Chuggnutt!

Month: February 2003

  • Clearing out the Month

    The end of the month is here already? Wow. Turn away for a moment, and the year’s already a sixth over.

    Interesting fact I learned this week in a Wired magazine article about the file-sharing software Kazaa: It’s a company decentralized and scattered around the globe: software code is housed in Estonia, the servers are in Denmark, the domain is registered in Australia, and the corporation— or pseudo-corporation, as it were— is located in the tiny South Pacific island of Vanuatu.

    The part I especially found interesting was Vanuatu itself, which is billed as a tax haven with a strict code of secrecy. Several years ago (okay, along the lines of 10 years ago!), I had a story idea that would involve this obscure little nation I found in an almanac that nobody had every really heard of before, but of course I never really did anything with it, other than file a bit of knowledge about the country away into some dark corner of my brain.

    So now, it seems a bit prescient (only to me, of course, since I never mentioned this story idea to anyone) to find this new stuff out about Vanuatu. It gets the idea gears turning again, and I’m thinking I should blow the dust off this story notion and see how well it dovetails with these new insights.

    Also this week we had a close encounter with the W32.Opaserv.Worm virus on my wife’s computer. Damn thing had been infected with three variants (in the C:Windows directory were three separate .EXE files of the virus: “brasil.exe”, “alevir.exe” and “scrsvr.exe”), and since this machine is running Windows ME (I hate Millenium Edition!!), you had to jump through four times as many hoops to kill the virus as you would for any other system. Watch out for this little bugger. It’s a pain in the ass.

    And how come nobody has registered the sweet domain mybandersnatch.com? 15 bucks on directNIC, people! (Ten points to you if you actually know what a “bandersnatch” is.)

  • The Man Without Fear

    Went and saw “Daredevil” Friday night. I liked it quite a lot, it’s worth seeing if you’re into the action/comic-book-adaption movie thing. I was especially interested as Daredevil, the comic book, has been the one comic I’ve consistently collected for, oh, the past 15 years or more. I’ll try not to spoil any critical parts of it.

    What I liked:

    • The realistic costume. No more of those 80 pound stiff rubber batsuits!
    • The realistic portrayal of a blind man going about his daily routine— folding various denominations of money in different ways to distinguish them, dark rooms (if you’re blind, why use lights?), all the braille.
    • The way they depicted DD’s “radar sense” was well done. Likewise, the fact that he spent nights in a sensory deprivation tank to give his ultra-senses a break was an excellent touch.
    • Depicting the physical strain and toll it must be to do what Daredevil does, night after night, by the scars all over his back in the shower, and pulling out a tooth (in a scene lifted neatly from “Fight Club”) in the same scene.
    • Colin Farrell as Bullseye.
    • Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson.
    • A lot of nods/tributes to the original comic, and Marvel comics in general, like: the sports center sign featuring the boxing match of Jack Murdock vs. John Romita; cops named Miller, Mack and Bendis; Kevin Smith playing a bit part as a crime lab worker named Kirby.

    What I didn’t like:

    • A few of the action/acrobat sequences had an unnatural Matrix-quality to them. I really don’t think people can jump that far, or that high…
    • Where was Stick? Or any martial arts instructor? It’s kind of hard to buy that a young Matt Murdock could have taught himself how to fight and do acrobatics so quickly…
    • Hm…. I guess there wasn’t much I didn’t like.

    Go see the movie. It’s worth it.

    And for any comic geeks reading, Frank Miller is the definitive Daredevil writer. For artists, I’m partial to David Mazzucchelli and John Romita, Jr. Following that, it pretty much goes without saying that I think the two definitive runs on Daredevil are Born Again and The Man Without Fear.

  • Priceless

    Dell Dude

    Now, if only someone could do something about those damn Dell Interns…

  • Tribute to Gharlane

    A post on Wil Wheaton’s Soapbox made me think of this.

    If you had ever spent any amount of time on Usenet prior to 2001, especially in the geek-populous (hey, I’m a geek, so I can say that) groups relating to science fiction, then you’ve probably read posts from Gharlane of Eddore. As a Usenet poster, he was probably the smartest, most prolific, and most opinionated person I’ve ever come across on Usenet, before and since. Reading his posts were always worth the time, and it’s fair to say that in many ways, Gharlane was Usenet culture.

    Sadly, he died in June of 2001.

    I’ll just quote from the post on Wil’s site:

    *sigh* I miss Gharlane…

  • More random things

    While in Portland for Kaitlyn’s surgery, we found a little bit of time to go to Goodwill to accomodate my wife’s eBay habit. Browsing through the science fiction section of their used books, I happened across a paperback Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson that was in pretty good shape. I’d been wanting this book, and for the super-low Goodwill price of $1.99 I couldn’t pass it up. So it was just icing on the cake to find out the book was also signed by the author!

    I’ve been playing with Wikipedia a lot lately, even contributing some articles and editing others. I’ve mentioned Wikipedia before, but I’ve been becoming addicted to it and had to slip in a mention again. Go check it out. You’ll be glad that you did.

    We got a new computer a little over a week ago, an eMachines from Costco. Cheap, and far better than the other computers in the house. Unfortunately, I’m still not completely caught up with installing all my old software to it, so my Palm eBook “project” has been delayed. Rest assured, it will be continued again. Soon, I hope.

    PHP rocks. Yeah, I just had to slip that in there.

  • Frustration

    Two days ago my daughter Kaitlyn underwent surgery on her eyes to correct her congenital esotropia (lazy eye). This was the second surgery for her, the first occuring when she was only six months old (she’s three now). We drove up to Portland Wednesday afternoon, had dinner with our good friends Justin and Raegan, and had the surgery Thursday at Casey Eye Institute.

    Turned out to be an even worse day than we’d imagined; Kaitlyn had a pre-op appointment at 11:00, to be followed (we thought) by surgery at approximately 12 noon. Unfortunately, the appointment ran long, and the doctor told us the surgery would be around 1:30 or 2:00, as a baby was in surgery ahead of us.

    Well, it wasn’t 1:30, and it wasn’t 2:00 either. We got bumped again, and finally Kaitlyn went into surgery right about 3:00. At that point, we had been pretty much led to believe that we’d be getting into surgery between 2:00 and 2:30, because they let us bring Kaitlyn back at about 1:30 for an oral sedative to calm her down, which she needed because she was completely freaked out about the whole deal. So, from about 1:30 to 3:00, I held Kaitlyn (who was groggy with sedative, but fighting it), waiting for surgery to start and desperately hoping it would be soon so we could get the hell out of there.

    The thing is, we were apparently originally on the schedule for a 2:30 surgery to begin with, but nobody told us that— we were led to believe she’d go into surgery around noon right after her pre-op. No one told us otherwise, until after we got there and checked in for surgery. And since patients can’t have any food for six hour prior to surgery, we had to get Kaitlyn up to have a light breakfast at 5:30 that morning. So when they finally took her in, she’d been without food for 9 hours.

    She’s doing fine now, and her eyes are red but straight. It’s amazing how fast kids bounce back from something like this. Still, I’m not happy with the runaround on the day of surgery. If they schedule us at 2:30, fine. If a young baby has priority over us, fine. But nobody told us until it was too late. That’s what burns me up. We were there jumping through the hoops they laid out for us, but they didn’t even have their shit together enough to tell us what was going on.

    Enough venting. Kaitlyn is good, things are good and the whole ordeal is behind us.