senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
why don't i feel bored ?
permalink Wednesday, 06FEB2007:yes, i know you're all eagerly awaiting my pronouncements on the best films (or at least the ones i found most watchable) of 2006, but it will come in time. i've been kept busy the past week preparing for the lighting of the inuksuk high school musical production of the 'beauty and the beast'. we were supposed to do a Q2Q starting on saturday morning, but they were still working out blocking and set changes so i was happy to see that my allocated student techs had adopted my attitude that until all that stuff was sorted, there was no point in making any final decisions about lighting.
it didn't help matters that a blizzard blew thru town on sunday partway thru our first actual 'run-thru'. apparently the ferocity of the weather made the national news, as if this somehow was a rebuttal to the climate change / global warming trend. anyway, the high winds part of the blizzard lasted thru much of monday as well, but damage had already been done to many roofs in town, including the one at the high school. this meant that teachers and students were not allowed in the building today, ergo, the musical production will be postponed to the middle of next week. while that helps the students and teachers get their production in order, i'm thinking that the community volunteers might have already had plans for valentine's day and won't welcome the change in scheduling.
today also saw the restoration of my pc, as billy helped me pluck the old intel motherboard out and plug in the new msi one from tigerdirect. windows even booted up fine without any need for updated motherboard drivers (those clever techs !). however, until i've burnt in the hardware, i'm not going to get my hopes up too high - i'm already on my 4th pc in 5 years, so i'm starting to think that the static clime in my abode is just too ornery for the delicate sensibilities of today's high-strung pc's. perhaps if i cleared out the dust bunnies more often ... ?
i'm still recovering from the part-time players production of 'two'. the plays themselves went quite well, and the actors / directors / lighting tech did outstanding jobs. yours truly, the sound guy, on the other hand, couldn't touch a button on the loaned laptop without sending forth yet another storm of phone rings or speaker distortion tones. however, the audience was forgiving, and walked away with pleasant memories of the plays - '52 pickup' by victoria's t.j. dawe and 'the stronger' by august stringberg.
downtime in january was mostly spent on broomball games, zone-out sessions of 'master of orion 2' and at least one poker session a week. with both mark and kevin out of town this week, i've had to become the broomball enforcer, and that garb just doesn't sit well on my shoulders. the orion sessions have mostly been figuring out the optimal way to win the game (maximizing population is the key), so i'm not sure if there's much value in future play. the MOO2 gaming sessions do tie-in with a salon.com article that i read today about scott rosenberg's new book 'dreaming in code'. clicking the breadcrumb trail to the the book's website, i read thru the extract and ran across his reference to an early computer game 'sumer' (sic) that began 'hamurabi, i beg to report ...'. those words instantly flashed me back to my high school computer lab where i spent countless hours playing whatever games that i could get my hands on. those few words clarioned in my head until i followed up on google and found out that, of course, like many small-scale games from those halcyon days, 'hamurabi' is now downloadable for free, so i will have to see if it still holds the same fascination for me now. but just the thought that some ephemeral digital artifact could slingshot me back to my youth - this is the kind of cultural resonance that ought to be preserved, rather than falling into the black hole of perpetual copyright.
as for poker, my current loss-less streak is now over a month long, which means i'm overdue for a smackdown. obviously, i can't credit my performance to any overwhelming skill on my part, but i'm still not quite sure exactly what formula works for me - i'm just hoping that my luck continues to hold. i almost braved the raging blizzard on sunday evening to head over to jeff's tourney down along federal road, but in the end, i decided that, while the jaunt from the high school down to the post office was pretty fun, the wide-open terrain down federal road was not as inviting. i'm still hoping that jeff can figure out some way to get the local lottery license folks to approve another large-scale poker tourney so that i can get more live-action practice. that way, if i should happen to sneak my way into a WSOP seat in the next few years, i'll be better able to handle all the shifts and changes in players and playing styles.
revelling in revelations
permalink Thursday, 07FEB2007:so, my attempt at a productive all-nighter went down in flames. when the network went down at 3 a.m. as usual, i still hadn't made much progress on the side projects that stand in the way of the major project. i just got caught up on blogs and made my desktop look busy and went home to crash around 6. my current night-table book read is 'stumbling into happiness' and i'm enjoying its revelations of how our minds create our subjective realities out of make-believe.
on a much more positive note, my youngest brother responded to my email wishing him a happy birthday with the news that he is now engaged to his russian girlfriend, so i'll be planning a trip to berlin in august for the wedding. he gave no inkling of this during our family get-together in december, so it was a bit of a pleasant surprise. hopefully he'll manage to pump out a grandkiddy or two so that the pressure on 'number one son' to produce progeny will get toned down.
feeding the blog
permalink Tuesday, 27FEB2007:ok, i've finally gotten the songs from the high school musical production of 'beauty and the beast' out of my head. but i haven't been resting on my laurels. i've re-started my monday night radio show on cfrt 107.3 f.m., but since my home pc is still down, i have no podcasts yet. i'm also busy hawking tickets to the banff mountain film festival that we will be hosting in iqaluit on march 10 and 11. oh, and playing a bit of poker here and there :)
at the end of march, i'll be heading down to montreal for a board meeting. the meeting will be on a monday, but thanks to the vagaries of arctic flight schedules, to make the meeting i'll have to fly down on the friday before and won't return until the wednesday after - 3 free days in montreal - what's not to like about that ! i'm looking forward to another movie-binge day ;)
speaking of movies, the few that i've seen in the last month or so have all been enjoyable. i wasn't able to see 'children of men' until it's last performance in town, and i would've liked to see it again, if only to figure out how they did that birth scene on cue. someone tried to convince me that the movie didn't portrary a child-less world realistically, as women wouldn't just collapse into maudlin puddles, but i rejoindered that innaritu's focus was more on the journey undertaken by clive owen's character from cynicism back to faith. the rest was just obiter. the sound design was also commendable.
just for sheer visceral pleasure, 'smokin' aces' was a great nite out. having ben affleck go down in a hail of bullets smacked of pandering to a fickle audience, but i still found myself whooping when the chainsaw came out. the colour saturation of the lake tahoe scenes was totally intense, echoing the drug-addled scenes of 'requiem for a dream'. another tie with that film was the appearance of clint mansell as score-maestro. also, while i'm not familiar with common's musical stylings, he was a fierce presence in the film and easily held his own against jeremy piven's trew kewl magic illusion tricks.
still, the flick that held up the best (and that i saw twice in the last week) was the oscar-award winning 'pan's labyrinth'. the contrast between fantasy world and reality was very well done. guillermo del toro managed to sell the sense of wonder, but also the reality inhabited by the characters, especially during the torture scenes. i agree that the grape-eating scene was out of character, but hey, i'm not a kid anymore. definitely a film where different bits would resonate depending on where you are in your life.
and finally, the impetus for making a post today, was running across one of today's entries on salon.com's 'how the world works'. it seems that district judge breyer has ruled that the US department of agriculture can't take a shortcut with the de-regulation of GM alfalfa and must go thru a full environmental impact assessment.
For those farmers who choose to grow non-genetically engineered alfalfa, the possibility that their crops will be infected with the engineered gene is tantamount to the elimination of all alfalfa; they cannot grow their chosen crop.food for thought ...
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