Month: January 2007

The CBP returns!

Well, it appears to have disappeared from the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine, so I guess it’s time to trot out a little bit of history. My university buddy Bob Kapur (the very same) put together Bob’s Celebrity Body Parts Game back when the web was young. No clues, except to remember that this is a 1995-era quiz, so if you’re tempted to guess Lindsay Lohan for any of the pictures you’re wrong! Enjoy Bob’s hard work!

Children of Men

This afternoon was mostly taken up with a viewing of Children of Men. No spoilers here unless you’re really sensitive to things like knowing that it takes place in England. Some random impressions:

  • It’s one of the most realistic, and therefore effective, near-future representations I’ve seen; I read some of the headlines in the newspapers on the windows where Julian and Theo meet and I can absolutely envision them happening in the next twenty-odd years.
  • Jasper has a line of dialogue about a future-past event that I’m certain was the seed that started the whole storyline.
  • I was surprised twice at where Jasper’s story went, given one of the stories Julian told about Theo’s past and an event that was telegraphed as a red herring later on.

So was Children of Men any good? Clive Owen (Theo) was, definitely; Peter Mullan (Syd) and Michael Caine (Jasper) were entertaining; and although I was initially annoyed by Pam Ferris (Miriam) and Claire-Hope Ashitey (Kee) they grew on me and had me caring about what happened to their characters. And it’s a great concept; a somewhat familiar one, but turned on its head. But the last act left me cold. From the first scene, and for the rest of the first two-thirds of the movie, I was completely bought-in, yet somewhere around the bus ride I started to lose the vibe and by the end it seemed to just be going through the motions. (The soundtrack under the abrupt closing title card was a nice touch, though.)

A solid three stars out of four. Readers of Mr. Ebert’s will recognize the use of his scale, and should also remember his caveat about comparing artistic works using absolute numeric values.

‘Nuff said… or not?

I was surprised to find that neither the Wikiquote nor Wikipedia entries for Stan Lee credits him with what I consider to be his most famous quotation, ‘Nuff said! It seems to be almost exclusively associated with him by the population of the intarwebs, but that source has been wrong once or twice before. Is this one of the things I only think I know?

If only I knew someone who could confirm or deny for this True Believer….

The Greatest Canadian Inventi… huh?

I’m not one to complain—much—but I did have to laugh at part of CBC’s The Greatest Canadian Invention tonight. Coming in at number twelve was the Java programming language, invented by Alberta’s James Gosling. So what did all of the on-screen graphics show?

XML.

Most of it was fairly generic XML, although there was a sample that was at least Java-related: an Ant buildfile. And I guess it looks computer-y to have dense blocks of characters with lots of <s and >s thrown in. But really, come on.

That said, Tim Bray, co-editor of and a major contributor to the XML specification, is also Canadian, so at least that part was right.

What I did on my winter vacation

Winter may be stretching it—it was almost ten degrees today—but I’m not going to let that get in the way of a good post title.

  • Went to see Kristin and D. The evening started really well, thanks to two events that took place even before the music began, one involving Ms Sweetland and one a St. Thomasite. Kristin was great, when I could see and hear her, and played a new song that jumped into my list of tunes I’ll never manage to request. 😉 Glorious Enemy was as haunting as I’ve ever heard it. The crowd wasn’t there for music, though, and D’s set was interrupted several times, mainly by the rowdy bunch who were there to see the next performer.
  • Rebuilt my primary Linux box. I had most of the pieces to do so because I knew it had been acting funny, but didn’t realize until I’d installed it that the new motherboard needed a new power supply (when is ATX not ATX? when it’s EATX) and new video card (since it doesn’t support AGP).
  • Rewatched the first half of the first season of Slings and Arrows with my sister and brother-in-law. Rachel McAdams… sigh. 🙂
  • Celebrated Christmas with the whole newly-extended immediate family and my dad’s brothers and their families. Ate a ton, including turkey twice (three times if you count the turkey pie my mom sent home, which was yesterday’s dinner), spinach lasagna on Boxing Day (my main contribution, lunch for parents, siblings and spouses at my place), sushi (made by dad and me under my brother’s expert tutelage) and fajitas (my brother’s doing). Somehow my sister got out of cooking duties, which I guess is fair: she usually makes bread while she’s home, and pie crusts which my mom uses throughout the year.
  • Upgraded my Linux installation to 64-bit. I could have done this on the old P4 system but never thought of it. It was harder than I thought—though not too hard—and I’m not sure it’s bought me anything on a day-to-day basis, but it’s done.
  • Finally migrated the services and files from my old Linux box to the new one. While I can no longer claim I’m a four-computer, three-Linux-box geek, I have cut my energy consumption substantially by turning one off.
  • Spent an uncharacteristically large amount of money on a gift to myself, which won’t be here for an undetermined amount of time. We’ll see which gets here first, it or the thing that will make it useful.
  • Figured out how to get DAAP running between Rhythmbox and iTunes on the Mac. Well, almost. Turns out OSX is a willing client but not-so-willing server; thank you Apple for turning yet another decent idea into a piece of worthless proprietary garbage. Since I’m in a migrating/power-saving mood, I’m going to start getting everything off the Mac and shut it down too.
  • Enhanced the listing for Les Dangereuses on my fan site for Lenni Jabour & The Third Floor. The CD’s only been out for fourteen months, so it seemed about time! Now I just need to get to that long-promised/long-needed redesign which I promised a year and a half ago….
  • Watched Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. Even with the rough edges it’s a vastly superior movie to the theatrical release, aka the Lester cut. The most-appreciated change: Non, the mute, is actually a threatening character, with only a few seconds where he provides a tiny bit of comic relief. Makes you wonder what the series could have been.
  • Watched four of the six Rocky movies. That is, if you can call skipping through Rocky V (which it turns out I’d seen before) watching it. Know what? They’re not particularly good. In a way the Rocky series reminds me of the Star Wars series: the more recent ones make the earlier ones worse. (I’ve heard Rocky Balboa redeems the series a bit, but it’s not high on my list at the moment.)
  • Got myself back on Phase 1 of South Beach. I’ve spent more on groceries in the last week than the last month!
  • Configured SPF for this domain in what’s probably a futile attempt to prevent addresses from appearing to be sent by peterjanes.ca.

And it’s not over yet: I booked Tuesday off too, because I just can’t bring myself to give up all this fun!