Anthology of Interest

Here is an article about ATI making a card for playing ASCII games like Nethack. I thought it was amusing.

The Internet Oracle answers about Nethack in Denver and about something better than Nethack.

For the curious, I've been playing again lately. I locked myself in Sokoban, and messed up with my last chance on a wand of striking, so I committed suicide by letting a minor monster kill me. ARGH!

Finished The DaVinci Code. It was a pretty good book, a real page turner. It's hard to know where fact ends and fiction begins in that book, because it's set in present day and is reasonably plausable. You have to take it all with a grain of salt of course; some of the stuff I knew about wasn't quite right, so how right can the rest be? Besides, I probably shouldn't be getting all of my theology learnings from a pop bestseller. It wasn't a good book in the way that The English Patient is a good book. It won't win artistic aclaim I think, but it's damn entertaining.

Tamara bought the new Harry Potter book yesterday. She's about half way through it now. The first chapter, all I've been allowed to read so far, is good. The way Tamara is reading it, the rest seems as good. We'll have to see how it holds up to review. It's about the same size as the last one, maybe slightly longer. I had heard it was going to be thicker...

We watched Signs tonight. It was a good movie; very Alfred Hitchcock. I get the distinct impression that M. Night Shyamalan intended this to be a realtivly small, understated film. But I seem to remember it being markeded as a big block buster. It looked faily low budget, right down to the credits. The marketing I recall was hyping a different movie. This one is a good suspense thriller, but it's not a blockbuster.

It's like the marketing people got a hold of this film and hyped it without even watching it, just because M.N.S. was the guy who did The Sixth Sense, which was a big successful movie. And M.N.S. is saying"no no, this is kind of a little experiment picture, it doesn't need the hype, that's a waste..." Or at least that's what I imagine, where imagine is the key word...

Aside from his slightly annoying habit of refering to everything in Paris as "famous" in the first few chapters, and my initial bewilderment at what was made up and what was real, this book is turning out to be really good. But if Gabe over at Penny Arcade says it's good, then it's good right?

He does a good job of writing a page turning. I just read over a 100 pages, just because the chapter would end with a little cliff hanger, and you just have to keep going so that you can find out what happens.

But oh well, time for bed.

Went home last weekend. For convocation. I finally have my little piece of paper that says I have a B.Sc in Electrical Engineering. Yay for me!

We left Thursday morning at about 6 am. Caught the 7 am ferry; we were just about the last car that got loaded. Whew! I don't think we saw any wildlife the whole trip. Nothing that I remember anyway, I was pretty tired and just concentrated on the road.

Went and visited Ryan and Kishor at the lab in Calgary. Watched Ryan play some GTA, which is always entertaining. We went climbing on Saturday, but I was super tired due to an extended period of sleep deprivation, due to a disturbing obsessing with CSI and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In any case, I only got two pitches in before feeling too mentally exhausted (and the weird physical weakness that comes with lack of sleep, which doesn't seem to impede my ability to walk fast) to continue. So I placed myself on belay duty and Ryan climbed some excellent 5.10 - 5.11 stuff which he made look really easy. I have to find a decent area in Victoria....

Left Black Diamond at 5 am MST on Sunday, got to the ferry terminal at about 3:48 pm PST. Along the way we saw a bunch of deer, 2 black bears, some geese, a coyote, and assorted birds. Stopped at the Petro Canada on the TransCanada outside Calgary for gas and coffee, and a little dose of East Indian music, and then continued on to Revelstoke, where we stopped for breakfast and fuel. Merrit for lunch, and Hope for gas. And that was it.

Just got back from The (new)Italian Job. The air conditioning worked in this theater, so it was much nicer. The movie was pretty good; it didn't really get me excited, but it had it's moments, and it certainly didn't suck.

A few good car chases, and a certain attention to detail that was nice. It was mostly realistic I think, although when they dropped a safe full of gold into a boat, I couldn't help but think that the safe would have gone through the boat. But thankfully the safe was in the water, and the one in the boat was a decoy.

The Cooper Mini car chases were pretty cool. The computer stuff was pretty wacky as always, but what can you expect. It's gotta look cool right? Who wants to see a guy hacking away in EMACS and at a bash prompt?

I spilled water on my keyboard last night. It worked at the time, but this morning some of the keys resulted in wrong keycodes. Good thing I have a backup keyboard!

Merging the linux progress patch into my multihead kernel. It's starting to work... just a few bugs to fix...

Came across a new music player for Linux/Gnome 2/X11 that is pretty cool. It's Rhythmbox, a program which takes ideas first implemented by Apple in iTunes and recreates them in GNOME 2. It's loading my (9 gig) mp3/ogg library now. It's taking quite a while, but already I can tell that the interface is nice, in terms of navigating artists and albums and stuff. It's much better than XMMS' one big list in that sense.

I'm unable to check the quality and other cool features because I'm at school running it from home over ssh, but it looks like you can put it in a GNOME panel applet, which actually is not a full-fledged applet, but rather a notification area icon. But enough functionality is available from the right click menu to make it useful.

I guess a real Mac expert would be required to asses Rhythmbox's iTunes compatibility.

On a side note, a new version of Gabber is out. It finally supports the GNOME 2 notification area, so you can see when you've got messages without the main window taking up a quarter of the screen!

Or at least my car is. Took time off work today and got my registration and insurance done. I had to get an inspection as well. But insurance is about $400 cheaper here than in Alberta, so thats nice.

Also got a new BC driver's licence. Except they still have to make it up, so my temporary one is a 8.5x11 piece of paper. But the lady said it wouldn't take long, so whatever. It's not like I need picture ID every day anyway.

Got to work just in time for a meeting today. I may have to give a presentation on the 19th. Might as well get the practice in.

That's all for now...

We just got back from Bruce Almighty. It was quite a funny movie. It's been a while since I saw Ace Ventura, but I think that if you liked that one, you'll like this one.

Although it doesn't deal with any heavy subject matter that could easily come up in a movie like this, it does have a good message and anything heavier would have spoiled the comedy, which was excellent.

Jim Carey's character sort of parallels Jim Carey's own life, in that he lets ambition take him away from what he is is really good at; being funny. In the end, he finds that happiness is best found in doing what he does best.

Anyway, I liked it a lot. BE SURE TO STAY FOR THE OUTTAKES IN THE CREDITS.