August, 11, 2005 archives

the los angeles times reports that many of the plaques at the old caltrans building were actually cement, although they appeared metallic.

i find it fairly mind-boggling that there is no picture to accompany the article. the building is literally across the street from the los angeles times building.

i am surprised that newspapers don’t use more photographs on their web sites, and use them more effectively.

here’s another example: this article about how to store book collections doesn’t have a single picture. unbelievably lame.

what do we get instead? ten little pictures to tell the story of the watts riots.

quatermass and the pit is vintage british scifi, with all the good and bad that implies. in the end, i was disappointed by how choppy the story is, with just a few too many leaps of logic on the part of the scientists.

it’s also another one of those films i probably appreciated less than i might have because i fell asleep while i was watching it the first time.

equilibrium is a movie that is seems good, but seems to be lacking some vital ingredient. it’s like a loaf of bread baked without salt. it does have a couple of pretty snazzy action scenes, and the underlying idea is sort of neat, if well-worn.

here’s how i spent ninety minutes of work today: having been asked to look at a timing related bug, i came to the conclusion that writing a good test case really required i implement an an old feature request for a sleep() function. ninety minutes later, the code is written, approved by brian aker, and pushed to the main 5.0 tree.

and it’s the first function i’ve ever added to mysql. oh yeah, and i ate dinner while i was waiting for brian to review my patch.

i’ve also got the test case written for the other bug. but there’s some question as to what the standards-defined behavior really is — from my reading of the sql:2003 spec, it’s implementation-defined. apparently our standards gurus (now on vacation) left other impressions.

we’ll probably work it out so you can get either behavior depending on what function you call to get the current timestamp.

update: thirty minutes later, paul dubois has documented the new sleep() function. i love it when a plan comes together.

“speaking in my official capacity as a pulitzer prize winner, mr. schneider, your movie sucks.” — roger ebert, reviewing deuce bigalow: european gigolo

terra naomi will be playing at the hotel cafe next thursday night at 10pm. she’s been getting a lot of attention on myspace, and is about to kick off a nationwide tour. i just got her latest ep, recorded with a full band, and it’s great stuff. “the vicodin song” is killer.

matt haughey’s prediction that she’ll be a household name in february 2006 may end up being a little aggressive, but he also may not end up being too far off.

so it looks like next thursday will be the last time to catch her in los angeles until november at least.

i think the los angeles downtown news actually managed to scoop eric on his election as treasurer of the downtown los angeles neighborhood council.

re-animator is playing at the egyptian theatre tonight at 7pm, followed by a q&a with the director.

sometimes you better be careful what you wish for, because it might just come true.

i’m now officially one of those jerks with more camera than photography skills. something to work on.

if you love fiddling around with various strange unix flavors (and microsoft windows) and slowly trying to obsolete yourself with perl scripts, product engineer for mysql ab might be the job for you.

it’s pretty remarkable how good pirates of the caribbean: the curse of the black pearl is. with a running time over two hours, it seems like it should be too long. and being based on a ride at disneyland seems like a bad idea. as it was, from that i’ve heard, for the haunted mansion.

but it all fits together pretty remarkably well. depp’s performance as keith richards as a pirate is inspired. and the few hat-tips to the ride are perfect. above all, the movie is fun.