November, 28, 2005 archives

heist is almost exactly what you would expect from a movie of that title from david mamet. gene hackman and danny devito are brilliant, but so is all of the supporting cast, such as ricky jay (who had most of my favorite lines).

the plot is probably the weakest element, but the more i think about it, the better it is. i was expecting a little more flash, but i think the film really pulls off a more moderate and realistic heist.

the dialogue crackles, of course. one particularly great line: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him.”

in an odd bit of serendipity, today (and tomorrow?) they’re shooting scenes in my neighborhood for the pilot of heist, a possible 24/prison break/the wire/murder one-style series about a jewelry heist that unfolds over a season. they’re using the farmers & merchants national bank.

speaking of murder one, they finally released the first season and the second (last) season on dvd.

it’s comforting to have a fake bomb squad entering the fake bank across the street. this is for the pilot of heist.

when i was coming back from the gym this morning, there was a cute actress/extra that was totally checking me out. but i could be wrong. i’m not very good at picking up on that sort of thing, so this was either so obvious even i couldn’t miss it, or something else entirely. for the sake of my self-esteem, i’ll assume it was the former.

i’ve started collecting some of my shots of the shoot of the heist pilot into a set. and that’s not the actress i wrote about earlier.

doug liman is the director of the pilot for heist. he directed the movie go, the pilot for the o.c. (which explains my temptation to yell “welcome to downtown, bitch!” out the window), and a bunch of other stuff i’m too lazy to look up.

“Sleepycat employs a lot of database people with, like, 25 years of experience,” [Josh] Berkus [evangelism guy for PostgreSQL] said. “One problem MySQL has is that most database people working there are new to the database field.”

that is a laughable statement that simply demonstrates that josh has little insight into the breadth and depth of experience of the mysql development team. it includes a number of developers with long experience in the database industry and recognized experts in the database field. the jokers like me who just brought a non-database background to their jobs are not representative of the whole development team. i can understand why josh got it so wrong, though. those of us who came through the open-source community tend to be more visible in that community.

the quote comes from this eweek opinion piece by lisa vaas about how mysql may re-team with sleepycat. and this doesn’t mean that lisa is right, but the timing of her piece and this announcement from sleepycat about their latest version is pretty funny.

and if richard mason got taken out to the woodshed for what he said, it is probably because “replace” is the wrong word to use. un-factual, as one might say. and i can’t imagine it was a very unpleasant trip to the woodshed considering how well his european sales team has been doing.

like always, seeing something in the press about things you have first-hand knowledge about is a good way to remind you how wrong the press often is, and how skeptically you should treat it.

a week or so ago i finally sent off a check to harvey mudd college that represented the other donation from my blo.gs spoils.

and today i got bled again. this time they told me not to drink or work out for 24 hours. i may even pay attention to at least half of that.