The Band's Visit

Great date movie. Not that I'd know what a date is.
I was expecting something silly or corny. But it wasn't like that at all. It felt true and honest.

Teacher Threatens Linux Advocate

Ignorant public school teacher threatens to call the cops on FOSS advocate for handing out Linux DVDs.

Linux Is Corrupting Our Youth!

Teachers are supposed to be well informed and open to new ideas.

Being aware of FOSS should not be considered some kind of esoteric knowledge. It should be akin to knowing that your diesel truck can burn biodiesel as well as petrochemical diesel. Then again I'm sure there are plenty of people in this country who know what biodiesel is but would never use it even if it was half the price of petro diesel. We the sheeple.

This reminds me of the jackass legislator in OK who threatened to call the FBI on CentOS when he discovered the default CentOS Apache "it worked!" page running on a server where he expected to see something else. He knew immediately that the server had been hacked and lurched into action.

Let The Right One In

Låt den rätte komma in (2008) Sweden

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1139797/

This is a truly original vampire film. The vampire is a 12 year old girl who has been a 12 year old girl vampire for a long time. She and her middle-aged male accomplice have just moved into a small block of flats in a Swedish suburb. Her accomplice sets about mugging humans for their blood which he drains into a container to bring home to the vampire.

He's not terribly stealthy and narrowly avoids being caught a the crime scene. Because he has failed to bring home the blood, she is forced to hunt. By then she is so hungry she doesn't bother to leave the housing development and grabs the first guy who comes along, and her attack is witnessed. Soon all the neighbors are alarmed because people are going missing and their bodies are discovered. A woman is bitten and survives to become a vampire herself but later commits suicide by exposing herself to sunlight.

The most interesting part of this film is the relationship that develops between the vampire girl and a 12 year old boy she befriends. He's being bullied by some local thugs and she encourages him to fight back. Meanwhile, one of the locals suspects the new tenants of being the serial killers and invades the vampire's apartment. The vampire girl is nearly incinerated by sunlight but her young friend is there to save her.

I don't want to spoil it so that's all. Rent it. Enjoy it. It's a soulful vampire movie with a great musical score.

Peace.

anti-Obama bumper stickers

This photo was snapped on Dec 5, 2008 which is well before Obama took office. I'm sure these people think they're pretty smart. In their minds, the gigantic heap of shit left by G.W. Bush is the Democrat congress' fault. Or something. Then as soon as Obama gets sworn in, it will be Obama's fault. Or sooner!

Boarding Gate

This movie is really unusual. It's one of those movies where you occasionally feel a twinge of guilt for having eavesdropped on so many intimate moments between people. And I'm not talking about secks here.

It's a completely unvarnished story of a woman at the center of a conspiricy to murder someone she once loved, ostensibly for money. There's hardly any sountrack. The characters in this film keep busy smuggling heroin and betraying each other. The line between gangster and businessman has been rubbed-out here. Pun intended. Do lots of people involved in international trade also smuggle dope as a sideline? I imagine so.

Eight stars for originality and for making us figure stuff out for ourselves.

Gnome Menu Issue FIXED

For months when I clicked on Places--> Home Folder the panel would launch gqview instead of Nautilus. So annoying.

When your Gnome menus get screwed up just

cd ~/.local/share/applications ; rm *

You can do this while logged into Gnome. Don't worry; all those .desktop files will be regenerated automatically by whatever deamon monitors .local/share/applications for changes. You will have the factory defaults reset immediately. No need to logout/login again.

I must have looked at a dozen files in .gnome2, .gnome2_private, .gtkrc-1.2-gnome2, etcetera. Why does Gnome need so fucking many config dirs and files? Why can't they all be in a single tree?
In the end I gave up and searched the forums on linuxquestions.com. That's where I found the answer after about ten minutes combing through the search results.

FIXED!

revisionist categorizing

I'm sick of how today's yout' has been relabeling our bands and musical movements.

We were not concerened with labels. If pressed by an outsider to categorize a band we would use "new music", "post punk" or "art rock" to describe them. We resisted answering the question, "what kind of musinc is this?"

I saw Fugazi listed as a "emo" band today and I wanted to puke. Also, The Cure is not a "goth" band. I dunno what a goth band is but I think Marilyn Manson might be one. And Green Day was not and never will be a punk band. Same goes for nofx.

You clueless pimple-faces can fuck off.