Michael's Blog

I just got done watching Shindler's List. I'd never seen the film before, but it is available from the library, so I availed myself of the opportunity.

Some reactions:

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Jennifer & I watched Cry, the Beloved Country this evening. I heartily recommend it (though not for small children).

Set in South Africa in the days leading to Apartheid, it tells the story of two men, a black priest and a white landowner, whose lives are brought together through a crime. It is a deeply moving film of pain, sorrow, and redemption. The acting and photography were also quite excellent.

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Yes, I'm going to blog about the same thing as my wife.

Not every day you see this. A bit of followup sleuthing, and it seems that it was slain by one of its own kind.

I finally watched Pirates of the Caribbean — At World's End today, finishing out the Pirates saga (hopefully). In a sense, I wasn't disappointed. I primarily watched it to see how the story finished out, having thought the second film took the franchise in a poor direction.

As you most likely are aware, the 2nd and 3rd films are really one movie broken in two. One really long movie. And not something Pirates is overly great at.

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This week, we made a significant change in our computer configuration. Following up on my migration of my laptop from Debian Testing to Fedora 9 early this summer, we have now moved our desktop/VM host from Debian Etch to CentOS 5.2.

Part of this was motivated by being able to get Firefox 3 supported. Also, I have been quite pleased with my Fedora system, and Red Hat-based systems seem to have somewhat better formalized support by software providers. Debian's recent security fiasco was also a contributing factor mentally (although no one is perfect, and they did handle it as well as anyone can expect). Also, though, Debian is community-driven. This has notable benefits — it is one of the most technically sophisticated distributions around and maintains a high standard of quality control. However, there is some comfort in running a distribution with a single organization behind it, willing to make decisions and cause things to happen.

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I've been using Firefox 3 for some months now (first beta versions, and now the final), and it's quite slick. Definitely a worthy upgrade.

Though there are some differing opinions on this matter, I find that the Awesome Bar (the new-and-improved all-singing all-dancing bookmark-and-history-searching address bar) to be spectacular. It incorporates some nice features that the Epiphany browser has (keyword searches over your bookmarks by typing in the address bar), allowing for much faster selection from a large list of bookmarks. I'm a bookmark fiend, particularly when good search support is available, so this feature is making my browsing noticeably easier.

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Our domain services are now back with Dotster, DNS provided by EditDNS. If you've experienced some temporarily bounced e-mails or other blips in elehack.net service in the last couple days, this is probably why.

We'd been with GoDaddy for the last 2 years, but their advertising has grown increasingly offensive. They seem to think that overtly capitalizing on male lust is a good strategy for selling technical products. In this case, it is a good strategy for losing a customer.

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I'll bite.

2 different solutions, depending on the desired means of annihilation. If projectile weapons and mass destruction are the goal, I want a minigun, pretty much any non-vocal hard rock/metal track (Mega Driver should provide suitable material), and John Preston. If, however, a slower-paced cleanout with melee and ranged magical weapons is desired, I'll take a lightsaber, Pompeii by E.S. Posthumous, and Gandalf the White.

Jenn & I just watched Star Trek — Nemesis tonight. We were both rather unimpressed. Between the bad directing, poor writing, and sub-par acting, it just didn't work for us.

For starters, the bridge felt stiff and cluttered. Forget the warm sparseness of the bridge on the Enterprise D (for those of you not familiar with the various ships to bear the name Enterprise, that's the one used in all the Next Gen episodes and the film Generations); the bridge here was darker, less open, and usually photographed with much closer shots. The new uniforms didn't contribute anything beneficial (although they didn't present a problem in First Contact).

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Robot Visions is a collection of robot stories, supplemented with a few essays, by Isaac Asimov. I saw it at my friend Jon's apartment and, having never actually read any Asimov, borrowed it for a time.

It's been a lot of fun to read. Asimov is a skilled storyteller and the short story is a quite effective format for building a world such as he does. Each story provides a small glimpse into his vision of what a robot-powered human culture would look like.

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