Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

December 31: That's a wrap! Great show, people, let's all go get drunk.
December 27: People I did not expect to get Christmas greetings from: the guys who ran the timing on a race I did some years ago.

December 22: The Hobbit (part the first) was a huge pile of fun, and for a two and a half hour movie didn't feel like it was dragging at any point. Now I need to dig out my copy of the book and read that.
December 21: I was led to believe that Australia was an epic chick flick, and while I'd agree with "epic" I think the only chick-flicky thing about it is Hugh Jackman running around being Manly (occasionally bare-chested because, of course, the scene demands it). It's pretty much by the numbers in as much as redemption is obtained, come-uppance comes up, etc. etc. but it's still an engaging piece of work. The only downside is, I think, the epic nature; there are, I think, about three dramatic endings in the movie, roughly at one-third intervals, which means you're about ready to get up and do something else when you realise, oh wait, there's more? I think there's a tight 90-minute movie in this, maybe by cutting some of the Tourist Board of Australia scenic shots or something (although to be fair there isn't a whole hour of those). Anyway, all told, this is worth a look.

Fixed the IMDb search thing. Web scraping and parsing in Emacs is probably some sort of crime - I know using regexps to do that sort of thing is definitely heresy.

December 15: I liked The Artist. The use of sound was clever, the occasional double-meaning in the dialogue was nicely done, and the whole thing was fun. I'm not sure it's award-winning fun, but then I'm not a member of the Academy.

I will note here in passing that the silly thing I use to pull the correct link for IMDb is no longer working correctly; it was initially not returning the correct movie title, instead providing a generic "IMDb - Find" text; and this time around it didn't even return the correct movie. Software rot in action.

December 2: Christmas tree: up. Cat evicted from Christmas tree: twice by me, once by Selene. Cat appears to have learned now that climbing tree leads to water squirter deployment.

December 1: Seeking Justice is a middling thriller with a nicely paranoid setup. What's really making me giggle about it, however, is shortly after I watch this I read about a website (human.io) whose basic premise is getting people to do small, inconsequential things. Which is sort of how the movie starts out. Anyway, the movie is fun; it's not Great Art, but it's not terrible, either.

I grabbed a Christopher Brookmyre title on Kindle without noticing it's basically a grab-bag of short stories, and was somewhat startled at the first "chapter" being a full-on not-really-fiction diatribe against homeopathy. Excellently done and all, but it threw me for a loop until I realised, oh hey, it's a self-contained story, not an opening chapter. That'll teach me to read the blurb first.

Still no apocalypse