Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.


May 26
Puss in Boots was a bit flat, and it's interesting to see that "Zach Galifinakis, weird intense guy who isn't really that funny" translated almost exactly from The Hangover to this. Oh, and Humpty Dumpty's ending? That was just plain weird. The whole thing feels like a waste of a good opportunity.

UPC's new "on-demand" service broke as soon as I tried to use it - par for the course for me, I guess, since they're effectively my telco now. Anyway, once it got back to working order, we found Alton Brown and learned how to cook delicious things from pork tenderloin. The show is a little more contrived than I like, but the recipes and the science are excellent.

May 24
Cracked open my somewhat neglected Java porting project, and was somewhat surprised to discover I'd left it in an almost functional state the last time I abandoned it. Cool!

May 23
Happy Birthday, Patrick!

May 22
Ah, irony. One of those irritating linkbait sites (you know the sort: every single "article" is of the form, "<NUMBER> <THING> TO/FOR <ACTION>", three-line lists are split over multiple pages, and you can't see the "content" because it's hidden in a raft of advertising) sporting an advert for an article elsewhere titled, "12 Annoying things About Your Website That Drive People Away" (clearly itself a linkbait site, and one lacking in self-awareness perhaps, too).


May 18
The Help is another movie rendering of something that Selene's read (and that I haven't) and it stands well enough on its own. I think I'd like to read the book for comparison.

I deleted the Facebook app off my phone as it's become increasingly unusable of late. I was somewhat amused at the phone's suggestion that deleting the app would delete all Facebook's data, too. If only.

May 15
Jane Eyre wasn't really my sort of thing, but it was made well enough at least. Herself says they left out a bunch of bits from the book.

May 14
Happy birthday, Dad! (I've been a bit slack about including these lately...)


May 12
Beery evening with some coworkers (and an ex-coworker). Great food at Bear, too.

May 11
Tintin was so-so. There was nothing really wrong with it, it just lacked that unknown quantity that raises movies above the average. It was certainly fun to watch, and the rendering of the various characters into fully-animated people (while retaining the cartoon look, feel, and occasionally physics) was all well done, but at the end I felt pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing. Still, better than that Twilight nonsense.

May 6
Back in Dublin again. I just spent more time than was strictly necessary trying to get a photo from a camera to that social media website: iPhoto purports to facilitate this, but put the picture in my "Wall Photos", which is something that appears to have disappeared from any easily findable link on the destination site, and the other choices (Profile photos, Mobile uploads) don't appear in iPhoto's view of the world; then I get the photo uploaded the old-fashioned way, i.e. upload file, and discover there's no preview option, which leads me to upload it with privacy set to me-only so I can fiddle with it first. I thought the point of these things was to make it so that I didn't feel any pain as my demographic information is effortlessly prised away from me.

Breaking Dawn - Part I was about as miserable as we expected - I think at this point we're just watching it out of some sense of seeing just how bad it can get. It's an awesome display of characters you don't really care about lurching from one crisis to the next all because of the female lead and her complete inability to make any sort of sensible choice about anything, ever. I can't recommend enough that you avoid this at all costs.

May 5
Off to Galway for a spot of family-visitng and craft beer consumption.

May 4
The Ides of March was... I dunno. It could have been, and given the cast, should have been an absolutely top-notch piece of cinema. Instead it was fairly mundane. I caught one of the plot twists, but missed another, and expected at least one more. Not really essential viewing, I think, in the end.

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Looks like another Irish summer. Fetch your boots.