March, 18, 2001 archives

i watched erin brockovich last night (one of the two best picture nominees i've seen, along with traffic). it turns out the car accident scene was shot just up the street from where i live. that was a little strange to see ("wait a second, those buildings look familar...").

one of the funnier lines -- bite my ass, krispy kreme!

the movie was good. i liked traffic more, though. i haven't seen enough of the nominees to have an opinion on who should win what oscars, but i wouldn't be disappointed to see anyone from traffic or erin brockovich win anything. (the only other film with any nominations i've seen is cast away.)

the dotcom 1040. for those who have yet to file their taxes.

the los angeles times has turned out to be a dud, newsfeed wise. they appear to only update daily. i had hope for the daily news, but they appear to be the same. time to poke around the local news stations, but i'm even less optimistic about those. (it seems to me that web journalism requires the vigor of print journalism with the rolling schedules of television news.)

in a fit of madness, i reclaimed some cabling i had stuffed into the ceiling and a wintv card stuffed in a drawer, and now i can watch tv on my computer through the miracle of xawtv. pretty silly. i need a proper 1/4" patch cable to get stereo sound, but it appears to work. i configured a couple of sawfish bindings so i have easy channel-up and channel-down buttons.

i also set it up so that the scroll lock led on my keyboard flashes when i've got email. once i get around to setting up my modemblaster, that will include voicemail, too.

i plan to do silly things with the modemblaster once i set it up. i'm waiting until i get the replacement hard drive from seagate so i only have to screw around with my server once. (the cd-rom is currently dead because i accidently left it disconnected when removing the dead hard drive.)

(oh, and i upgraded to the 2.4.2 kernel on my desktop to get the wintv card to work. a little excitement with mkinitrd not understanding /dev/root, but once i realized mkinitrd was a perl script, a little kung fu was applied and things fell into place.)