A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.
December 31
Last of the year... I thought Gould a little young for the role
of Marlowe, and the movie felt a little flabby in places, but
mostly The Long Goodbye
was a fairly light way to wind up the year. Apparently there's
nothing you can't strike a match on. Also, uncredited
Schwarzenegger!
December 30
It's been that time of year... frantic wrap up to things in the
office, landing the two time-bound things that cropped up kinda
late but unfortunately to the detriment of finishing off a third
thing and not really being able to give as much attention as I'd
like to a fourth. Still, the two things landed I'm happy with, and
the progress on the others is good.
In home nerdery, the Raspberry Pi that runs my OpenHAB setup
spontaneously set its SDCard to read-only. Fortunately, I had a
spare card. Unfortunately, when I did a block-level copy of the
frozen SDCard to the spare, the spare also became read-only, and I
don't know if this was coincidence or if there's some magic flag
on SDCards that I inadvertently copied in the process. Restoring
the state of the Pi in a more refined fashion took a bit more
effort; after a few failed attempts of partitioning and rsyncing
things, I realised I simply don't know enough (or anything,
really) about how a Pi bootstraps itself from a SDCard, and
resorted to doing a fresh install and then restoring relevant
files from the frozen SDCard. All told I probably spent three days
(or at least three evenings) on this. Once I was done with that I
took the opportunity to do the usual round of z-wave maintenance
on the couple of devices which were neither on nor off the
network; one of 'em still insists it hasn't woken up since August,
despite regularly transmitting data, adjusting the heat, etc.
Movies: we watched both Deathly Hallows, two Daniel Craig Bond
movies, a bit of Raiders before dinner, and The Russia House
which really captured the feel of a John Le Carré novel
even though I wasn't familiar with the specific source
material. I'm sure there was a bunch of other stuff in there as
well (Doctor Who was a bit disappointing, particularly
the very specific religious wink at the end) but it's been a few
weeks and I can't quite recall everything.
December 14
Work continues to be slightly bananas for handwaving reasons,
meaning I am completely avoiding most of my casual nerdery in
favour of spending my evenings Not Computing. Movies and
what not this week:
Silo
season 2 is tipping along nicely. I'm still not terrifically keen
on the introduction of a second Big Bad over the original story,
but I guess they're making some use of it. The look of the thing
is awesome, though - really captures what the books were trying to
pitch.
City of Lies
was an interesting dive into some areas I was peripherally aware
of - corruption in LAPD, and the murders of Tupac Shakur and
Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace. Reading around the movie -
which of course, has its own agenda to pursue, for whatever
reasons - it seems like there's definitely something in the tale
it tells, but likely noone will ever know quite how much. A
telling observation: the murders going unsolved versus how quickly
a recent murder suspect was found and arrested, and the
socioeconmoic categories to which the respective victims
belonged. Draw what conclusions you will.
The French Connection
is yet another movie I'd watched so long ago that I could barely
remember the details. On rewatch: it's slow. Like, really
slow. Yes, as the decades rolled by we moved from the slow panning
shot to "ADHD squirrel on a caffeine bender" but even taking that
into account, the decision by the director to film this
"documentary style" seems to have driven him to cover a lot of
ground where essentially nothing happens, such as the overlong
tailing sequence that includes Hackman camped in a doorway while
the guy he's tailing has a leisurely multi-course meal. I don't
think I'd agree with the commentary that this is the greatest
movie ever made; for one thing, there isn't a single female
character of note in it - they're all bit-parts at best, and more
likely to be nondescript supporting roles, and that includes the
woman shot by the sniper aiming for Hackman. Oddly enough, an
angle it shares with City of Lies, where the only woman
of note is Mrs. Wallace - who incidentally is played by the
real Mrs. Wallace.
December 7
Devil in a Blue Dress
seems like a really good adaptation of the book of the same name
by Walter Mosely, so I'm a little stumped as to how it didn't turn
into an Easy Rawlins franchise. Both IMDb and Wikipedia
hint at it being unsuccessful, but it seems to have fairly solid
ratings. There is, I suppose, the fact that it only made back its
cost at the box office, rather than turning into some sort of
magical money fountain. Anyway. Good story, great characters,
beautifully shot.
December 6
Mystic River
was good, but kinda grim. I think I'd kinda hoped for a slightly
better ending but who knows, maybe that didn't play well to test
audiences or something.
December 1
I have still not made any progress on my subtitle quest, not
least because some work stuff has been occupying most of my
thinking for the last while. It's been long enough that annoyingly
I can't find some notes I'm sure I made on progress. It may be
they're the notes I made on this site in late October, but I
could've sworn I'd something a bit more organized / coherent. In
any case, I have a notes file now which I'm starting with
the four questions I'd asked myself back then. Let's see if I can
make some progress on this before the end of the
year.