Safety Fork, the

I finished reading The Gulag Archipelago tonight. I derived a non-fictional literary satisfaction from this book that I haven’t from any book since I read McCullough’s Truman and Speer’s Inside the Third Reich when I was still in high school.

I find it a little bid odd that I’m reading more books again now that I am no longer in school. Isn’t a university supposed to foster appreciation of literature? It isn’t as though I read nothing for the last four years, but looking back, I don’t seem to have consumed so many books as I did before or—as it is beginning to appear—after. Perhaps the difference is that despite my increased personal responsibilites, my working efforts are now collected into a specific portion of my time, leaving the rest in uninterrupted blocks for other pursuits.

Along with my new television, I finally purchased and watched the DVD edition of the Star Wars IV – VI trilogy. I knew going in that a lot of people have decried the changed George Lucas made for this release, but I had no copy for myself otherwise.

The thing is, most of the edited parts didn’t bother me. I didn’t mind the extra dialog in a couple of places, and I didn’t mind the re-composition of the hologram/dead-Jedi effects (although I thought they were more compelling in the original). I found I could live with the ridiculous rings around large explosions (not only do they make no sense physically, but they just plain look bad).

What I object to were the changes in music, and only in Episode VI. I don’t know who composed the tunes they substituted, but you’d have to get me a confession from John Williams himself—face-to-face—for me to believe that he did. Especially in the celebration scene at the end, it outright clashes with the rest of the soundtrack. Who knows what those ewoks were singing about before, but it sure sounded good, and it was far better support for the joyous mood of the scene than its bland usurper.

It makes me think of the stage version of The Lion King, which I saw with my family earlier this year. I thought the actors did a good job, the costumes and set pieces were fantastic, and the adapted parts of the script were well-done. On the other hand, the new songs and music bits didn’t fit right. I don’t care how much critical acclaim you got from having the hyenas do hip-hop, pausing the intense, building music and lyrics to have your army break parade formation and ‘get down’ for a minute and a half absolutely destroyed the dramatic impact of the scene.

Please, just leave the music alone.

I am finished furnishing my apartment. When I moved in, I knew that I wanted to get a bookshelf, DSL, and a television. Now I have all three.

I realized when I was looking at apartments in March that I would be in the position, for the first time, of having a room which would need a screen. In the dorms in college, I just used my computer. Last year, Darren had a television for the living room. Now, however, I have another room for my computers and no roommates to cover my shortfall.

Yesterday, I bought one of these (a 32-inch LCD screen, in case you don’t care to follow the link). I had fun confusing the girl who was ‘helping’ me (I actually liked one of the other sales guys better, but she was the one who kept hanging around me asking questions). I don’t think she knew what to think of me, especially after I responded to, “Do you have HD cable already?” with, “Oh, no…no, I don’t watch television.” I could just see her trying to figure out why some guy who doesn’t watch television wanted one (movies and computers, of course).

It’s quite nice, of course, but somehow the most geek-exciting thing for me is that the screen comes with an RS-232C port. I don’t have an extra cable right now—my only serial cable is currently the console for my server—but I’m looking forward to having some fun controlling my TV from my computer. The protocol is simple ASCII command/response, and is even fully documented in the manual.

Somehow, my VHS tapes just don’t look so good anymore.

I was looking through my photo library, when I came across a picture I took of myself on November 15^th, 2004, when I had just decided to grow a beard:

…and here’s a picture I took of myself tonight, eight months and a day later:

“I’m sorry, what did you say? I was growing a beard.”

Today was nice. I got to sleep in until nine—and even then not move from bed until ten. I had a nice lunch of sandwiches with delicious, thick, juicy slices of tomato. At about one in the afternoon I decided not to bang my head against a programming project I’ve been thinking of starting. Instead, I started writing some postcards to people who gave me graduation gifts or came to my party. It’s been two months, now, and given that even the university bureaucracy finally got around to sending out my diploma, I figured that I could take action.

That didn’t last long, as I came across the gift certificates that my dad’s cousin John gave me: one to a nice restaurant and one to a bookstore. Always a fan of bookstores, I couldn’t write a note of thanks without having at least checked the place out, I reasoned. So I hopped into my car, burned my palms on the steering wheel (it’s aflame in the summer and frozen in the winter; I think there are a total of about two months of the year during which I can steer my car in relative comfort), and drove into Minneapolis.

I parked in a residential area a few blocks away (I don’t like parking on busy streets) and walked to Magers & Quinn Booksellers. Now this is a bookstore. It’s roughly two and a half small shops packed with bookshelves, and on the bookshelves are books of about every kind imaginable. Not just the shiny new editions of books you’ll look hip reading that are carried by the big chains, but also used copies of things out of print, collectible books, random sets of books printed in 1907—my favorite was a seven-book set of Russian history written in Russian. I couldn’t read it, but it was still cool.

At about five o’clock, I finished looking around and bought a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, volume three (“Damn you, gulag archipelago inmates!”). After getting some dinner, I didn’t really want to go home, so I walked a little less than half-way around Lake Calhoun, found a bench, and read a couple of chapters. By the time I got back to my car a little before nine, there were the makings of a nice sunset.

Just before I got home, I realized how thirsty I was—and how much I dreaded drinking the water at my apartment—so I stopped at Target so that I could finally break down and buy one of those faucet-mounted water filters. I’m usually fairly tolerant of water impurities, but I concede that it made a world of difference, enough that I enjoyed two large glasses of water from where my palate usually only grudginly accepts one. A worthy investment, I think.

While I was out looking for a Linux-capable WiFi card last weekend, I found a copy of my favorite movie. Given my propensity for enjoying bad action movies, you might be surprised by the choice- . I like a lot of movies from different genres, but if I have reason to pick one to stand by itself it’s always the original 1957 version of 12 Angry Men .

There’s no action, no special effects, and only one set. I doubt if any movie studios would even produce it today; it doesn’t appeal to any of their “important” demographics. Instead, it’s all story, all acting. These are things I miss from contemporary movies. Even most of the good movies I’ve seen lately are ones I wouldn’t necessarily care to own, to watch again; it’s hard for me to be entertained a second time when part of the appeal is the flash of something shiny and new.

In a renewed effort to halt the use of luxury sport utility vehicles (S.U.V.s), the Safety- and Traffic-Animal Bureau (S.T.A.B.) has begun deploying geese. The specially-trained birds strategically enter intersections and begin street crossings in order to halt or delay the passage of S.U.V.s while allowing other traffic to proceed normally.

According to a senior S.T.A.B. staffer, the common Canada goose was chosen as ideal for the targeted campaign. Geese are plentiful. In early qualifying examinations, it was found that geese were not fearful of vehicular traffic and would of their own volition embark upon crossings of busy streets. Geese were also determined to have an ideal body-mass/density configuration, ensuring that S.U.V. operators who choose to ignore the presence of the geese will face expensive and time-consuming repairs.

The psychology of S.U.V. owners was also considered in planning the program. In stark contrast to their name, luxury sport utility vehicles were found to be purchased and designed primarily with aesthetic or competitive-status-symbol motivations. Because of this, both the initial cost of the vehicles and also the owners’ aversion to risking even minor cosmetic damage is high.

Approximately 5,000 geese have already been trained and are currently being deployed in the greater metro area of Minnesota. An additional 10,000 geese are being prepared for the second phase of the pilot program, to begin within the next four weeks. Officials from other localities throughout the nation have expressed an interest in the program. Pending local successes, similar efforts are expected to be rolled out in most major metropolitan areas within the next three to five years.

I finally released a version of Same OSX. If you’ve a Mac and you’re bored, feel free to take a look.

I got to work this morning and thought, “Hey, I wonder if anyone’s checked out safetyfork.net yet,” so I whipped out Firefox. Lo and behold, I can’t make a connection. I knew it worked fine yesterday, but I couldn’t really do anything about it from work. (I can’t even SSH out, because the network guys there block even most outgoing connections, for reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain.)

When I got home this afternoon, I found the machine waiting serenely at at the OpenBoot prompt; there must have been a power outage during the night, and I’d forgotten that when I first got this machine I told it not to boot automatically when powered on. It’s all taken care of now (although I think I’d like to get a UPS for this machine at some point).

Two years after I started New Ideas for Free, I’ve moved my ‘blog here. It’s not as if I dislike LiveJournal, but a combination of factors has made running my site myself more attractive to me.

The first factor is that I have finally reclaimed possession of the Internet. Having only a modem-speed connection for a month was certainly livable, but it didn’t allow me to do a number of things I like to do—like finally have my own server for this site, play games from time to time, and use services provided by Google (which, for some reason, dropped all requests from my GPRS modem).

The second factor is that I finally paid some attention to the new terms of service for LiveJournal, and, as I pointed out before, I didn’t find them reassuring, especially as someone who paid for the service. It’s more attractive to me to have my own system, which I know isn’t going to just up and disappear on me.

But fear not, LJ friends, for I will continue to follow your tribulations. I even wrote a bit of a hack so that my old ‘blog will be automatically updated with links to my new posts (like this one!) as I make them. (If you noticed the flurry of ‘testing’ posts before I deleted them, this is why they were there.)