Call it cliche, but the “greatest film about film ever made,” 8 1/2, has become one of my favorite movies. It really is an unbelievably directed movie, and despite the language barrier (wearing thinner every day!), I was really able to connect with the characters. More amazing is that this is the first film to be self-referential to such a high degree, a style that, I think, has been copied ever since (i.e. Adaptation, which I also liked). But I really loved the scenes from Guido’s childhood and how magical they felt with such simple cinematography. There were no special effects or anything, but some sequences (especially the opening one) had such an uncanny dream-like feel. Anyway, it’s really a great film.
Category: Personal
A Patriot Act
I watched Mark Crispin Miller’s “A Patriot Act” on DVD last night, per my Dad’s recommendation. Check out its website if you like.
Absolutely tremendous show. It basically paints the Republicans in the White House for what they are: religious zealots trying to merge the church and state. Even though this was performed before the election, watching it now, after, Bush has won, made me a bit depressed. I should be storming Washington right now.
Laptop returns, cpufreq actually works
My Dad’s really awesome sometimes. In a previous post, I talked about how my laptop’s screen cracked due to a friend’s drunken behavior. Well, my Dad did me a favor and swapped the old HD out of my broken laptop and put it into the new one I got. So now I’m running Linux as if nothing broke.
Here’s another crazy thing… I thought my laptop didn’t have cpu frequency scaling support, but I was actually wrong. It’s just that I didn’t have all the kernel modules I needed loaded. It turns out I can scale the CPU on this laptop from 400mhz up to its max of 1.7Ghz! This is awesome because power consumption goes way down, laptop stays cooler, etc.
Plus, someone wrote an excellent piece of software to do this scaling automatically depending on load and remaining battery power. Temperature readings still come in as 0 degrees celsius, but I decided temp readouts are unnecessary anyway. The BIOS does a good job managing the fan. Yay new laptop! Back to work on my paper.
The “Tyranny of Time”
I’ve been meaning to update that last post with more analysis of Bush’s speech, but the tyranny of time crept up upon me. So much work, so quickly!
In more fun news, two days ago I spent two hours in Union Square listening to various [somewhat deranged] speakers talk about “the police state” and how “communism is the solution.” It got me angry how little these speakers focused on (what I think are) the most important issues surrounding not just this election, but this country’s future: the continual rise in power of corporations.
Anyway, I eventually was given the megaphone (“Andrew, what has come over you?”) and gave my best impromptu speech on why corporate power is ruling this country, and more broadly, the world, and how distorted neoliberal (or libertarian) economic policy is, in terms of the current brand of pro-corporate globalization being a true “race to the bottom.”
Got quite a few cheers out of the crowd, which felt good. Not really good in the egocentric “I can rile up a crowd” sense. Good in the sense that some people actually care that corporations are, in many senses, running their lives.
Then I watched some Lou Dobbs last night that confirmed a lot of what I spoke about, at least confirmed it in my and Lou Dobbs’ world. But that’s good enough for me.
Good chair for bad back
Unfahrenheit 9/11?
So, Christopher Hitchens has written this response to Fahrenheit 9/11. I just finished reading it.
(Silly side note: I bookmarked this link before I saw the movie, so I that I could read it afterwards. I really didn’t understand the title at all, until Olivia informed me that it’s meant to be pronounced “Unfair – enheit 9/11.” I felt silly, but I guess it comes from the fact that I pronounce it FAR-EN-HEIT, rather than FAIR-E-HEIT. Apparently, I’m not so insane, since my pronounciation is Dictionary.com’s recomendation, as well. They recomend pronouncing the “a” like “father” or “pat.” Not that this means anything in particular, I just think an editor could have come up with a better title!)
So, for the most part, Hitchens’ article does present some of the problems with Mike’s film. We all know (all of us who have seen it) that it was a bit dramatized, a bit over the top, and a bit of propaganda. It was meant to be an emotional rollercoaster: to get us angry and sad, riled up for election time. In this sense, the film was effective. But I can see why you might find it unfair. Mike shows us every clip he can find of how the Iraq war is horrible, of how Bush is a horrible president, etc. without ever throwing in clips that speak to the opposite conclusion. I guess the problem with Mike’s film is that it is not “balanced.” It is simply not the way I would have set out to direct a similar documentary. But, in all honesty, Hitchens’ article is similarly flawed…
On keeping things
You know, my philosophy about buying things used to be, never buy high-end because you’ll always have to replace it/upgrade it within a few months. But now I’m starting to reject that whole idea entirely.
I mean, I’ve already posted on other sites about how new PDAs don’t impress me because I still use a Palm Vx and it does everything I need in a PDA, and then some. Everything I need. No, it doesn’t play seven or eight MP3s in its Flash memory. No, it doesn’t play video clips I record with the tiny video camera embedded in the back. No, it doesn’t connect to wireless internet access if hotspots are available.
Nope, all it does is keep track of my todo lists, download articles from AvantGo and download maps, directions and listings from Vindigo. I can also set reminders, create shopping lists, and play DopeWars. All in 8MB of RAM. Plus, it’s thin, it’s beautiful, and it’s made in the USA.
Now that computers keep getting faster and faster and most software is not proportionally taking advantage of it, I find it easier to say, “Okay, I’ll have this computer for a few years.” That’s a good thing. In retrospect, these last five years have moved so quickly that it really made us geeks spend a ton of cash. I mean, I’m on a 2.6Ghz machine with a gig of RAM. I never use more than 300MB of RAM unless I’m running VMWare (which I’ll admit, is often nowadays). My CPU never gets cranked unless I’m doing video processing. I mean, things aren’t as speedy as perhaps they should be (I/O being the bottleneck), but I haven’t felt my computer “lagging” in years.
As a side note to that, software needs to get smarter. At 2.6Ghz of raw power, my computer should be doing more for me automatically 🙂
Murphy’s Law: Murphy was an optimist
Well, I have to hand it to you, Murphy. I really wasn’t expecting it this time. But you managed to do it. I thought I was free, but clearly I was not.
It’s 5:44am, the birds are starting to chirp, and here I am, finally with a working computer. I am still not entirely sure why it works now. I believe that the clips on the HT800 CPU cooler push down to hard on the CPU or the socket, and are causing instability problems. It doesn’t surprise me. Right now I have the clips off and it boots every time. I put the clips on and it doesn’t boot. I’m pretty sure it’s not coincidental. It’s also the only thing that has changed.
In any event, this has significantly slowed down my work on the summer project, but I’m going to make it up by working all weekend. 
The question becomes, how am I gonna clip this CPU cooler to the motherboard without causing the instability? I tried only using 2 clips but that seems not to work either. And I can’t even lift up the HT800 since the thermal paste is acting as an adhesive (maybe I did too good a job?). In fact, I’m starting to think perhaps I put too much thermal paste, and that’s why the CPU is getting crushed. I guess things like that really make a difference when you’re talking millimeters.
Throughout all of this, I thought the reason for POST failure was: (a) thermal paste hotspots again; (b) BIOS issues with the installed video card, causing me to do CMOS resets about 40 times with mixed results; (c) bad memory, becuase sometimes taking a DIMM out helped; (d) bad IDE controller, because sometimes removing the drives helped. In all a-d, I believe I was wrong. This was Murphy playing games with me. He gave me four red herrings. The problem, I’m sure, was the clips all along, but Murphy took me for a ride and provided the coincidences to make it possible. All-expense paid trip into my own personal hell: a malfunctioning computer with all my data on it.
I am still not entirely sure of my theory. If Murphy breaks it here, though, I will be quite upset. What a bastard he can be.
Tomorrow I have to do UAC work all day. It’s imperative. Hopefully it’ll keep booting so I don’t have to use the Mac.
SSL and high school reunion
Been reading the SSL Certificates HOWTO to learn a bit for my summer employment (which will require SSL communications). Nice because here my college education is actually helping, in that things I learned in my Discrete Math class are showing up.
Yesterday in the wee hours of the morning, I was getting bored researching this stuff, and so I googled one of my good friends from high school, David Krauss, an extremely talented computer engineer who knew PPC assembler and was fluent in C (and when I say fluent, I mean it) at the tender age of 15. A die-hard Mac lover with so much knowledge, I always wished and hoped he would get a job at Apple. And, it turns out, he did. That makes me happy. The world is somewhat just, it seems.
If you want something done right…
You know the rest.
Well, I got my video card, and definitely needed new holes drilled in my side panels. Unable to find a usable drill press, I decided to bring it to a local glass shop, as I mentioned before.
The guy acted like he could handle it, and said it was completely “feasible,” but that he’d have to “look it over tomorrow.” So I left the panels with him. I called him twice the next morning to see if he still thought it was possible, and to suggest I reduce the drill pattern to make it easier for him. No responses. He disappeared until 5pm or so. When I called him back he said he was “done.” I couldn’t believe it. Could the side panels be finished already? He said they “looked good,” there was just “a little shelling.” (Ok, so I can’t expect something like this).
Holy shit. A little shelling? He ruined my side panels!…