Ancient history
I might have lost my mind. After the failure of Diary-X I had to consider the worth of what was lost. A lot of memories. It's no secret, my long-term memory is shot. Over the years people I knew have become ghosts that haunt me everytime I think I see a familiar face. Memories distort and fade away. It's a big reason I continue journaling everything. I can go back and read old entries and just remember. When Diary-X died it took the first two years of my journals with it. I had no backups, I just always assumed that old stuff would always be there and now it's gone.
So I've brought back those entries I made since Diary-X. They've all been imported and dumped into the "old" category before I consider delving into categorize every single one of those three-hundredsomething entries. And they're almost all here, I think. Some may have been lost in some early blog-engine changes but I've got everything out of Movable Type and Livejournal. They're probably an enormous mess but this is my land of Do-As-You-Please and they're my enormous mess. Enjoy!
Wreckage
Yesterday Matt and Katie and I went driving around to see where we could still go, what was still open, and what was trashed. We brought the camera and got a bunch of pictures that I'll be sharing as soon as Katie comes back from breakfast.
It's insane out there. Both game stores are closed because of the damage, Springfield Game Store still being intact and Battlegrounds being nearly destroyed. In some parts there's power lines and phone poles lying in the streets. There's pieces of roofing or siding wrapped around the tops of phone poles. There's two hotels that were pretty new that were almost gutted entirely. Power is out sporadically all over ther place. There's lots of places I couldn't get to just because I couldn't get my car around the damage without taking it offroad and my saturn wasn't made for that kind of stuff. It really makes me wish I had the polaris I use to tool around the base in Iraq here.
V for Vendetta
I saw the preview for this almost as soon as I got back in the states. I've read the hype. Awesome comic book translated into reality by those masters of cinema, the Wachowski brothers. Or should it be the Wachowski siblings, seeing as one is transforming into a female? Well they botched the end of the Matrix trilogy, why not hand them a work of graphic novel art and see how badly they can crap on that as well?
So I pirated the V for Vendetta comic books. The internet is a fantastic thing and Katie won't let me buy the trade paperback until after the 15th. And it's good, the story is a little simplistic when compared to other well-loved comic book miniseries' but it's well drawn, well written, and consistant.
The problem is that the trailer makes the movie look like an action flick along the lines of the Matrix. I think The Matrix is even mentioned in the trailer, though only to lend some kind of credibility to the Wachowski siblings. But V for Vendetta isn't an action story. It's a political message. The first volume (or the first three issues, however you look at it) have the bulk of the action with the last seven issues having little to no action at all. It gets more cerebral. Why is V fighting the totalitarian government? Who is V anyway? Yes, stuff explodes, people die but it's not anything like the first three issues where people are dying on nearly every page.
So I'm probably going to see this before I have to go back. It's getting released on the 17th and I go back on the 22nd so I've got some time to see it without having to fight the crowds on opening night. I just want to see how badly they can muck up this story. I rewatched the end of the Matrix trilogy yesterday so I have nothing but confidence in the Wachowski siblings and their ability to mishandle a popular franchise, especially one they didn't create.
Free software that more or less doesn’t suck
In order of usage...
- Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 - From reading my site's stats it is obvious everyone already knows this one. Drop IE, get Firefox, find the extensions for Flashblock, Remove It Permanently, BugMeNot, DownThemAll, and NoScript, get a nice theme (I recommend BlackJapan because it's a black theme that doesn't look ridiculous), and enjoy the internet again. Seriously, between Firefox's built-in pop-up blocking and those extensions I feel like I'm not being bombarded by invasive advertising as much as I used to.
- Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 - A free email replacement for those of us who have no need for the 800lb gorilla known as Outlook. It's got extensions too but I don't find any need for them, all it needs to do is download and sort email and it does a great job of that. It also has a builtin spam filter that probably works great but I have a different one that works in conjunction with Thunderbird...
- POPFile 0.22.4 - It's a little confusing to set-up and it needs training to work right but when it's up and running (which doesn't take long at all), it works fantastically. It sorts and tags emails before they hit your inbox. It's program and platform independant so it'll work with nearly any mail program on nearly any OS that can run PERL. It's nice because I have it setup to tag spam and I use a pretty simple filter on Thunderbird to kick the tagged email straight into the trash. I also set it up to tag everything else into categories like "myspace" and "my site" and whatnot for no particular reason. It'll work with a sorting system as simple as "spam" and "not spam" just as easily.
- imeem 1.8.6 - A free IM program that supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk, as well as it's own IM protocol. I just started using it since I've come home and it's easily replacing Trillian. It has a lot of social features and so far it's not as buggy or hideous as trillian basic and gaim. Katie's brother pointed me towards it because he's working for them so I know it's at least less evil than the alternatives.