<p>on friday night we went out for indian food with obert, clayton and clayton’s girlfriend. then obert and lani and i went to see <b>Amélie</b>. beautiful movie. highly recommended. Jeunet really has a way with colour and always seems to present an array of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters. if you’ve seen <b><a href="http://www.geocities.com/falling_for_faye/chungking/">Chungking Express</a></b> by Wong Kar-Wai, take a moment after you’ve seen <b>Amélie</b> to compare and contrast plots. should be interesting.</p>
<p>after seeing <b>Amélie</b>, i discovered that lani hadn’t seen <b><a href="http://us.imdb.com/Title?0118583">Alien: Resurrection</a></b> (another Jeunet film) so that went on the agenda for saturday night. then i find out that lani hadn’t seen <em>any</em> of the Alien series so some education was in order. it turned into a 6 hour Alien marathon (we skipped the third movie due to time constraints) for which gerard <a href="node.pl?nid=2673">joined us</a> for part of.</p>
<p>today lani and i (well, lani mostly) pulled the trigger on some cheap tickets to berlin. just a quick whirlwind weekend trip the weekend after next (dec. 14th – 17th). we were both feeling a need to get the fuck off the continent for a little while. my plans are to visit <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>, drink some good german beer and otherwise just enjoy my first trip to europe. anyone else going to be in berlin that weekend and want to get together for a drink? any recommendations on places in berlin that should be visited at all costs?</p>
<p>had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cranberry sauce and beer with some kind of sweet, nutty, fruity bread stuff for dessert.</p>
<p>cleaning and listening to a David Bowie concert on <span class="caps">BBC</span> america.</p>
went up to harlem again to visit craig and the wife and and baby (19 days old now) and have dinner and beers with coworkers.
for dinner we ordered out from the soul food restaurant across the street. i was amused to see on the menu, under the “Salads and Vegan Corner” section of the menu that the first item was “grilled chicken with greens”. the next item under it was “fried jumbo shrimp”. now, call me daft, but when did chicken and shrimp become vegetarian foods, let alone vegan?
maybe us vegetarians just have a different definition of what “vegetarian” food is than the rest of the world. to me, it means, very simply: no meat. that’s it. not too complicated a definition. pretty easy to classify foods with it. from what i’ve seen of menu’s (particularly in chinese restaurants), a significant portion of the non-vegetarian world considers vegetarian food to be “it’s got something in it that’s not meat.” like “grilled chicken and greens” has some vegetables in it so it must be vegetarian. almost every chinese restaurant i’ve been in in new york has, in the “vegetarian dishes” section of the menu the item “spicy bean curd with meat”.
i’m not going to rant on now about how restaurants should have more vegetarian items on the menu or anything, but for the love of god, stop putting meat dishes in the vegetarian section of the menu.
went up to a coworker’s for “practice thanksgiving” with a bunch of people. basically just turkey and lots of food without the pressure and annoyance of dealing with holiday traffic or relatives (being a vegetarian, i didn’t partake in the turkey but contented myself with salad, mashed potatoes and some damn good yams).
<p>while we were there life turned into a sitcom. Ben (the host), realized at one point that it was his girlfriend’s birthday and he’d completely forgotten about it. sitting in a new york apartment during a party while one person desperately tries to figure out ways to bluff like he really knew about her birthday all along is about as close as my life has ever been to being a badly written sitcom. if we’d had a laugh track and some wacky neighbors we would have been all set.</p>
helped peter move his stereo to his new apartment over in harlem. sweet place. large and new. on the 11th floor with an amazing view of the city. i’m jealous. my view is of brick walls on the other side of the alley. although i’m not sure i’d trade being able to walk to work for having a nice view. besides, i need darkness in my apartment for my projector…
<p>saw craig while i was over there (craig used to work with us but recently left for a more lucrative position. his apartment is in the same building that peter’s moving into). his son Max was born two weeks ago and both craig and his wife had that bloodshot, not-quite-all-there look that betrays how little sleep they’ve had lately.</p>
i’ve been busier than i thought lately with non-thraxil stuff so i haven’t been fixing things as quickly as i’d hoped. but, here are the changes i’ve been making:
users page now uses colour coding to indicate frontpage posting authorization and lists the total number of posts each user has contributed (includes comments)
ordering of comments has changed a little. threads with the newest post are at the top. i think this is more consistent with how they used to be while still allowing for threading.
fixed a small issue with diaries and comments. eg, if you look at a comment posted by sarah to mark’s diary, you’ll notice that it uses the stylesheet for sarah’s diary and links back to her diary rather than mark’s. other diaries are like this too. it’s a problem in the old version of the default diary templates. if you change the <tmpl_var name=“author”> tags to <tmpl_var name=“diary_author”> in the appropriate places, it will work correctly. i’m still working on throwing together some good documentation on the template system.
<p>i’ll post any other updates i make as comments attached to this post.</p>
the CD-RW drive i bought a long time back didn’t have linux support at the time so i was forced to keep a small windows partition on my home machine just so i could burn CDs.
<p>a few months ago, the drive gave out (hardware or software i don’t know). i’m too poor to buy a new one right away (but those 16×10×40’s do look awful sweet) so i decided to hell with it all and when i upgraded the home machine to mandrake 8.1 tonight, just killed the whole partition scheme and started over (wanted to put reiserfs on it anyway). </p>
<p>no more windows partition. yay. it’s not like i’ve used windows for anything more than “boot windows. burn cd. boot back to linux” for the last couple years but it makes me feel much cleaner to just not have it on the machine at all.</p>
<p>interestingly enough, mandrake seems to have detected my CD-R drive this time; perhaps there is linux support now after all. if it <em>was</em> just a software error under windows, i may have it back without needing windows at all. </p>
<p>if i had a microwave, i could microwave my windows disk…</p>
a coworker of mine who does artsy photography stuff is working on a project that follows the hypothetical “what if janice joplin were still alive and performing?”
<p>she did a shoot today at <a href="user.pl?user=jerfunfin">another coworker</a>’s apartment (which happens to be two doors down the street from mine) using <a href="http://tammyfayestarlite.com/">Tammy Faye Starlite</a> as her model. for the shoot, she borrowed my guitar (a very <a href="/images/iceman.jpg">badass</a> axe). </p>
<p>i can’t wait to see how it all came out.</p>
<p>afterwards, we went down to the east village and had drinks and played pool.</p>
<p>in the first one, i was sitting on the porch of my parents’ house in maine just watching the sky on a nice sunny day. over the horizon, flying fast and low came two jets. i’d never seen any like them before. blue and white with forward swept wings. very futuristic looking. more kept coming along with a growing number of smaller, darker fighter jets joining them in intricate aerial maneuvers. since i’ve always been a sucker for planes, i’m watching intently, pleasantly entertained by the surprise airshow. then there’s a pop and a flash of light as one of the planes falls from the sky quickly followed by more and more explosions and gunfire. as i realize that it’s not an airshow but a real dogfight and the beginning of a war, i get that same overwhelming nausea that i felt for continously during and after 9/11.</p>
<p>i don’t remember the second one as well but i was in the middle of some large mountain range that was littered with tunnels and underground homes. an entire culture lived inside the mountains (kind of like hobbits). the opposite side of the mountains from where i was were being hit with nuclear weapons. i could feel the earth shake and the heat of the blast on my face as entire sections of the countryside were vaporized.</p>