Anotherblog

Eating DVDs

Eating DVDs
Our DVD player ate one of our DVDs. It has a five-disc carousel, and after watching a film, when we opened the tray to retrieve the disc, it wasn’t there.

I unscrewed the cover of the DVD player, and there it was, somehow stuck underneath the carousel. Very clever of it. There was another disc there too, down the side, a CD that had been missing for several months.

So, I took them out, fixed the cover back on, and tried to play another DVD. It immediately ate it. The cover is now off again, and we’re temporarily watching movies on the PS2 until we work out what to do about the DVD player.

New DVDs
Well, they’re not new, but Video Ezy were having an ex-rental sale, so I bought a couple of cheap DVDs: The Arrival, Holes, Hulk, Secretary, and Once Upon A Time In The West. “The Arrival” was the DVD that was eaten by the DVD player. It wasn’t scratched at all until then, which is pretty remarkable for an ex-rental.

Wordpress 1.5
I upgraded Film Forensics to wordpress 1.5, which had the unfortunate consequence of breaking the Categories bit. Still, I am optimistic the problems will be sorted out soon. The new templates etc. seem to be a bit more flexible, so I’m agonising over yet another change to the look & feel of FF. I want to change the reviews to use wordpress templates for the body of the review as well as the header - I’m considering having the body of the review just be a hidden section of the individual entry, though I’m concerned it may look a little bloggish. It’s not worked out yet, but it’s getting there.

I’ve finished the Bubba Ho-Tep review, but not posted it yet ’cause I’m going to try and fix the website first.

Ten things I’ve done that I don’t think anyone reading this has

Ten things I’ve done that I don’t think anyone reading this has
Yup, it’s a Livejournal meme.

1. Ridden a unicycle backwards
2. Juggled five balls for ten seconds
3. Four Coin Split/Muscle Jump (coin tricks)
4. Broken my leg playing volleyball
5. Accidentally said something in Japanese instead of Greek
6. Potted fifteen pool balls in fifteen shots (8′ * 4′ pool table. During practice I potted four balls on the break, and missed only three shots thereafter)
7. Been inside Stonehenge
8. Been sole author of a patent (pending)
9. Deliberately crashed a bicycle to avoid a dance lesson (age 10)
10. Conducted a choir

I should note that Peter N. may have done #8.

35

35
I’m now 35, and feeling much better. Really, my main issue is with all this extra body hair. As we were memorably discussing over dinner at “The Little Snail” on Sunday, there’s a market out there for…

Extreme Combovers!
That’s right. Balding on top, but with more back-hair, ear-hair, eyebrow-hair and nose-hair than you know what to do with? Why not do an Extreme Combover! Normal combovers are distinguishable by their distinctive side-to-side appearance. When your gorilla back-hair attacks from the rear, nose-hair and eyebrow-hair attack from the front, and ear-hair adds to the assault from the sides, the disguise will be imperceptable!

Note that to get the nose-hair to contribute to the comb-over, you should probably grow out a beard, and have the nose-hair creep along the mustache and up the sideburns.

So yeah, it was a good birthday party. And I took yesterday off work and did nothing, unless you count playing Pokemon “something”. On the bright side, I am now thoroughly sick of Pokemon, and no doubt will get back to work on my many projects any minute now.

Camera!
My most significant birthday present so far has been a Canon Auto Zoom 518 Super 8 camera, vintage 1967. I’m not sure whether it will work - the electrics haven’t been touched in a long time - but I’m going to have a go at restoring it, or at least having it restored. First, some of the batteries have been in that camera for a long, long time, so there’s the simple matter of cleaning the terminals and finding new batteries to fit. Anyway. Fun to be had, even if it’s just a prop in a movie some day.

So what now, Andrew?
Next up: Film Forensics of Bubba Ho-Tep. I’ve now watched the film twice, read the short story, watched the extras, and listened to about half of the director’s commentary. Time to get writing.

Still Dazed & Confused

Still Dazed & Confused
Perhaps it is a life-thing, this continuing vagueness that is plaguing me. Sunday is my 35th birthday, and I get an almost caffeine rush of jangly coolness from the thought that five years will have passed since my 30th, when I had just premiered my first short film and a whole new career seemed to be blossoming. It has blossomed - kinda - but slowly, and lazily, at a normal human speed. I have reaped the willy-willy, which feels almost as silly as it sounds.

And of course, it is also silly to measure a life by achievements, but that’s something I have nonetheless set up for myself. In job interviews we are told to visualise ourselves in five years time, and the five year future self always seems a little strange and foreign. It would be a surprise to see me with the same haircut, the same clothes, but that’s what Mr. 30 would be seeing. On the other hand, he’d be seeing a new house and a new job, which is nice, and seeing the fact that my relationship with Anna is now in it’s fifth year and going strong, which is even nicer. He’d be impressed with the amount of writing I’ve done, while a little disappointed that there are no full-length movie scripts (or, indeed, movies) there, and that there are no second-drafts out there yet.

Ah, but Mr. 40 is watching. I cannot help but picture him as a little sad, because 40 sounds like a sad number. I imagine he’ll have written a full-length movie script or two, and he’ll have finished second drafts of one or two novels, and have sent them off to various publishers with no responses, but that’s fine. It’s a difficult market to break into, and he is a little too lazy to push harder. His guitar playing will be better, but not yet good, and he will continue to be embarassed at the amount of time he has spent getting lessons, and the fact that he very rarely practices. Will he have children? I expect so. That will be exciting, but a little too hard to imagine right now. Will he have a new job, a new home? A new home, likely. A new job - well, he’d be happy if he stayed where he was.

Right, I’ve depressed myself now. Time to go home and play computer games and watch the last of “The Beidebecke Affair” and do some writing.

Squash

Squash
I’m on a long losing streak against Ian B. in our lunchtime squash and badminton games. Last week we played badminton, and he won a lot, and this lunchtime we played squash, and the margin ended up something like 8-1 games to him. Still, I got to ten points in almost all of those games (which go to 15), and there were only a few times when I felt like I didn’t have any answers - by the end of the game, although I was utterly exhausted, I was doing pretty decent shots. But Ian is still better.

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
It is a silly film, and not particularly good, but I enjoyed it. A substantially similar film to Dude, Where’s My Car, and if you like the latter you will probably enjoy the former. I would delve - my Film Forensics instincts almost demand it - but I am in an unusually thought-free state at the moment. Wherever my brain is, it is not currently inside my skull. I have been massively forgetful and have made several very silly mistakes at work today.

Reality TV Spies
Oh yeah, we had a neat discussion about Reality Television at lunch yesterday. We came up with an idea for a show about spies, which is fun but massively impractical. Twenty to thirty contestants enter the village at the beginning of the game. Each is given a secret, and each is told they’re a member of a spy ring, and told what the name and hidden password or handshake is for that spy ring. It’s then up to them to discover the other members. There are policemen in the village too, who ensure public order and arrest people they discover doing anything “illegal”.

Each spy ring is given a number of tasks they might complete - transporting secret papers, photographing certain military installations at the fringes of the village, discovering members of another spy ring, kidnapping scientists, protecting VIPs, assassinations. Cash prizes! Any violence may only occur in the Neutral zone, which (as it happens) is right in the middle of the village, and through which people have to go quite often. When they enter, they have to put on helmets, because paintballs are the only way people may be assassinated.

Nobody starts with any paintball guns, of course. Individuals may compete in various intellectual games (as “Scientists”) in order to make scientific breakthroughs in the fields of bugging and spying technology, winning prizes like radio bugs, bug detectors, miniature cameras, video cameras, phone taps, assassination weapons and ammunition, and so on.

And, unusually for group oriented reality TV, the groups don’t hang around together or publicly acknofor quick - and very real - cash.wledge each other. Spy networks operate best when they are actually secret. And, of course, it is perfectly acceptable to take bribes from an opposing spy ring for quick - and very real - cash. Yes sir, a double agent could make very good money.

More toy cars

More toy cars
I did some more script writing and filming of the toy cars film on Saturday. It turns out that the powerbook really is a lot easier to use than the desktop, even with the smaller screen: I can have the laptop right next to the video camera, because both are light and convenient. This is going to be great: I can have the editor right there when doing filming, and they can cut and paste shots into the sequence as we’re filming it. I’ve yet to test whether I can capture footage directly from the live video camera, but I’m sure it’s possible.

Anyway, there was much fun dragging toy cars around backwards with fishing lines, and then reversing the footage so it looks like they’re going forwards. I could just use remote-control cars, but frankly, the look is all wrong. Remote-control cars are very hard to handle (the small ones don’t have much speed control), and the antenna is a bit obvious.

Battlestar Galactica
We watched episodes 6-8 at Jon & Kate’s place last night and the were (again) very good. It’s nice to see - for once - a treatment of AIs that is a bit less logic-and-explosions. These ones have got religion, and it looks like the writers have really thought through what it would be like for an AI. And it’s always fun watching stuff with Jon & Kate: we stop the DVD frequently and launch into discussion about meaning. Frequently, we *have* to stop the DVD when watching films together, as Kate’s howls of laughter are wonderful, and set everyone else off.

Games
I played much Pokemon on the weekend. My progress in MTG in lunchtimes has hit a brick wall in Loki’s rather nasty control deck - still, I’ve done much better in this round than either of the previous rounds. And Carmel M. has brought in the board game she designed, and we’re going to give that a go one day this week.

Valentine’s Day
We’re doing dinner at home tonight, and I think I’m going to have to grit my teeth and pay for flowers at stupid prices, because I didn’t manage to get alone for long enough on the weekend to go out and buy flowers. Perhaps I shall do a painting of some flowers instead. If I have time.

Bloody comments spam!

Bloody comments spam!
I’ve been getting comments spam in the Film Forensics comments section, and it’s shitting me to tears. It started when I was away on holidays in England, and there were only about a hundred bits of spam when I arrived back. I turned on moderation of comments, not that anyone ever comments there anyway - hopefully that’ll start changing once I start posting the reviews to rec.arts.movies.reviews, and make the website a bit clearer. Anyway, I’ve been getting about fifty spam comments a day, which don’t make it through to the actual comments, but do result in email messages to me.

I’ve had a spam blocking thing up there for a week now, and I’ve been steadily increasing the severity of the blocking. Hopefully the current setting will work - it emails me digests of the blocked spam instead of individual notices, so I can at least see whether there were any real comments that got slurped up.

My regular email spam has been getting worse and worse too, probably because I have my email address on the filmforensics webpage. Spam is one of those things that really gets to me more than it ought to, like gratuitous four-wheel drives.

The funny thing is, I suspect it’s only happening because filmforensics uses wordpress. I bet greymatter is so out of date, the spambots don’t know how to spam to it.

Pokemon
I picked up a second-hand copy of the GBA Pokemon Ruby game yesterday from a work colleague, and played it for three hours last night. It’s one of those games that wires itself directly to the collecting impulses in your brain. I was surprised at how good it is at it, too. I have a fairly strong collecting impulse, but I thought I would be rather more immune to Pokemon than I am - I’d casually looked at the game before, and it didn’t really appeal.

Anyway, bang went any efforts at doing work last night.

Another car crash

Another car crash
Anna’s brother Bill has also crashed his car. It was (as with Anna’s crash) entirely the other person’s fault; a taxi doing a U-turn smacking into the front right side of Bill’s car. Between Anna’s family and us, we used to have four cars. Now we have one. Two in with the smash repairers, one in for mechanical problems.

Huh. At least we now have a loaner from the insurance company. It’s a Mercedes Benz, which sounds more impressive than it is, which is essentially a rebadged Daihatsu Charade. Still, it goes, and it allowed me to play badminton at lunchtime yesterday against Ian B. He beat me in all four games, but they were reasonably close. And now I am feeling it. This is my first major bit of exercise since coming back from England.

Music
Jon came over on Thursday night last week and we played much music and watched a couple more Battlestar Galactica episodes. All good, though the DVD player had real problems playing them. We’re practicing up playing “Cloud Factory” - ambitious, especially since there aren’t any tabs available on the web, but Jon is more than up to the acoustic guitar part. I also tried out Garage Band, routing the audio out of the mac into the amp to play drums along with us. It worked well. So easy, and so good. I’m keen to lay down all the parts of “Cloud Factory” into Garage Band, and when we want to play it, we can just cut the instruments out of the mix that we want to play ourselves.

Wedding
Anna and I went to a big Greek wedding on Sunday, which was all fine and good. Excellent food up until the main course, which tasted as though it had been cooked and reheated a couple of times. Fortunately, we had already eaten two courses and were completely full. And the dessert looked delicious. If only I could have sweet things. Sweet, sweet, sweet things.

I danced, for once. I have no idea what’s going on in my head with that stuff, except that sometimes I cannot stand it, and sometimes I have no problem at all. Sunday was the latter.

Magic Tournament
After an exceedingly weak second round - I’m now coming equal last - I managed a strong start against a good deck, winning 2-1 against David MM. I finally abandoned playing green, settling for a white/black/blue build, essentially the same build I had some success with at the end of round one.

Writing
A good attitude towards writing is continuing to elude me. I have to do a second draft of the script for “Cars”, finish the Film Forensics for “Alien Vs. Predator” and “Bubba Ho-Tep”, and make a start on getting back into Cesura. Instead, last night, I rewatched “Mystery Men”. I suppose I could call it research for a future FF.

On the bright side, for FF, I found a standard Forensic Investigation form used throughout North America. Yet another rejig of the look of the website, coming right up.

Wrestling with the cut end of a wish

Wrestling with the cut end of a wish
“The Cut End of a Wish” is one of the more delightful bits of technical doco translation I’ve encountered recently. We’re quoting it liberally, here. I think it’s destined to be a classic.

The cut end of my wishes has recently sliced with pure intention at the new 12″ Powerbook. The Apple store got them yesterday, which was just when I was looking, so nice co-incidence. I bought one and lay in bed all day writing up Film Forensics stuff. Yesterday was a sick day/holiday: that is, I was sick with stinky headache in the morning, then fine but carless in the afternoon, so there was no point going to work. I bought the powerbook, and worked away on it until my headache came back. Who’d have thought that staring at a computer screen all afternoon would do that?

Stinky headache
I’ve finally realised what migrane patterns look like. I’ve been having them for years, but have never made the connection, mostly because they don’t always happen at the same time as the migrane: usually a little before or afterwards. My migrane patterns are usually pretty similar: a vibrating square, with a succession of smaller vibrating rectangles surrounding it, getting progressively smaller the further they get from the square, like the shape of a shuruken star. And dizziness. Anyway, they don’t happen very often, which is nice.

Car crash!

Car crash!
Anna was driving with her Mum yesterday, and as she went through an intersection, someone going in the opposite direction decided to turn right. He hit the Subaru on the front right panel, doing an annoying amount of damage (I haven’t seen it). Nobody was hurt. He admitted that it was entirely his fault and exchanged insurance details with Anna. So, phew. However, it means that we have no car at the moment, as the Mitsubishi is out of action at the moment.

Also, the other car was a porche.

Magic tournament
I’m coming last! I just opened up the pack for the third round of the tourney, and I don’t think it’s going to help much, either. So I’ve changed the mix of cards to be fun, rather than powerful. Oh well. I thought my deck this round was much better than the first round deck, but now I’m not so sure.