TV Shows, Movies, and Books

No work today. Sometimes you just have to take a day off to get the stress levels down. The RSX got an oil change. I mowed the lawn. That was about it.

I still haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie. Maybe next week. I did see Spiderman recently. For a comicbook movie it wasn’t bad. It was very, very predictable as it follows the same storyline as Superman… boy discovers he has super powers, his father figure dies, he gets a job at newpaper, gets a colorful suit, fights some crime, gets the girl, loses the girl… The villain was pretty lame – just a guy in a plastic power-rangers suit. Still, it was fun in spite of all that. The Danny Elfman sound track helped a lot. They played the really goofy Spiderman Theme song from the old cartoon as well. Susan claimed she couldn’t get it out of her head for several days.

Saw the season finale of X Files too. It was okay. Pretty much what one would have expected but nothing spectacular.

Somewhat more interesting was The Chronocide Mission by Lloyd Biggle Jr., which I just finished reading to Susan. Even though it’s a new book it reads very much like classic science fiction from the Golden Era. 300 years from today, a majorly screwed up Earth is being destroyed by war for a second time because of an artifact called a Honsun Lens that can unleash huge amounts of energy and distort time. A small group of conspirators decide that the only way to save the world is to destroy it – or, at least, the particular timeline that leads to it. To that end they form a plan to use the time distortion capabilities of a Honsun Lens to go back in time and kill the man who created the lens. As usual, the fun is in finding out whether or not they can pull it off. Recommended.

Wildflower Arts & Music Festival 2001

Friday, Susan and I spent the evening at the Wildflower Arts & Music Festival. It was mostly music. And the music was mostly 80’s bands like the Go-Gos, Flock of Seagulls, The Romantics, and a bunch of others. Overall, it wasn’t a bad deal for 10 bucks. The Go-Go’s did a nice cover of I wanna be sedated “for Joey!”.

Saturday, I was on-site all day with one of our clients who was migrating their internal DNS to a new server.

Tonight, I’ll be watching the season finale of X-Files.

Webcams, X-Files, and Punk

A new week with some interesting things ahead. The new linux kernel should have stable enough CPiA/USB support to finally try it out for webcam use. We may have some new server hardware to play with too.

The season premier of the X-Files was on last night. Turns out to be a three parter, so we still have to wait another week to finish the story. Overall though, it was fairly predictable.

I ran across an fun little Internet radio station. Fat Free Radio plays a wide variety of punk including classic bands like the Buzzcocks and more recent stuff like Jughead’s Revenge and Blink 182 (well, actually, I guess the Buzzcocks could be called recent again since Pete Shelley seems to have gotten the band back together). They’re using icecast, by the way.