A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
February 28
Went to see the Killers tonight, supported by Black Rebel
Motorcycle Club. BMRC were a bit monotonous, sort of Placebo/Jesus
and Mary Chain/The Mission without the excitement and variety. The
Killers were excellent, aside from one song where they had a drum
loop turned up WAY too loud (and not in the "if it's too loud
you're too old" sense; the kid standing in front of me had
his fingers in his ears). Brandon Flowers is quite the talented
individual, singing, nipping back from the front of the stage to
play keyboard, and even throwing in some bass on one of their
final songs. And the guitarist has VEGAS written all over him:
silver puffy shirt, black leather trousers, and hair that Brian
May would've been jealous of, coupled with a penchant for making
rock'n'roll faces at the crowd.
February 27
The vodafone picture album maybe isn't working again. Or maybe
there's a limit of one cat picture per week or something.
Playing with libnw some more. I can't quite figure out what's
going on here just yet, so I'm waiting for some sample files to
turn up. Not having the hardware is a real pain, but I'm not
expecting a v2 device to magically appear on my doorstep,
really.
February 26
Got home kinda late from the office and wasn't really in the
mood for doing anything of note. I appear to have another
interested party who owns a v2 Sony device, mind you.
February 25
Started watching Ellie Parker and abandoned it
about half an hour in as it became obvious it wasn't getting any
better. I'll watch the rest of it, but really it just seems like a
waste of time and effort... I have no idea why I rented this. I
suspect it was on the strength of an interview with Naomi Watts,
as I can't see any way in which you could cut a trailer from this
that would entice me to rent it.
We resorted instead to watching Inside Man, which was a far better
movie (although the whole war crimes link seemed a little clunky)
and well made. One to watch.
After all that it was time to drive back to Dublin, where I'm
catching up on spam, etc. for the weekend. It appears my
vodafone-to-flickr hack started working again, so I can once more
send out-of-focus pictures of beer, cats, etc. direct from
wherever I find them. Whee!
February 24
RUGBY DAY! Ok, so I missed the first match in which Italy got
their first ever away win, Scotland being the victims; the big
match of the day, though, was Ireland v. England at Croke
Park. Ireland won. Resoundingly so, in fact. England's much-feared
kicker was basically never given a chance to shine, while Ronan
O'Gara scored from every single kick. And there was one astounding
try which showed that not only have the Irish finally learned to
play across the width of the field, they've learned to do so
quickly and with style.
After that, it was a bit disappointing to see France dismantle
Wales, but we cheered the Welsh efforts anyway.
Wound up the evening by going to see The Good Shepherd at the
cinema, which I think probably deserves the tag, "The
Godfather of CIA movies", although I did have some trouble in
places following who was who - probably not least because of my
earlier rugby-related celebrations!
Back at the house, we caught the tail end of Jack which was full of heavy dialogue,
sort of like a Kevin Smith movie without the toilet humour; after
that we watched Higher Love, which on paper I
wouldn't have looked twice at but turns out to be funny and
touching and generally really enjoyable.
February 23
Made a few more half-hearted attempts to persuade the laptop
battery that it's not dead. It doesn't respond to anything,
unfortunately, so I suspect it's destined for the nearest battery
recycling wossname. Bah.
Off to Ballina for the weekend, partly to instruct Sheila in the
fine art of Doing Nothing. Of course, what better movie to watch
for such a plan than Jay And Silent Bob
Strike Back? It's not the first Kevin Smith flick to be shown
on Irish TV, but it's certainly not the type of thing you'd have
expected from RTÉ maybe fifteen years
ago... BUNG!
After that we watched Autumn In New York, which I
thought was well-done if schmalzty, while Sheila scoffed at it
simply because it had Richard Gere. I wouldn't call it a
must-watch, but I've seen a whole lot worse. On the other hand,
there was a bottle or two of wine in the room so perhaps my
judgement wasn't the best...
Ten Little Indians mostly
amused me on account of the presence of Fabian, who I'd only
previously seen referenced in Mad Magazine. I started falling
asleep around about the second murder, so I didn't see the rest of
the movie.
February 22
Another pub evening... The Porterhouse really needs to get rid
of that show-off with the guitar. At least he didn't turn up until
quite late.
February 21
Office drinks superceded anything else that was liable to
happen, such as productive geekiness, etc.
February 20
More small steps on libnw. It helps if you read the data from
the correct filehandle... I have notes here on how some of the
indexing works, but I'm not sure I actually understand
them. D'oh.
February 19
Stopped in at Lou's place, as she's a bit sickly at present.
More fiddling about with the libnw stuff, including relocating
some extra info on the file formats someone mailed me last
year. I'm still kinda flying blind on how the folders are stored,
however.
February 18
What's Eating Gilbert
Grape? has been on my one-to-watch list for a long time, but
ScreenClick only recently acquired a copy. It's an odd movie; the
pacing is a bit weird, and as Johnny Depp's character says at the
start, nothing much ever happens. And still there's a story
there somehow. It's worth watching if only to see DiCaprio's
performance.
Messed around with the libnw code a bit. Someone expressed an
interest in helping out with test files and such a few weeks back,
but appears to have vanished in the interim.
February 17
As I guessed, the battery in the laptop appears to be
dead. Unfortunately I found this out by accidentally yanking out
the power connector while doing something else, rather than
through careful examination. Bah.
I think Syriana is best summed up by some of
Clooney's dialogue near the start: "it's
complicated". I'm not sure I followed the entire thing, to be
honest. Harsh, but watchable.
Saw a ripping blues band tonight; the harmonica player must've
been made entirely of lungs. Titanium lungs. Astounding
stuff.
February 16
Met up with Cathal for brewskis and chat.
February 15
Took a day off work and wandered around music shops looking at
guitars. My current electric is over 15 years old and frankly was
what I could afford 15 years ago as opposed to a finely-crafted
piece of hardware. I'm due a little cash windfall shortly thanks
to our Government's long-term savings incentive, so I'm thinking
this is as good a time as any to shop.
February 14
Met up with Stella for a beer, much to my surprise; turns out
she'd done the Valentine's Day stuff yesterday.
Fiddling around with exiftool to try and marshall some photos into
order, now that I've got two sources of pictures which reliably
datestamp images internally - well, as long as their clocks are
set.
February 13
Pointless and all as it might seem to parody Pop Idol and its
ilk, American Dreamz is actually
quite a clever movie, especially with the not-so-subtle digs at
the Bush/Cheney dynamic. Although I don't for an instant believe
that bit about reading the newspapers could possibly
happen...
February 12
Note to self: when you decide at the last minute to change which
case you're using to bring stuff to the office, don't forget to
move all the bits from container A to container
B. Grr.
February 11
Well, the historic rugby match at Croke Park turned out to be a
defeat for the Irish team; no Grand Slam for us this year. Just
the Triple Crown and the Championship (in which we're currently
placed third) up for grabs, now.
Dad recommended The World's Fastest
Indian to me, as he'd seen it on a trip down under. The story
is a bit "local country bumpkin visits city slickers, does
good", but for all that it's a hard movie to watch without
smiling at some point - or several points. Well made, and worth
seeing.
Also on today's viewing: watched most of Stargate (not bad, saw it in the
cinema when it was released, and back then the actual gate
sequence was pretty kick-ass) and the end of Die Hard 3 (nice
mindless fun, although not for all the family!)
February 10
Fixed up most of the aforementioned screenscraping
doohickey. Nothing to see here, move along.
Paramount Comedy was showing Top Secret!, one of the first
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies I ever saw. It's still plenty funny,
23 years later...
February 9
At some point during the week I fixed (I think) the stupid MTU
problem caused by my insane 3com router, which means it should now
be possible to access my website from tunnelled things like VPN
connections and what not. Of course, there's no guarantee that
this actually works, just that it seems to be okay with
my sample set of One Machine On A Tunnel.
Had a quiet night at home, on account of being on-call for the
weekend. Well, that and having been out for most of this week
already...
February 8
Ruadhrí's turn on the WAIDER CARNIVALE. He recently said,
"I've heard that Brazil is planning on coming to you for
Carnivale this year." Cheeky!
February 7
One of those "how about I stop by your office after
work"-becomes-"how about we hit up a pub for one of the
best pints in Dublin" evenings with Lou. And that was
after my irregular-but-regular Wednesday evening beer
with Stella.
February 6
One of the many sites I've written scrapers for has changed its
layout, and done so non-trivially, which breaks some scripts I'd
thrown together to "add value" as they say in all the
best marketing brochures... guess I'll need to redo those.
When Brendan Met Trudy
is a fabulous piece of work. You might be a bit lost in the
various accents (the female lead has a brutal Cork accent, for
example) if you're not Irish, but hey. There're subtitles which
are mostly accurate. The riffing off other movies is excellently
done (particularly Au Bout De Souffle), and there are a couple of
laugh-out-loud background gags, too (check the cinema signs on The
Savoy when they're leaving the theatre, for example). One to
BUY.
February 5
Back in d'auld sod. Laptop is fine, albeit I think I've roached
another battery - right now it's claiming it's charged up but I'm
pretty sure it's not, and I'm not going to test it by yanking the
power just yet...
February 4
Ireland mostly trounced Wales, with a few scary moments and
Ronan O'Gara having one of the worst kicking games I've seen in
quite a while.
February 3
Six Nations Rugby 2007: England do a stompy-dance on Scotland,
much to our disappointment. The funny part was that we were in an
English bar, and we and several others cheered Scotland's try
(first of the game) loudly, but when England scored a try some
time later there wasn't a peep.
And France stomped on Italy, much to noone's surprise.
February 2
JC and Anita get married. Waider's laptop, on the other hand,
refuses to switch on. I'm assuming these events are
unrelated.
February 1
Doing my usual crash-style development on the NW lib, trying to
get it to a point where there are visible results even if the code
is awful (and it is). For some reason my sloppily-coded yet simple
fread() wrapper is corrupting more data than I
expected... of course, I'm coding on a plane. The altitude is
probably upsetting my hacking genes or something.