Miyazaki film festival on TCM

From BoingBoing:

Miyazaki film festival on TCM

Cartoon Brew says there will be a Miyazaki film festival on TCM in January. Nine of Miyazaki's animated movies will air.

This is the package of Studio Ghibli features that Disney acquired, which includes Spirited Away, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso and Whisper of the Heart. No word if TCM is going to run them subtitled or dubbed. This is probably timed to remind Academy voters to consider Howl's Moving Castle for Best Animated Feature. While I'm not crazy about TCM showing anything after 1970, I do admit Miyazaki's works are true modern classics.

CartoonBrew link
BoingBoing link

Woot! I'm really looking forward to this! There are 3 in there I've never seen, and don't recall having been easily available on home video. Time to crank up the Myth box.

-B

Sold my soul to the devil...

Yes, it's true. I've gone to the dark side, and all just for a sweet techno-tchotchke. Well, a sweet tecno-tchotchke and the apparently the best cell network in the area.

I just got a Motorola e815 (through Amazon - gotta love those rebates!) and a two-year sentence contract with Verizon. I have very mixed feelings about this, as I've heard more horror stories about Verizon than any other service provider out there. I think that they're not particularly more or less evil than the average wireless provider out there, but that they just have more customers to complain. I do think they have a greedy, non-customer-centric business model, but all I really need them for is a good phone and good network coverage. Everything else is just a seem edit away from being as Motorola intended it.

So yesterday started our 2-week worry-free trial, after which it's good-bye Alltel, hello Verizon. I'll miss Alltel, as they've always been great to deal with. I just can't take marginal- to no coverage at home and in my office. If I can't use my phone where I spend most of my time, why pay for it?

-Bill

CNN.com - Fire destroys 'Wallace and Gromit' warehouse - Oct 10, 2005

How sad. And this just after they got the weekend box office record w/ $16mil.

Fire destroys 'Wallace and Gromit' warehouse - Oct 10, 2005
"BRISTOL, England -- The company behind the new 'Wallace and Gromit' film said Monday its 'entire history' has been destroyed in a fire at a warehouse containing props and sets." CNN.com

But I think Nick Parks, they guy who created Wallace and Gromit, had a great perspective on this.

"Even though it is a precious and nostalgic collection and valuable to the company, in light of other tragedies, today isn't a big deal," he said.

Old Man's Eyes

"Starting around the age of forty or so, the ability to focus on closer objects decreases - books and newspapers have to be held farther away to bring them into clear focus. This is probably the first sign of the condition called presbyopia (from Greek words meaning "old man's eyes"). Another sign of presbyopia is that people's ability to refocus quickly between near and far objects decreases."

This becomes painfully apparent when Bon brings something to me and says "Here, look at this!" and puts it six inches from my nose. I used to be able to focus that close, but now find myself taking whatever it is and moving it out to 16 inches or so. Sigh. I'm getting old man's eyes.

quote from http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/office/computer_glasses.html

Drama on row R, section 16

Susie and me (I? myself? whatever...) went to go see the Rolling Stones last night. Fabulous show - everything you'd expect from the Stones. They rock, even at age 62 (Mick), and I'm very glad that Susie talked me into going. We talked about what a Stones show would look like at some place much smaller, like Cat's Cradle, and while I thought it'd be a killer show, she thought it'd suck for Mick to be trapped on such a small stage. $65/ea for seats just about as far from the stage as you could possibly be still seems outrageous for a concert, but I guess that just shows my age.
I know it sounds weird, but I had almost as much fun watching this little human drama unfold on the row in front of us. All folks involved looked like Duke students, which wasn't too surprising. The girl in the cute plaid skirt (cps, henceforth) and the guy in the orange shirt (os) were sitting in front of us and to the right a bit. She was cute, he looked like you average casually dressed college kid. After the Stones started their set, I noticed her crouched down, sneaking a drag (or 3) from a joint from the guy in front of her. After that, she starts bouncing around and dancing with everyone near her. (Perfect attitude to have for a concert, btw.) Everyone, that is except her date, Mr. Orange Shirt. He seemed to be enjoying the show, but slightly annoyed at his dancing date. Ms. cps ends up dancing with Mr. Green Shirt 1 (gs1). He looked like a Duke frat person, and he was in the company of gs2, gs3, and (possibly) gs4. So cps danced with gs1 a lot, with lots of other fun, flirtatious stuff along the way. The more they danced, the more annoyed os got. Os tried to talk to her at one point and tell her he wasn't happy with her behavior, and from what I can tell, she told him to relax / f-off, after which she resumed dancing w/ gs1. As the concert drew to a close, cps noticed os was upset about something and tried to find out what, only to get the brush-off. Cps then stopped dancing with gs1 and tried to console os (talking to him, trying to nibble on his ear, kiss him) but he'd have none of it. When we left, they were still sitting there, settling into a nice breakup argument. To her credit, she was talking to him, rather than going home with gs1 and friends. I think cps was a bit of a skank for abandoning her date for someone else, while he was still there. I think os was a bit of an uncommunicative stick-in-the-mud for not dancing with her himself, and not having their relationship ground rules worked out better up front. Susie said "I'm glad I'm not that age anymore." Yeah, it's amazing what 15 years and a couple of landmark course will do for you.

Cheers,
-B

Kungaloosh Recipe

Original Kungaloosh Recipe -- Circa 1997

1 1/4 ounce vodka
1 1/4 ounce Malibu Rum
3/4 ounce Midori (melon liqueur)
2 tablespoons pineapple juice
1 splash cranberry juice

Mix well with ice or freeze. Yell kungaloosh! Drink deeply. Repeat as necessary.

Found at Kungaloosh Recipes -- Adventurers Club

Sheesh....

I really need to get off my butt and actually post something here. I find myself avoiding doing it (why?), and then dreading posting because it's been sooo long since I've posted, so it's self perpetuating. So, here I am running my mouth, saying not much of anything.

Not that I get that anybody else has ever read this. Yell if you read this post!!

-sbh

Richard Koch's 80/20 rules

A nifty read. A bunch of common-sense ways to get more out of life.

Learn to live the 80/20 way

OSCON 2005 Day 1 - The Ruby/Rails tutorials

Hi from Portland again. It's beautiful here, and something about the place makes me wish I had a bike here.

Day 1 Tutorials I attend were Dave Thomas's Intro to Ruby and David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails - Enjoying the Riding of Programming.

Intro to Ruby was great. Dave is a great presenter and put on a great talk. It was well paced and did a great job of teaching Ruby from the ground up. It's a beautiful, elegant language and seems to be capable of great things in a very straightforward way.

I have really mixed feelings about David Hansson's Rails talk. He clearly knows his stuff.... heck, he wrote Rails while growing Backpack at 37signals. And there's no denying Rails is a great platform to devleop for. I'm having great fun trying it out and seeing what it can do. David's presentation was very much a whirlwind tech demo, and very much not a tutorial. It was great to see how someone very skilled could do very elegant things with Rails very simply and quickly. Rails just rocks. But the tutorial sucked if evaluated as a tutorial. There was no real structure, there was no way to take notes, next to no way to follow along on my own laptop, and it was difficult to walk out with anything approaching useful skills to get Rails going.

One other thing I learned on my own trying out O'reilly's Rails demo was that the default Ruby install with FC4 is missing something (an exception declaration?) that keeps rails from running completely. It runs enough to sorta work, but not enough to actually run controllers and the like. I pulled down and built Ruby from source and everything was great.

Portland, day 2

Day 2 was a blast.

We tracked down had breakfast at Arnolds (a great local-chain), grabbed tasty munchies at Trader Joe's, found REI and blew some time there, and spent an insane amount of time driving around Hood Mtn National Forest looking for Bagby Hot Springs. (Notice a trend here with the 'getting lost' thing? Me too.) Despite less than ideal directions, and a couple hours of fruitless exploring, we finally found it and it was fantastic! It turns out we weren't that far from it in the first place, and in our exploring, we hadn't actually backtracked enough to find it.

Up next: OSCON 2005 - Day 1

Hello from Portland!

Yay! Am in Portland w/ my darling wife Susie, and we had a great day. We toured the city... got lost... drank a bunch of good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival... got shaken down by a druggie in Chinatown... (finally!) saw Hitchhiker's Guide at the Bagdad Theatre.

I'm out here for OSSCON this week, and it should be a blast. More on that as it happens.

Remarkable Tsunami pictures

This guy put together before / after pictures of the Tsunami damage.

Tsunami - Receding waters, Kalutara Beach, Sri Lanka

You really get an idea of how bad the damage really was looking at these. What would your town look like after this sort of damage?

-Bill