
Lenni times ten
From the beginning of February through the end of April, I had the pleasure of attending ten—count ’em, ten!—Sunday evening performances by the captivating Miss Lenni Jabour, four of which also featured the extraordinary Miss Alex McMaster on cello, vocals and glockenspiel. Know what? Life is gooood.
Buffy
On Monday evening I went to the Aeolian Hall to see Buffy Sainte-Marie. I was surprised to discover earlier in the day that people at work had never heard of her: those of similar age I figured would at least be familiar with Universal Soldier and Starwalker, and the youngsters for her six-year stint on Sesame Street. Oh well… confirms again that my musical tastes are substantially different from just about everyone else I know, and in the end it didn’t affect the amount of fun I had at Buffy’s show one iota.
Other stuff
As well as working on what I’ve started calling REx I’ve been messing around with syndication, both in Atom and iCalendar forms.
Not quite satisfied with Dave Jacoby’s RSS feed for Roger Ebert’s movie reviews, I decided to roll my own that also includes the summaries from the website. It’s the first thing I’ve written from scratch in Python—that is, with the help of Steve Jenson’s atomfeed.py and the built-in SGML, URL and regex libraries—and while it’s not pretty, it suits my purposes. If I thought it would be anything less than extremely fragile (mainly due to the wonky markup on Ebert’s site than anything inherent in the code) I’d probably post it… still might so people can point and laugh.
Also took some time on the weekend to write an iCalendar translator for Allison Brown’s performance calendar. It’s a simple little bit of Perl but took a lot longer to write than it probably should have; the RFC isn’t the easiest thing to read and there doesn’t appear to be a validator anywhere. The converted file appears to work in Mozilla Calendar, though, and that’s good enough for me.
Finally, I’m considering converting the Sirens’ tour calendar to hCalendar format. I’d probably still generate the RSS and iCal feeds, since the XSLT is there already, but I’d love to deprecate them in favour of a single human- and machine-readable page.
REx as a microformat
The robot exclusion microformat is still on its way; a large part remains in point-form notes and there’s a long (and growing!) inline example that I think needs to be split out to its own page to be effective. Stay tuned.