Fri, 02 May 2008
In the interests of better site availability and less Comcast AUP-breaking, I've finally gotten around to outsourcing my website hosting. I'm currently at NearlyFreeSpeech.net, a webhost committed to the twin goals of free speech and affordable web hosting.
How free is their speech? Read their Abuse page:
"A NearlyFreeSpeech.NET member site is defaming me or otherwise injuring me civilly."
Please forward a copy of your legal finding from a court of competent jurisdiction to our contact address. If you have not yet obtained such a finding, a preliminary injunction or court order is also sufficient.
If you are not able to obtain the above, you will need to work directly with the site operator to resolve your differences. We will have to fall back on our members' contractual assertion that the content they upload is legitimate and therefore we will not be able to get involved
How affordable is their hosting? You pay only for the bandwidth and storage that you actually use: $1 per gigabyte of bandwidth and $0.01 per megabyte-month of storage. (Plus the bandwidth cost goes down the more you use.)
They support a variety of CGI scripting languages, including C, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Oh, but also Fortran, Tcl, Lisp, Scheme, OCaml, and Haskell.
We'll see how it goes, but I think I'll like it here.
Tue, 02 Nov 2004
I'll be using several resources to track the election results tonight:
- Wikipedia's election results,
- CNN's election results,
- Contrapositive's Election Night Cheat Sheet,
- And, of course, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Mon, 30 Aug 2004
A few years ago I came into posession of a video entitled "Godzilla vs. Mito Komon". Most people, I suspect, have heard of Godzilla, but not necessarily Mito Komon. Mito Komon was both the title and star of a very long-running Japanese TV show set in 17th century Japan.
The video itself was apparently done by an art student as a project. He wrote the script, directed the film, and acted all of the parts (including Godzilla, Great Majin, and several high-voltage electrical towers). I have been unable to find out who did the fansubbing.
Since I haven't found anyplace else to get it, I've put together a torrent of the video. Behold, Godzilla vs. Mito Komon.
Thu, 03 Jun 2004
Well, it appears that I'm listed on Blogshares, so I'll drop their icon into this entry to claim it.
Sun, 22 Feb 2004
They gave me back my story.
Ever since I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in elementary school, I've loved Middle Earth. Like many people, I waited with anticipation and dread for the movies by Peter Jackson. Would he mangle it as horribly as Bakshi? Would they actually be good movies? The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and I was, by and large, pleased. Jackson had omitted some things and rearranged some others, but the result was good. There was Tolkien's work, on the big screen and amazing faithful to the text.
Then came The Two Towers.
At the time, I wrote up a page about what I thought of the movie. Though that writeup is now lost, it can be summed up pretty succinctly: I didn't like it. Jackson took great liberties with the story, adding bits that were never there and changing bits that were, sometimes for no apparent reason. It was bad in a very annoying way, because the parts that were right were very good. A lot of people had the same reaction as I did, and there was much complaining.
At least one person did a bit more than complain. The Two Towers: The Purist Edit is a reedit of the movie, in a similar spirit to The Phantom Edit. It removes the worst of Jackson's additions--Aragorn's warg battle, the dwarf jokes, the Elves at Helm's Deep, among others--and fixes some of the changes--the Ents now make the right decision, for instance. I can't emphasize how pleased I am with this edit. It's much closer to the books that I've loved for so long.
It's not perfect. It's from a screener copy from one of the big awards ceremonies, so it occasionally has "For your consideration" written across the bottom of the screen. Because it's essentially from the theatrical version, the editors didn't have all the extra footage in the Extended Edition to draw on, which was too bad in several cases. While a lot of the editing is pretty good, some causes feelings of abruptness and draws attention the fact that things were excised. In a couple of instances, people have their lines dubbed over. Since the lips no longer match the words, the dubs are painfully obvious. The editors did a good job of removing the elves from Helms Deep. That means that they cut out a lot of footage, though, and the battle doesn't have the same grandiose feel to it as in the original movie. It still works, but it's not the same. Because of all the various cuts, the Purist Edit runs about 40 minutes shorter than the theatrical release. And not everything was fixed. Fir instance, Helm's Deep is still won by Gandalf riding in with the Rohirrim, not by the Ents and Huorns.
But the Purist Edit is still a vast improvement, story-wise over Jackson's telling. It's a lot closer to the movie I wish he'd made. Thank you, whoever you are, for making this edit.
Thu, 05 Feb 2004
For about the last week, Simplex has been plagued by electricity problems. Which is why I'd been off the 'Net for a while and why aperiodic.net was unreachable for that period of time. In the interests of archival, here's the timeline:
Wednesday, Jan 28th, night
I'm playing Simpsons Hit and Run with Leah when the power flickers. The UPS with a bad battery just barely manages to keep the computer and PlayStation 2 alive. I learn the hard way that you can't save in the middle of a mission, right before the power cuts out entirely and the game goes bye-bye. We figure it's an area problem and that BGE will fix it. The power continues to flicker on and off throughout the night, so we just shut off all of the computers.
Thursday night
The problems persist. We realize that everyone else seem to be doing okay, so I resolve to call the leasing office in the morning.
Friday morning
The power is mostly on, but keeps flickering off and back on. I call the leasing office after I get to work. They haven't heard from anyone else, so it's probably just us. They promise to send out someone to look at it.
Friday late afternoon
A maintenance person goes to the townhouse. Ray is home at the time. Naturally, the power works while the maintenance person is there. He's got other calls, so promises to return on Saturday and look more closely.
Friday evening
I get home and note that the electricity is still having problems. Ray's already left, so I don't know about the visit from the maintenance person. I call the emergency service number and leave a message. When I don't get a response, I call BGE. They have an automated menu system that works me though the symptoms that I'm seeing. It ultimately tells me that this sort of thing is usually internal to the house and not something they can fix. It offers to set up a service call, but warns that if the technician determines that the problem is not something BGE can fix they will charge me $80. I call the leasing office again.
Friday, about 11:00pm
The power flickers off and back on again for what will be the last time that night.
Friday night
The maintenance person calls back. I talk with him for a while, giving him some more background on what sorts of things are happening. He says he has a pretty good idea of what's going wrong and will be in first thing on Saturday morning.
Saturday late morning
The maintenance person arrives, looks at the circuit breaker panel, and says he has to leave again. I'm left with the impression that he'll return; Ray is left with the impression that he won't. Regardless, he doesn't. Power works all day.
Sunday night
Power problems manifest again.
Monday morning
I call the leasing office to report the continuance of the problems. They say someone will be out to look at it.
Monday evening
I return home to find that someone came, more or less just looked at things, and left. Ray was home at the time and was told that they'd get someone more knowledgeable out there.
Tuesday, 3:30pm
I call the leasing office to see how things are going. I'm told that an electrician has been called, but has not yet responded.
Tuesday evening
I get home to find that no one has yet been in.
Wednesday, early afternoon
I call the leasing office again to see if they've actually done anything. I'm told that the electrician is currently in the townhouse.
Wednesday, late afternoon
The leasing agent calls back to say that the electrician had been in. Naturally, the electricity did not misbehave while he was there. Going on what he'd been told about the problem, he rewired several of the circuit breakers.
Wednesday evening
I get home, verify that the power seems to have been working continuously, and power up all of my computers. It has now been a week since we first started having problems.
Fri, 23 Jan 2004
Had dinner at Phở Ðạt Thành last night. Very good Vietnamese food. (Well, the food was very good, and it's a Vietnamese restauraunt. I would have to leave it to someone more familiar with that cooking style to judge its authenticity.) It's good food, and it's Columbia. Go there. They have a huge menu. Go there a lot.
(Really, I just made this entry because I could put the full name of the place in Unicode. I'm a dork. But the food's really good.)
