Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

Friday, July 10th, 2009
tskirvin	10:32p	Brüno Brüno: ** 1/2 (out of 4) I enjoyed Borat back when I saw it, but when it comes down to it, I only remember two details about the movie: the interesting character (with its associated mimicry from Americans everywhere), and the glorious scene with the brown bear in the ice cream truck. The rest just ran together; I remember the embarrassment humor and a few specific jokes when I think about it for a while, and that's about it. For this, the sequel to Borat, I'm just going to remember the opening song. To be fair, I really like that opening song: Nessaja, by Scooter, a band that I love for its over-the-top ludicrousness. This song is one of my favorites anyway; and for those In The Know, it set the tone very, very well (especially if you've seen the video... but I digress). The audience didn't quite understand why I burst out laughing as soon as I recognized the tune (though they might have gotten the hint when "the painted cow" was mentioned... but I clearly digress again. If I'm not careful, this entire review is really going to be about Scooter). For me, I recognized that it would give us a bit more euro-trash behavior than even the trailers hinted at. And just for good measure, the poor sound system hurt the song badly, and the point that it was cut off at showed how the rest of the movie was going to be over-the-top but not follow through the way it should... (Okay, seriously, that's my last reference to the song, at least for now). From that point on, yes, the movie was funny, but in an instantly forgettable way. Most of the humor was based on one of two paths: "I can't believe they got away with that", and "where the hell did that come from?". Both of these require some level of surprise, and so I'll refrain from discussing them in too much detail. But what I can say is that they were going for a third kind of humor: "look how we can make these people look like fools". And really, they didn't do a great job of that. Only in a few cases was the hypocrisy amusing. ...and you know, that is all I have to say. It was funny. There was a good song. I doubt I'll have any interest in seeing it again. And while I kinda hope that it's not as popular as Borat was, I would like to see Cohen do another movie before too long. ** 1/2 P.S. IT'S NOT A BIRD, IT'S NOT A PLANE; IT MUST BE DAVE, WHO'S ON THE TRAIN URL: http://wiki.killfile.org/reviews/movies/bruno/ (Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
bruceb	12:06a	Video management help sought I'm posting this on behalf of a friend: =-=-=-=-= C. was playing back some of our little Digital8 videos from her childhood to a friend today, and some of them are getting choppy and bad. It is clear that we have an extremely urgent situation and need to archive all the videos as quickly and as professionally as possible, while not on a professional budget. We are thinking that, cost-wise, putting the NOT-compressed raw data onto a lot of giant hard drives would be best, then re-archiving them to new drives every few years to  maintain the archive. We have located only one playback machine for this format: Sony GV-D200 but we are not sure if it will be higher quality and able to send the video smoothly to a computer. We also don't know if there is a more appropriate software than iMovie for archiving on the computer side. Maybe something that can help patch together the choppiness? Like a video Photoshop kind of thing? We really need to salvage what we can as soon as possible, and we want to make sure that what we actually archive ends up being usable. Money is tight, but this obviously can't wait. :(  There are several hundred tapes, and we need to just do this around the clock once we find something that will reliably and accurately transcribe them. I'm really stressed out about having all these tapes lost permanently--we had no idea they were failing already. :( Thanks for any help locating a solution. =-=-=-=-= (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
tskirvin	11:08a	The downside of dropping NANAS I think that moderating news.admin.net-abuse.sightings helped passively train my spam filter. The amount of spam making it through to my mailbox has increased dramatically since I dropped the group. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
tskirvin	10:56p	I just shut down news.admin.net-abuse.policy. news.admin.net-abuse.sightings went down a few weeks ago. I'm going to give a week before I actually close the accounts and request that the groups go away. It was a good run - 1996-2009. I'm just done with it. Five groups left. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
tskirvin	10:12p	Garage Sales, 27 Jun 2009 Since my last time hunting for garage sales (and before this weekend), I really only went out looking for sales once, on the 13th. It was a quiet day, and I didn't find many sales; but I was also hemmed in by both the Palo Alto Library Book Sale (which went well), and the Great American Food and Music Festival (which did not). The weekend of the 20th, for its part, saw me distracted by the need to meet a friend a couple of hours away. But in both cases, while I felt a bit silly about missing out, it wasn't the end of the world, because I knew that Dad was coming out soon anyway. And that was without knowing that Saturday was going to be the best garage sale day I'd gone to in years. My parents arrived on Thursday night. Dad and I did a quick run on Friday morning, but only found one sale (and that required the use of a GPS); this area just doesn't seem to have sales on Fridays, or at least not ones advertised via signs. It was an okay sale, but nothing special; Dad almost bought a rug made out of camel fur, but that's the best that could be said for it. We left afterwards for Santa Cruz, where we spent the day wandering about (including a trip to the Mystery Spot and a Santana concert). It was a good day, but not a great garage sale day. But Saturday... whoo boy. We went to about ten sales; of these, four were sales that I would consider monthly highlights, and two of those were the kinds of sales that I dream of when I go out on Saturday mornings. In order: The first sale didn't seem too good at first; there was somewhat interesting stuff, but the items were all unmarked. The first item I really paid attention to were the three Furby toys; my Mom loves Furbies, but she knows that she has too many, and didn't want to have to carry them home. As such, I asked for a price, and was told $2.50 a piece. I mischievously offered $5, because: a. Mom had asked me not to buy them, but she would take them if I got them. b. If the woman did take the deal, I'd be okay. c. If the woman didn't take the deal, she wasn't going to get a better price all day, so she'd kick herself later. d. I didn't think that the woman would take the deal. She counter-offered $6; I didn't take it (my $5 bid had been just right, after all). I snickered, as did my family. But it rapidly turned out that this was a fluke; they really were into bargaining. Mom bought a nice set of collapsible bake-ware for $5; Dad bought a nice bowl for $5; and I bought a model train set for a co-worker for $5 as well. You know, I think I might have gotten that number stuck in their head... I got to be a bit evil, and I came out with good stuff. That's the stuff of garage sale legend. I... still haven't comprehended the second sale, which we found in Los Altos. It was a couple of families, mostly selling off toys, and more specifically they were selling off LEGOs. Lots of LEGOs. Thousands of dollars of LEGOs. And the prices were good, very good... I got about 6 large plastic bins full of various LEGO sets, including three sets of Mindstorms, for $100. We were barely able to fit them into my parents' car (a Highlander) to get them back to my storage unit! And now they sit downstairs, waiting for me... You have to understand, I don't know that I really wanted them, but LEGOs are one of the things that I look for. It was the mother load, and the price was right; I didn't really have a choice but to buy them. I bought more volume of LEGO than all of the things I have thrown out in the last year; and now I still have to figure out what I'm going to do with them. Such is the price of obsession. After taking the LEGOs back home, we went over towards Mountain View again. The first sale we found in our second round was run by an Irish woman, and she was selling loads of books and some interesting furniture; but while it was a very good sale, it mostly appealed to my parents. There were several sales like this through the day, sales that were good and memorable but not worthy of stories. Still, that talking Ronald Reagan was pretty awesome, and the proprietors were very friendly. Laserdiscs. Who has laserdiscs? I used to have a player; I probably should have held onto it for the eighth sale of the day, which was a sale of anime, video games, and about 50 laserdiscs that I actually wanted. I was fairly restrained at this sale, only buying a total of seven DVDs, a 900MHz phone, and a ottoman for use as a hallway stool; but what I really wanted was to buy the Babylon 5 laserdiscs. Aah, such is life! Of course, the real draw there was the Gauntlet II arcade game, for $700 - a price that was a bit of a challenge on its own, but nothing compared to the lack of storage space for it. Still... After all of that, the Student Sale made the most impact on me. A few graduating students were moving away, and they had books, t-shirts, and some action figures. The thing is, the books were fascinating - feminist sexuality texts, in large part - the t-shirts were exactly the kind of thing that I want in general (but too small, since they were owned by the girls), and I just couldn't bring myself to buy the Ash figure for some reason. Why the impact? Well, mostly it was the fact that the girl selling the copy of Diablo II was excited to talk to me about it. She turned out to be Korean (how did I not notice that at first?), and something really impressed me about this heavily tattooed girl chatting cheerfully about video games... Clearly, I have a type. Also, there was a photo booth - one of the students had drawn two pictures, one of a miscellaneous space scape, and one of a giant cat. They offered to take pictures for a quarter, and email them to you. Dad talked me into doing it... and I was foolish enough to let them use my camera instead of getting their email address. I would have liked to talk to them again. I bought stuff at seven of the ten sales. Eight of the ten sales were selling video tapes. And my parents bought five times as much as I did (well, if you exclude the LEGOs). It was a good weekend. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
tskirvin	9:03p	I own a PS3. Now what? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
bruceb	11:07p	Crunch time, of a sort: going quiet "Gafiate" is one of my favorite words out of sf fandom. It stands for Getting Away From It All. That's what I'm going to do for a couple weeks, maybe longer. Here's how I figure it... I've been online more or less continuously since the early '90s, and in that time I've built up a lot of expectations—both in my mind and in others'—about who I am and what role I play. I've been that guy who doesn't have much of a life going on, who's around kind of all the time and at erratic hours, who's sometimes giddy and sometimes despairing, on and on. If you're one of my regular readers, you know the drill. By no means all of these expectations are bad, you understand, as I see them now. It's just that they're anchored in states of mind and body I have been in, rather than what I'm in now. This last week was full of big surprises, from great to horrible. This coming week will be, too. And probably the week after that. And then the pace of shocks will settle down, I hope, but there'll be consequences and correlaries and all sorts of other stuff too. This is, it's dawned on me, my work right now: this is my obligation, to myself and to all the people who've helped and cared about me over the years, to take the fullest, smartest advantage of the opportunities I have right now to understand what's going on and what I can and should do about it. Lots of you go quiet in crunch time and its equivalents—getting a big program done, finishing a thesis or dissertation, traveling, and like that. I generally don't for more than a day or so...but then I haven't had an opportunity like this in many years, either. I may write some journal entries, comments on others' journals, and like that. Or maybe I won't. I will share important personal developments when they're ready to share. Beyond that? I'm off to the injecting, inspecting, detecting, infecting, neglecting, and selecting, as Arlo so rightly puts it. :) PS: I will be dealing with e-mail more or less as usual, and if you want to know what's up, share funny links, or anything like that, my mailbox welcomes your correspondence. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
jlindquist	4:26p	This is Car 55... we're in a truck! I forget who forwarded the link last week, but someone's assembled a GMap of all the filming locations used in The Blues Brothers. The bit where the cruiser carrying Troopers Daniel, Mount, and John Candy's character flies into the box of a semi truck? That was filmed on IL-53 just north of Dundee Road, a half-mile dead-end segment closed to traffic. I always thought it looked familiar, but assumed it was closer to the site on Rand Road where the State Police pile-up was shot (near IL-176, as it turns out,) which I'd passed on several occasions on day camp trips to Sunny Hill Beach in Wauconda (one of the concert announcement scenes.) Nope, it was a spot I passed much more frequently when we headed for Woodfield. (Comment on this)