9 November 2005, lunch time
I wrote this because I wanted to sum up the France at Night thread while it was still fresh in my mind, and my opinions on the matter hadn’t dulled. I did this because I am easily agitated at times. The thread is entertaining to read.
Read the rest of this post. (1231 words)
Comment [11] Politics | Current Events
8 November 2005, the wee hours
This plugin will let you use two new conditional tags when building pages, <txp:rsx_if_next_section_different /> and <rsx_if_prev_section_different />. I use these tags to display my link-log mixed in with my regular posts. <txp:rsx_if_next_section_different /> is true if the current article’s section is different than the next article’s section. If the current article is the first article this condition is always true. <txp:rsx_if_prev_section_different /> is true if the previous article’s section is different than the current article’s section. If the article is the last article on the page this condition is always true. You can use <txp:else /> as you would expect.
Download the plugin: rsx_section_conditionals.txt.
Update: Damn it! I just noticed that you need edit your publish.php file to use this plugin, thus making it even more niche. You will need to add the following line of code to publish.php, after the line 766: $out['posted_rsx'] = $Posted;. (The previous line of code should be: $out['posted'] = $uPosted;.) We must do this because the plugin needs to have access to the database value Posted, which is not stored by default. (The unix timestamped version of the value is stored, but this is not much use.)
7 November 2005, lunch time
Rambot lives in Toronto. I should have been more creative with my names, but it was very late at night when I started playing Animal Crossing.
Read the rest of this post. (536 words)
Comment [10] Video Games
3 November 2005, lunch time
On the advice of Tyler, I went and watched Good Night, and Good Luck at the Cumberland cinema last night. I’ve now saved a total of $4 thanks to my membership. I have $8 to go before I have recouped the cost of the membership. Good Night, And Good Luck is about Edward Murrows taking Senator Joseph McCarthy to task for his Communist witch hunts during the 50s. Before CBS took the story, many journalists were too afraid to go after McCarthy. The film is shot in black and white, and looks great. There is a lot of stock news-reel footage in the film, which also gives it a very documentary feel; a very large chunk of the film consists of news-reel footage. The film is in many ways an obvious criticism of the Bush administrations undemocratic behaviour, and I think more importantly, a criticism of todays lack-lustre media coverage of important stories. Tyler post on the movie discusses this aspect of the film. I want to learn to talk like Murrows. The man is very eloquent, and more importantly, has one of those stereotypical 50s news-man voices. Everyone in the movie smokes, and I have to say it is a shame smoking is so horrible for you, because it is so damn cool.
2 November 2005, late afternoon
Sanaz is taking part in the Miss Universe Canada pageant. If she wins she gets to be Canada’s representative in the Miss Universe pageant. You may recall Canada won the pageant last year. I actually took the photos Sanaz used for her application. I still haven’t seen them, though I’ve been told they turned out really well. The photos I took were probably much tamer than the ones on Sanaz’s Miss Universe page. There is a link from her page, where you can go vote for Sanaz to win the People’s Choice award. My cousin won this award the year she participated in the pageant. Go vote. I want to be able to say I know two past winners.
Update Nov 17th 2005: Sanaz won the people’s choice award. Good job those of you who clicked and voted. I now know two winners.
2 November 2005, lunch time
After watching Broken Flowers at Cumberland, and then going the following week to see March of the Penguins, it seemed reasonable to get a membership at the cinema. I though about all the money I’d save if I stuck to watching a movie a week for a year. (You save $1 on Tuesdays, $2 the rest of the week.) Of course, after watch March of the Penguins, I never went back—until last night. Matt suggested we go watch The Squid and the Whale, a film I had not heard anything about. The Squid and the Whale is about a family going through a divorce, and how the divorce effects the two children in the family. The film is funny. It’s not a comedy per-say, but there is plenty of humor throughout the film, even during some of the more serious moments of the movie. The writing, acting, and cinematography are all top-notch. Watch this film.
30 October 2005, late at night
So I’ve left my bachelor apartment in High Park Village behind. For the next little while my base of operations is in the Bloor West Village; I’m living around Jane and Bloor now. For those who don’t know Toronto too well, this means I’ve travelled two subway stops from where I used to live; that is to say, I haven’t moved all that far. The new place is cool enough. I now live in a duplex, in what I imagine to be a very old house. I have a roommate now, Lori, who is quite nice. I have a washing machine and a dryer in my apartment, a welcome change. (I will have to write about this washer and dryer pair—I have plenty to say about them and I’ve only been in the place for 2 days.) I have a living room, and I have a television, something I’ve been without for a good year or so. So far, so good.
Update: The internet here is much slower. I think I’ll be OK.
28 October 2005, lunch time
My bed lays in pieces in the foyer of my apartment. My plan was to set it on fire—it’s made out of untreated wood—but, I don’t really know where I can go and do that in the city; it also seems like more trouble than it is worth. Instead, I plan to just leave it next to the giant garbage cans in the parking garage of my building. Someone else can take the wood and burn it if they want, or perhaps do something productive with the bed. When I bought the bed, I had planned to lacquer it some sort of mahogany brown. It would look nice and cool. That never happened. Just as well, the bed started to break about a month or so after I bought it. It’s a piece of junk bed from Ikea, and the slats had a habit of falling through the bed. I ended up stuffing cardboard boxes under the bed to help hold them up, though this was only a partial solution. I dismantled the bed late last night. Only my mattress separates me from the floor. I am moving soon. I will have a roommate, and live in a small duplex. I feel like I’m going backwards in time.
27 October 2005, the wee hours
The last time my hair was as long as it is right now was around the time of my birthday. I remember because I was having a BBQ at my home in Scarborough. I walked through my front door, and my mom started yelling at me about my hair. She yells very loud. My youngest brother had an appointment to get his hair cut that day, but my mom insisted that I get mine cut instead.
I get my hair cut in Scarborough from a very lovely lady named Liz for $6. Usually she does a good job. That day she chopped all my hair off. I looked like a mental patient. This was in fact the second time she had done this, the first was right before my cousin wedding. Still, I keep going back. I like Liz. Also, for $6 dollars, you shouldn’t expect too much.
My mom is not in the country right now. With no one on my ass to get my hair cut, it has grown reasonably long and shaggy. This doesn’t bother me very much. I actually like it long; I don’t need to put any gel in it.
Lisa: I’ve got a weekend job helping the poor and I’m only eight.
Homer: That’s not a job, it’s a waste of time. What can poor people pay you? Nothing! What satisfaction you get from helping them? None! Who wants to help poor people anyway? Nobody!
25 October 2005, evening time
I’ve been reading Daring Fireball for a very long time now. John Gruber writes about Apple, and is for the most part usually pretty insightful with his commentary. I mentioned in passing that I was going to support his site for the year. Today, sick at home, reading through the Daring Fireball archives, I decided the site is definitely good enough to worth supporting. I mean, I gave Jason Kottke money for his blogging venture, it seems only fair to support a site with some quality content. So I sent Mr. Daring Fireball some of my hard earned moneys. Also, I really wanted the t-shirt.
Update Oct 27th: John Gruber says a little bit more about his goals for this membership drive, and the amount of support he has received so far: Membership Numbers.
21 October 2005, mid-afternoon
During some quite trying times over the summer, I spent some time in my cousins basement watching random episodes of Battlestar Galactica. My cousin Jana had downloaded much of the first season. I had heard the show was supposed to be good, but thought to myself, “how good can a Sci-Fi show be?” After all, how many years of crap Star Trek have we had to put up with? Well, Battlestar Galactica is really good—surprisingly good. It’s not like any other Sci-Fi show I’ve seen. The special-effects are top-notch; the show is well written; it’s exciting; it’s violent; it’s funny. I bought the DVDs (so letting people pirate television isn’t all bad), and watched the mini-series that started this new series yesterday with my friends. The mini-series is a pretty self contained story, and sets up a lot of stuff for the first season. If you are looking for another good television series to watch, I say you check it out. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of science fiction to enjoy the series.
Comment [5] Television
Es pasion delirio
de estar contigo
pero, pero, pero
soy dichoso mi amor porque me quieres tambien.
—Tu Mi Delirio sung by Astrud Gilberto
19 October 2005, the wee hours
I get a lot of hits from Google images. They end up cluttering up the referrer pane in my copy of Mint. The latest version of Mint lets you filter out domains you don’t want to see in your referrer pane anymore, which is nice and all, but it would still be nice to have these hits tracked somewhere. Being a tech-savvy guy, I thought I would try my hand at writing a plugin for Mint that does this very task, tracking hits from Google Images.
17 October 2005, lunch time
One day I will write a longer post about VIM, and how it is the bees-knees if you need to edit text, on UNIX, in a GUI-less environment. Till that day, I will share this little tid-bit I discovered while reading Slashdot’s post on the release of VIM 6.4. You can reposition the cursor in VIM using the mouse if you use the following command: set mouse=a. There is a lot of geeky humor in the thread, for example: “I hope they fixed the bug that made you type all those weird key combinations to write to a file and save.” If you don’t think that’s funny, it’s because you are a lamer.
Comment [2] Technology
16 October 2005, early evening
Shima dragged a bunch of us out to see Elizabethtown last night. Funnily enough, most of us enjoyed the film—except for Shima. The movie takes place after Orlando Bloom’s character looses a shoe company a billion dollars. His father dies shortly after this low point in his life, and he must head down to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, to bring his fathers remains home. On the way to Elizabethtown he meets his love interest in the film, Kirsten Dunst. I think the movie has a lot of really good moments, and the dialog is quite good. It’s a funny film. I enjoyed the parts of the film that focused on death and grieving much more than those that focused on the budding almost-romance between Bloom and Dunst. The movie has a great soundtrack. There are also quite a few good cameos; Alec Baldwin is particularly funny as the head of the shoe company.
15 October 2005, late at night
While Shima and Liz were hard at work on some planning course, I was entertaining myself in the G5 lab watching Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy. I had heard mixed things about the movie. I enjoyed it. The film is worth watching if only to see Steve Carell, who plays a mentally retarded weather man. The film is set in the 70s, and stars Will Farrel as a deep-voiced kind of stupid anchorman. Christina Appelgate plays an up-and-commer female journalist who throws Ron’s news team into disarray. The film is funny. Lots of good one-liners, and plenty of scenes of Will Farrel being stupid.
12 October 2005, mid-afternoon
Apple’s big mystery event is taking place as I type this. So far they have announced new iMacs, and a new Apple remote control, and new video playing iPods! Hot damn. Engadget has quasi live coverage happening. Apple apparently picked a venue with no WiFi or cellular coverage to host the event. I can picture a person running in and out of the building, waving flags to signal what has just been announced.
Update: Apple didn’t mess around with this pre-Christmas product announcement.
You can buy episodes of Lost at $2 a pop from Apple. Sweet Jesus I love Apple. Oh, Shima, you can buy Desperate Housewives too if you are so inclined. Prices are about the same as buying the show on DVD. With DVDs you have to wait till the end of the season; for your paitence you are rewarded with extra features. I think for many people, $2 televisions shows will be a worthwhile purchase. I’m not sure if it will make a dent with the bit torrent crowd though.
The new iMacs look really impressive. They cost the same as the old ones, which makes them more or less unfordable, but they are thinner and feature iSight cameras built in now—not too shabby. I think with the announcement of the Apple remote control and FrontRow, and television show downloads, Apple is trying to position them as alternatives to televisions. They’d definitely work well for kids in dorm rooms and the like, or people like myself.
The new iPod and the iTunes announcements are probably what most people will focus on. Apple has said they wouldn’t make a video iPod because they didn’t think there was any demand for people to watch movies on the go. I don’t like to watch a movie in disjoint chunks, but I know plenty of people who don’t care all that much. I suppose television, which is normally chopped up due to commercials, might be a better fit for video on the go. If the battery life on the new iPods remains as long as it is right now, these new iPods will be pretty slick beasts.
12 October 2005, lunch time
We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems.
Google.org is the philanthropic wing of Google. Currently the site is quite empty, but in the future it will be a place to find out information about getting grants from Google, and I suppose to find out what non-profit activities Google is up to. The GoogleBlog has more information about current endeavors Google is undertaking, in a post entitled About Google.org. I like the we-can-change-the-world mentality of Google.
Comment [4] Technology
11 October 2005, lunch time
“This ain’t the Drake.”
I guess if you haven’t been to the Drake Hotel in 15 or so years, you would be in for quite the shock. The place has changed. An old man walked in to the Drake just as my cousin and I were leaving the bar. His first words to us were, “It’s a little warm for a fire don’t you think?” The fire place was running. He then wandered around in disbelief before leaving the bar with my cousin and I. We took our time leaving to hear what else he had to say. He complained to us about yuppies before going on his way.
The funny thing about the encounter was that my cousin and I were discussing gentrification and how neighborhoods in the city can flip all of a sudden from slum to shiny-happy-land. This has happened most markedly along Queen St. West. I walked with my cousin, along this road, from the Drake all the way back downtown. This took us along pretty much all of the newly rejuvenated Queen St. West. We passed my cousin’s old street, which was down the road from a lonely-man motel he recalls was a second home to many prostitutes. (The motel is still there, I wonder if the prostitutes are?) We passed the park, where people were jogging and walking their dogs. This was a shock to him, as he recalls it being the sort of place you wouldn’t want to walk through. We actually made it all the way back to University road without crossing some tract we thought was even slightly slummy. It’s quite amazing.
Earlier, while my cousin and I were eating brunch at the Drake—the fact that I go for brunch at the Drake makes me a Yuppy and I hate myself—I was discussing Parkdale and how the neighborhood was nice till about the 1950s, got slummy after the Gardiner came up, and is now being revitalized, centered around the Liberty Village area. The bar tender, who had served my friends and I at the Sky Bar during the summer, came over to give us some water, and catching the portion of our conversation, interjected: “It is getting nicer, but I like my Parkdale. I’ll know the neighborhood is done when you can’t get a $1.25 stout.”
8 October 2005, lunch time
Go see the Tangiers live. You would be a fool—a damn fool—not too.
5 October 2005, mid-afternoon
You can use the stream editor sed to do some useful things. For example, say you had just built and compiled a newer version of gcc, and want to rename all of these new gcc binaries from their default names to names that include the programs version suffix. You can do so using a simple comand like: for file in * ; do echo $file; cp $file `echo $file | sed 'some regex magic'`; done. Regex magic should be of the form '/pattern1/pattern2/'. Well perhaps that isn’t so simple, but you get the idea.
4 October 2005, the wee hours
I had wanted to watch Steamboy when it was being shown last year at the Toronto Film festival. I’m glad I saved my 17 dollars. Steamboy is visually stunning, but that is about all it has going for it. The movie is a beautiful steampunk romp, but really has no substance to it. I had high hopes for the film, as it is the work of the amazing Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira, Otomo’s other film, has a dense intricate story that feels crammed into 2 hours. I’ve watched the film several times, and each time feel like I appreciate the film a little bit more. Steamboy on the other hand has almost no story to speak of, and drags on and on for its 2 hour running time. The last hour of the film is a big battle between two steam powered armies. Also, the protagonist of the movie is Ray Steam. I can’t make this stuff up.
1 October 2005, early evening
I suppose at this point in time it is pretty cliché to have a crush on Emily Haines. Nevertheless, there is definitely something about her. The Metric concert at the Pheonix tonight was amazing.
29 September 2005, early evening
I didn’t feel good growing up back in the day in London with Sri Lankans, ‘cause they’d look down on us. They’d be like, “Oh, you haven’t got a Dad. My Daddy’s a doctor, and we’re going to private school, and then I’m going to Cambridge to be a doctor.” And I knew when I was a kid that was never going to happen to me. I had no parents helping me with my homework. My parents never came to a parents’ meeting in school, I went to my own—“How’m I doing this year?” [laughs] Then when I started doing art, and everyone was like, “Oh my God, your children are so thick that they have to take art!”
Excerpt from a great interivew with M.I.A. at Pitchfork Media. I can’t stress how true this quote is. I think all of our family friends in England have children who are doctors or lawyers now. In Canada, there are just too many Tamil people around for anyone to be in your face about what your kids are up to. [via Ananthan]
Comment [7] Music | Interesting Links
