waider dot i e

May 20: Two health-related things I've encountered recently: firstly, Allie Brosh writes about depression. This is actually the second of two, with something like an eighteen-month interval between the two, and I'm torn between recommending you read them in order and recommending that you skip the first one outright because the important stuff is in the second (i.e. the one I linked to). So, decide for yourself. This is an astonishingly frank, in places hysterically funny description of being on the receiving end of a bout of clinical depression. I can't make claims about how applicable this is to all depression - the comments on the piece itself have a few positive remarks in that direction - but the really, really key thing in here that was an eye-opener for me is her description of people trying to cheer her up. The short version is, if you're listening to someone telling you how they feel (or in this instance, how they don't feel at all), make sure you've actually heard them before offering advice. (Or telling them what to do with their dead fish. Read the piece to make sense of that.) This is incredibly powerful, clever, and stupidly obvious advice that I've certainly missed and that I imagine many other non-depressed people have, too. In summary, why aren't you reading this already? Waider.IE will still be here when you're done, and it's much less informative.

The second thing is a TED talk, a website, and an app: it's all called SuperBetter and it's all about literally gaming your health. Probably the best explanation is the TED talk, where Jane McGonigal talks for 20 minutes and promises you you'll have gained 7 minutes on your lifespan if you follow along. (Caution, embedded video starts playing as soon as the page has loaded; you may wish to stop it and pick one of the downloads to stash it away for later viewing). I've signed up on this with my gmail account, if you decide to sign up yourself and want to invite me as an Ally - I'm declining the opportunity to spam a bunch of people with links to an app they have no interest in!
May 17: Surprisingly, the Total Recall remake turned out to be not a bag of crap, although there was definitely an amount of "don't think too hard about this" going on, and Colin Farrell can't seem to hold an American accent straight for more than 30 seconds at a time before the Irish starts bleeding through. Still, entertaining stuff, worth a look.

Finally got a complete Gramps build, but it crashes on startup. Seems to be a bug involving glib (that's g-lib, rather than "smooth-talking") vs. Xcode4.
May 14: Almost had a working Gramps build, then discovered I was pulling from the wrong source repo. GAH. After I'd filed bugs, too. DOUBLE GAH.
May 12: Watched the oddball Korean movie, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring which was sort of predictable and dull but set in very beautiful surroundings. Actually rather relaxing to watch, to be honest. Wouldn't pick it out again, though.
May 08: So it turns out that (a) the gtk-osx stuff that Gramps uses is in flux and (b) that flux has broken the damned thing twice in the last week. I've filed two bugs, one with a patch and one without (as I can't quite figure out how to fix the problem yet).

Phone activated. Even with staff (presumably) on the premises I still had to choose non-obvious IVR options to talk to someone.

Turns out the gtk-osx guy is pretty reponsive. Three bugs filed today, all closed within the day with fixes. Small bugs, to be sure, but that's still a decent turnaround.
May 07: AvantCard (MBNA's buyers) are doing a great job with their new site. Right now, it won't let me add a second card to my account (last time I tried it didn't recognise the card, now it simply doesn't offer me the option) and when I tried to visit their FAQ section, I got a Sharepoint error. Classy. There's also this gem: "Selecting your statement is straight forward. Simply select the statement month you want to view and click Select. This will open the statement details to view.", which is in a "Tips" box right next to the main text which reads, "Coming soon...".

Got me a shiny new JebusPhone, but I am having no end of difficulty registering the SIM for it. It would appear that after 5:30 the entire Vodafone support staff goes offline and you're left with an IVR system that leads you around in circles, refers you to the website, and just generally refuses to help. Some competitors of this excuse for a telco and indeed some variants of this telco in other countries allow you to simply enter your SIM number into an online form (online! what a concept!) and away you go. Le sigh.
May 05: Trying out the Gramps build-from-source option again, this time using a user account expressly created for the purpose.

Of note: The build-from-source version definitely disagrees with whatever version of xz I had installed (I can't even recall what I installed it for - I turned up a compressed file at some point that required it, I think, but even that's a hazy recollection).
May 04: The twice-mentioned Screenclick oddnesss dropped a Korean-language movie on us. Faced with that, we chose to eschew cultural world cinema and instead wartched Quantum of Solace, which was a good deal more fun (at least, I imagine it was. The Korean movie still awaits).
May 03: After noting the oddball stuff Screenclick had queued up I went and rescrubbed the wishlist, and so we had Men in Black III to watch, which is awesome. Ignoring the fact that it's third in a franchise, this movie would stand on its own barring the fact that if you'd not seen the first two you wouldn't know the MiB backstory, which doesn't get any expository backfill here. Taking on board that it's a sequel, though, makes it so much more impressive that it's as good as it is. It's laugh-out-loud funny in places, it's got a good line in adrenaline-loaded scenes, it's got a bit of poignance, a bit of romance, an Apollo 11 launch... what's not to like?
April 29: Another peculiar movie choice showed up in the Screenclick queue, so we decided we'd go have a look at Netflix. And this is how we wound up watching Emma. Which, for someing ostensibly chick-flicky, turned out to be a whole lot of fum - I can't say I'd buy it, but I'd certainly watch it again.