Month: August 2003

A Pirate’s Life For Me

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I just saw Pirates of the Carribean, the movie based on the ride. And, while there were parts that were a little stupid (Captain Sparrow insisting that he loves the theme song and wants to sing it over and over), it was for the most part like the ride made into a movie, except good. I liked it, anyway. The main characters had a high “who cares” value, but Johnny Depp was fuckin awesome. Just rad. And Geoffrey Rush as the villain was great too.

I’ve heard that Disney is making more of these “movies based on the ride” things- e.g. The Haunted Mansion– but you know what would be too awesome? A movie of It’s A Small World. A horror movie. The trailer would go something like:

TITLES: It’s a world of laughter
VISUAL: a carload of DRUNKEN TEENAGERS drives into a small town at night.
TEENAGED GIRL: Wooo!

VOICEOVER: A world of tears
TEENAGED GIRL: (crying and hitting boyfriend) It’s YOUR fault we’re stuck here!

VOICEOVER: It’s a world of hopes…
BOYFRIEND #2 stares around him, in awe, in an abandoned cathedral. Sunlight streams through holes in the ceiling.
BOYFRIEND #2: What happened to this place?

VOICEOVER: … and a world of fears
Quick POV flash of one of the girls being attacked by something 2 feet tall

VOICEOVER: There’s so much that we share
GIRL is lost in the dark somewhere
GIRL: Jerry?

VOICEOVER: That it’s time we’re aware
GIRL and BOYFRIEND #1 clutch their sputtering candles with bloody rag-covered hands in the dark- a flash of lightning outside illuminates thousands of round-headed grinning dolls sloooooowly closing in on them.

VOICEOVER: it’s a small,
Jump cut of someone’s paniced eyes

VOICEOVER: small,
Jump cut of about to get axed in the back

VOICEOVER: world.
Camera rotates around REMAINING TEENAGERS as they frantically look around them- they are in a giant hall filled with laughing singing dolls- it is HELL.
GIRL: No! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
DOLLS: Heehee hee hee!

Mariachi

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There’s a Mariachi conert on public TV right now. I’m not a particular fan of mariachi, but it seems to me the real value of that genre, like accordion polka, is the sheer annoyance factor. You know:

You’re at a nice restaurant that serves $20 chicken mole with your date, you’re trying to make a good impression, and suddenly a giant guy in a ridiculously large sombrero and an acoustic bass guitar the size of a coffin screams joyfully “AH- HA HA HA!” and just as suddenly an entire band materializes around him, including trumpet players, blasting shrilly while you and your date confusedly try to “appreciate culture” and wonder when they’re going to leave. Or how about:

You’re studying for finals. You’ve got a massive hangover and this math or physics or whatever problem which was just on the edge of solvability last week in lecture now looks like it was written by space aliens, or in Chinese, or by Chinese space aliens. Juuuust as you think you might know at least which part of the book you should be reading, you hear the goofy baseline outside your window- it’s almost like the theme to “Jaws”- something is coming and you kind of know what it is, but aren’t really paying attention because of this studying thing- A trumpet blasts! you look outside and it turns out there is some wild drunken birthday party at the mostly-nonstudent apartment complex and yes, they have brought in an entire mariachi band. Aaargh!

BUT. In this case, the concert was just… sterile. The players are all in their Mexican finery (dark suits with the white lace stitched on), playing for a mostly white audience, who I am certain are not drunk off their asses. The band members are all safely far away from the crowd, behind microphones. It’s like an exhibit of stuffed tigers. Usually when you hear this music it’s either “oh my god I wish they’d go away” or “wooo! WOOOO! I’m TOTALLY DRUNK OFF MY ASS! Where is my top? There’s a video camera! Wooooo! This is the best MTV Spring Break Ever!!!” But here it’s more like “Oh how quaint! Look at the brown people! I hope you’re enjoying this Tricia, these tickets were expensive. Oh dear me, you aren’t going to drink that red with the FISH are you?”

Bah!

Ideal Work Environment

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OPTION #1: Papasan with remote keyboard and trackball. With immense monitor reasonably close by of course. Sort of similar to using a Web TV.
OPTION #2: the coffee house approach- little round one-preson tables, squishy chairs, laptops with wireless. Indirect (dimmer) lighting, wacky art on the wall, maybe carpeting or even a rack of ‘zines on the wall. No cubes, big open space. Maybe for bonus points next to the big windows. I totally wish my office would do this. Maybe that’s more suited to a startup…

Office furniture can go WAY too far. I’m not just talking about the Herman-Miller Aeron.

KIRBY: do you know how fat you could get with one of these?
BRIAN: totally
KIRBY: I don’t like how the tower sits next to your crotch
BRIAN: I was just thinking how it looks like a sexual torture device
KIRBY: Nazi death rape machine
BRIAN: a $4000 Nazi death rape machine

Yet Another Technocratic Divide

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Installing some more plugins on our Movable Type server here… I want to put links to amazon for the books I’ve been reading, the music I’ve been listening to, movies I’ve rented, etc… I was just about to write my own perl client to interface with Amazon’s “web services” which would let me link to their stuff and not host any images etc on my server. This would be fairly complex but fairly quick (maybe a single evening to write, another evening to debug).

Then it turns out someone has already written such a thing- MTAmazon. Except guess what- it doesn’t support per-entry tags. That is, using it, you would only really get to have them in your “template”, or the non-dynamic part of the site. It’s just like having a static “home page” of the past decade- want to change your list of “Top 5 British Invasion Covers By Female Punk Bands” ? You have to go into the template and edit your list. As opposed to just posting a new entry in a special category, as seen in the “Daily Links” on the right.

So I was thinking, what the hell- why not just put that in? Then I realised it might be a limitation in MT itself… looking through their message boards, this has indeed been requested a few times. But their answer- “well you can work around this by adding [yet another] library module, MTMacro.”

Geez. Basically it’s going to be like 2 people able to do this, because either no one will care or no one will be capable of installing all this gear. Those who don’t CARE enough, ok whatever with them. But content providers won’t be able to use it, because it requires major hacking… which means they get no Amazon sales.

Is it simple Puritain Work Ethic? More work = more reward? Or is it the “I got mine” philosophy? “I got it to work, so I don’t see what you’re problem is.” No effort is expended to make something easier, because hey, it works for me!

Anyway to make this story even longer the guy who does MTMacro has some kind of loopy pop-up interface for his Amazon links, which, yes, require ANOTHER library to be installed. Whatever!

NoYOU Heva teh Porblem

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What does it look like when you touch-type drunk?

SOBER: I found that reality show on tape- the one danh used to talk about where the naked guy is kept prisoner until he gets a million yen in mail prizes
BLASTED: dont’ give me shit you leeeeeetle bitch
BLASTED: hjszg ox zsdxo,d
BLASTED: ghzg ix zsdo0xm,d
BLASTED: ghzg ix zsdomxd
BLASTED: ghzg
BLASTED: hat
SOBER: damn G you’re fully unhinged
BLASTED: that is zsedomxed
BLASTED: that is aweomse!
SOBER: git on up! hat!~
BLASTED: i will type until it comes out right!
SOBER: ooooh you were touch-typing
BLASTED: yesh
BLASTED: fuck some nbitches
BLASTED: fuck em!
SOBER: funny
BLASTED: span that ass!
BLASTED: spank
SOBER: fuck em in the ear!~
BLASTED: back that sas up!

Amazon in blog

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Amazon web services:

  • There are 2 options, one where you just host images yourself, and the webservices version,
    where the entire content comes from amazon.com
  • Problem: the iframe served is BIG and the URL is thus far difficult to parse

Give it up, you know you just want it in Blog: What I want is a special category “Amazon” for postings, with the “Excerpt” field containing an ASIN and the main body / maybe the extended body containing a review article.

Those fucking bitches. Turns out this functionality was in here the entire time… it’s just wholly undocumented! The only way I found out about it was by looking through the perl code when I was planning on writing the new functionality myself!!! Okay here’s the deal:

  1. Suppose your search string (e.g. your Asin string for a particular book) will always be in one field in your MTEntry
  2. Make a listing of your entries using MTEntries, just like normal
  3. Now use MTAmazon within the entry. Except instead of filling out something in the “search” field,
    use the attribute “related” instead
  4. “related” can be:
    • category
    • title
    • extended
    • excerpt
  5. The MTAmazon tag will use that field in the list of entries for the search string, one per Amazon invocation
  6. So, in the case of a simple listing which only uses a search string from the blog entry,
    with everything else being generated by MTAmazon, there will be NO MTEntry tags in your template code for this list!

I Think I Have PMS

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BRIAN: I’m sore all over and really fuckin tired
BRIAN: I want to go back to bed
SHAC: bah thats me every morning
BRIAN: you have the flu every morning?
SHAC: i guess
SHAC: im sore all over and tired
BRIAN: do you feel like peeing out of your ass?
SHAC: have you been taking estrogen?
BRIAN: you think it’s PMS?
SHAC: yeh
BRIAN: you may have something there
SHAC: if you start yelling at me for no reason… definitely pms
SHAC: let me know when everything is my fault
BRIAN: FUCK YOU! YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID!
LIL DY: that aint right
LIL DY: tell him it is always his fault just cause
LIL DY: and he has now made you cry cause he is so insentive
LIL DY: then it will be PMS