Leaving for Canyon in the morning (bright and early at 7:30 am). Should be there around 11am. I still haven’t packed or know if I still have laundry to do. Could be a short night. I’m going to try to procrastinate doing laundry as much as possible by organizing and posting photos. :)

I was trying to remember all the movies I’ve watching that I haven’t posted about. I thought there were more, but I can’t remember any more. I have a couple of oldies sitting by the tv I really need to watch, but spend most of my free tv time trying to get through JAG.

• Disturbia. Not like Rear Window (which was good). Decent movie though, good commentary. The chick was uber-hot (and apparently single at the time of the taping of the commentary…).
• The Best Years of Our Lives. Cool movie that’s still relevant today.
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This one’s a keeper, pilgrim.
• The Birds. I thought it not as good as is generally accepted. I “watched” it before in my music in movies appreciation class, but slept through most of it. :)
• Jaws. I have no recollection of watching this in its entirely before, but just did. A classic.

Man, I have too many movies to watch still…

I liked it better when it was called Children of Men/Mummy/Signs. Would not consider it deserving of its current IMDb rating of 7.9…

I’m totally posting this to make sure I have a post in December. :)

I have for quite some time been in want of a Greasemonkey script to display IMDB movie ratings on Google Movies. I finally ran across the Inline IMDB ratings script. I seasoned it to taste, and the result was Google Movies Inline IMDB ratings. I tried to optimize it so that it would just query the IMDB page once per movie, but it could probably still use a little optimization… Perhaps someone else on the intarwebs will find it useful. :)

Technorati Tags: google, movies, imdb, ratings, greasemonkey

Again I’ve been remiss in posting. Lately I’ve caught up a bunch on somewhat of a movie backlog. I’ve watched:

• Charade, which was very good
• Maltese Falcon, which I realized half way through I had seen before, but hadn’t remembered. :( I guess that means that I wasn’t to impressed. But it was good. I wonder why I had forgotten I watched it before…
• Eurotrip, which was good and better than expected
• This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which, while interesting, wasn’t all that well put together, I thought. Not nearly as compelling as Supersize Me.

The past week I also started listening to the 1920s Radio Network on the world wide web. The music is pretty soothing; mostly standard big band tunes. And when it gets late they do radio theatre. Where I learned that Dragnet first started as a radio show, which I never knew before. I guess that makes the sketch Jack Webb did with Johnny Carson on the Carson Show about clapper make a whole lot more sense. :)

I’ve been quite remiss in updates of late. I’ve had two major trips, since I wrote last. One to see my new niece, and the other to Durham, NC for the East Coast Wesleyite Meetup. Both exceeded expectations.

Getting to see the newest member of the Garner clan was pretty cool. The first of our immediate family’s next generation. I guess that she already has a couple of 3rd cousins in the age-range ballpark… Anyway it was good. A short visit, leaving Saturday morning, getting the early afternoon and leaving Sunday night. Good and short and sweet. Pictures will be forthcoming (of what few ones I will actually consider posting…).

What’s probably more interesting than me getting to hold my niece while she slept endlessly was part of the plane ride back. I’m not sure what kind of jet the leg was from Amarillo to DFW, but there were two sets of two seats, with an aisle down the middle. My seat was next to a young lady, traveling back to Louisiana. Anyway, the interesting part of this story is that we talked for the entire flight. We started chatting before takeoff and didn’t stop until I walked her to her next gate (only after which I realized I had walked 10 gates in the exact opposite direction of my gate). It was rather refreshing and encouraging that I could sustain a conversation and vice versa, something I was all but convinced might be outside the realm of my abilities. And while I may never hear from or speak to her again, I will always take the practice. :)

The newest tradition of the semi-annual East Coast Wesleyite Meetup was really nice. I guess we’ll continue having it (until everyone leaves the east cost, which might be sooner than you’d think). It was just really nice to be able to sit around with people who’ve known you so well for so long and and just be. There was the movie watching, the watching of the Kansas game, and the copious amounts of 42 (and staying up too late). :) Lots of theological discussion, even more so than I remember traditionally at Wesley (what else would you expect from the majority of our party being in seminary…). The drive was totally worth it (6 hrs going and 5.5 coming back) and wasn’t tiring or bad. Having to drive all that way even forced me to finally get new tires, but oh brother are tires expensive. I definitely look forward to the next one where I can get to see again Robert, T.J., Jeremy, Erin, and the honorary Wesleyite for the weekend, Ryan (Jeremy’s roomate).

Not the most eloquent of posts, but it’ll have to do…

Dashboard Confessional’s Don’t Wait.

I couldn’t stand it anymore last weekend. I took most of the day on Sunday the 7th to clean the apartment. It was time. I managed to clean the floors, the toilet, and the tub, but no counters or sinks. I actually cleaned the Formica in the kitchen and bathroom on my hands and knees since I don’t have a mop, and fastidiously vacuumed the carpet (although I don’t know how much it helped). Towards the end I was wishing that I some of that pre-vacuum powdery stuff to freshen up the place. Maybe I should get some candles to smell up the place, too…

I will be in Canyon over this coming weekend, flying in Saturday and flying out Sunday so I can see the new niece. I’m not staying long this trip, but I’ll be back once a month for three months straight, so I can’t see much complaining.

I’ve spent most of this weekend and last week trying to get a few more systems up and working at home. I got hadoop working on a couple of Xen nodes, so that was cool. I got their demos to work, but then I couldn’t really think of anything to do with the new found programming platform, so it’s gone unused. I’ve also been trying to get SSL working for ldap. I think I’m finally starting to understand the whole certificate authority and SSL at a macro level, but there’s always still more to learn. I was maybe hoping to get ldap over SSL working pretty well and maybe even kerberized nfs working, and I’ve made some progress, but not as much as I’d like.

I also managed to actually watch a movie. I don’t know how long I’ve had the Maltese Falcon from Netflix, but by now it’s probably been months. I saw “CashBack”, which was ok. A decent independent film, which had its moments, but not too much to write home about. I also finally tried to play “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” but it had a deformity in the disc, so it was unplayable. I’ve been slowly going through JAG, and am currently in season 3. I guess on the surface it’s a pretty cheesy show (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but it has some long running allusions and story lines that are slowly unraveling, which is why I’m watching in the first place. I guess that I could read online what happens in the end, but where’s the fun in that? Anyway, it’s nice to have this very episodic show carry on these threads and morsels they pay off every once in a while. What was quite odd, though, was the very last episode of season 1. I watched this episode, not knowing anything about it. It was a cliffhanger at the end of the season. To be expected, correct? Well, I start watching the next season, and it doesn’t pick up where it left off. I check online, and it was never aired and the conclusion never written. I was miffed to say that least. Well, they didn’t totally forget about it and actually reused it, re-wrote the story and made a whole new episode out of. Not too bad if you ask me, as there were definitely some tricky and very fine lines to walk to pull it off, which I think they did.

Anyway, it’s 3am. Why am I still awake?

I have a niece.
That is all.

Scrubs starts Oct 25, Battlestar Galactica returns Nov 24, but wtf?! Lost returns Feb 2008. Why must Lost continue to do this to us?

In other news, you band nerds out there might have run across a teaching book called Fussell Exercises for Ensemble Drill. Lately I’ve been longing for the good olde days when I played everday and was in practice. I think it’s directly correlated to all of the JAG I’ve been watching, with a march in every episode. So, in the string of books I wished I hadn’t sold back to the bookstore (even though I never owned this one — I should have stolen it :) ), I went ahead and bought it online. I chose a retailer on brand recognition (JW Pepper). I pick ground shipping because I don’t need it right away. A couple of days pass, and it arrives at my doorstep. I think in passing, wow, that was fast. I open up the envelope, and it has a return label (because they’re efficient), and I notice that it says Lithia Springs as the city. I think to myself, hmm that’s odd; they printed the wrong city and accidentally printed my city. Then, I look at some of the other documentation and realize that my music was in fact shipped from what can be no greater than 2 miles from my house. I spent $5 on ground shipping, which represented more than half of what the book actually cost. Had I known, I could have just drove by there, as I pass by them like everyday. What’s even more curious is the fact that they are a stones throw away from a FedEx depot. I guess they have their reasons, but if it was me, from a logistics perspective, I’d have gone with FedEx instead of UPS. :)