A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
June 26
Wow. Sunshine.
More Mac Mini weirdness: after installing the latest software
updates, MySQL won't start, complaining about a mismatch between
the localisation files and the software. I'm not using MySQL at
the moment, but annoying, that.
June 25
Amazing Grace had only one thing
particularly wrong with it: the trailer made a big deal about the
song of the same name, but frankly, its presence and influence on
the story was negligible at best. It's a piece of history I wasn't
aware of, and (as is usual for me when presented with this sort of
stuff) I spent a good deal of time reading about it after the
movie. Historical inaccuracies were fairly minimal, and the
heavy-duty cast did an all-round excellent job. This is definitely
a piece of historical drama to watch.
June 24
This morning, the Mac Mini completely lost its network
configuration. Which meant I had to dig out the necessary cables
to hook it up to a TV and such so I could see what I was doing
as I reconfigured it.
The Green Hornet: ugh. One of
those movies that tries to be a comedy, an action movie, and a
vehicle for a flavour of the month performer (in this Seth Rogen)
which turns out to be a muddled, unfunny mess. I think Will
Ferrell is probably responsible for the popularity (?) of the
man-child character, wherein a grown man completely
unironically behaves as if he's a pouty teenager complete
with childish namecalling; what this is doing in a superhero
franchise I have no idea, never mind that it's the lead
role. In short, don't waste your time on this. It's two hours
and more that you'd be much better off spending, say,
asleep.
June 20
It's been years since I last watched Breakfast at
Tiffany's, and with it fresh in mind I'd rate it as watchable
but non-essential. I'm kinda curious about the novella it was
based on, too.
June 17
Dinner and a show. I feel all grown-up or something. Dinner was
at 101 Talbot, somewhere
I've been a few times in the past with previous work
colleagues. I'd booked through MenuPages but somehow between
the website and the restaurant they got the day wrong (the
confirmation from the website said the 17th, so I can only assume
a game of telephone was involved), but given it was early Friday
evening they had no trouble seating me. The food was excellent (in
my experience, it's never been less) and in particular the portion
sizes were huge. After that, we took off to the Abbey Theatre to see
Perve, an excellent play examining the way rumours get
out of hand. It's a spare perfomance; a bare stage with few props,
and a handful of actors and actresses, but it's extremely well
done both in scripting and delivery and well worth
seeing.
June 14
Apparently I last watched Bobby in 2007, although I have no
recollection of doing so, and worse still my opinion on the
footage at the end (where they're swapping between archive and
freshly-shot, pun unintended, footage) is completely opposite to
what it was then. However, I think the feeling I had this time was
that the whole thing lacks focus, which is bizarre given that it's
about one very specific event; I also thought that the Kennedy
speech that's played over the confusion at the end is wasted, as
there's so much going on that you can't really focus on what's
being said. Anyway, it's actually worth a look.
June 8
Heh. There's already an update for iTunes 10.3.
June 7
Shiny new Apple stuff is interesting, but the current preview of
Download Everything To Everything in iTunes is a bit... well,
let's put it this way. I "bought" (some were free) a
bunch of games, completed them or got bored with them, and deleted
them. I don't particularly want to see them again. And yet here is
iTunes offering to redownload the "missing" ones, which
isn't really useful. Perhaps there's a way to stop it from doing
this that I haven't yet found.
The Painted Veil is, I am
told, a chick flick, which may account for me not finding it
particularly my thing. It's very well made, and although I don't
know how faithfully it sticks to the source material, the story is
solid enough; it just... didn't click with me.