Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

With me not buying anything off the web for a long time now and holiday season approaching, I decided to make myself a present. The top of my wishlist is occupied by photographic equipment - all sorts of expensive lenses and a flash unit. I reviewed my wants, needs, and the financial status and decided to readjust things a bit. It will be some time until I will be able to buy expensive Canon lenses, but I have gaps in the coverage of focal length spectrum, so I thought I should do something about it.

After some Googling, I made a choice to buy Tamron Zoom Wide Angle-Telephoto AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di LD Aspherical (IF) Autofocus Lens for Canon EOS (is it the longest lens name or what?). This lense has a good range of 27-75mm, which covers my needs pretty good. It is a rather fast one with f/2.8 aperture at all focal lengthes. The price of approximately $360 USD is affordable. And it has excellent reviews on the web. What else can I ask for? Well, I can ask for a lot of things actually, but that is irrelevant now.

And since I was already ordering something, it was a good thing to add a few smaller items, like a 128 MByte memory stick duo for my mobile (finally!) and few other small items.

I wonder if the package will make it here before Christmas.

One of the things that will go into history with the year 2005 is the number of bad movies produced by Hollywood. IMDB says:

Hollywood is mired in its biggest box-office slump in over 20 years.

With all those bad movies around, finding something worth the time and effort becomes increasing difficult. Luckily, there are these two things that can make our lives easier - IMDB and Perl.

Combining the two all sorts of interesting things can be achieved. Particularly, an ultimate movie wishlist can be generated.

If you are here just for the script, than here is the movie_wishlist.pl. If you want just the result, than here is wishlist.html. Otherwise read on for the explanations on how it works and how you can make it better.

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The other day I noticed a few updates, but not all of them. BlogLines announced all the recent changes in this news article and it turns out that I noticed only the small subset.

The biggest and most welcome change - keyboard navigation. Now, instead of scrolling feeds with a lot of items and switching between feeds while moving the mouse all over the screen, one can use keyboard shortcuts. ‘j‘ and ‘s‘ are my two favourites. By pressing ‘j‘ it is no possible to jump to the next item in the feed. No scrolling. No mouse. Simply go there. By pressing ‘s‘ it is trivial to go to the next feed with unread items. Again, no mouse involved. Just these two keyboard shortcuts speed up reading a lot. And I needed the whole two seconds to get used to them. Amazing!

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I bought a few more DVDs using Martin’s special offer (1 DVD for 7 CYP, 5 DVDs for 30 CYP, 10 DVDs for 50 CYP). This time I got the 10 DVDs pack. Here is a list of movies:

• Lethal Weapon full collection (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). This is an all time classic of criminal action with elements of comedy. I don’t know how many times I saw all of these movies, but I’ll sure see them some more. Actually I started with part 1 already.
• American History X - one of the best movies about racism and nationalism. Ever.
• Requem for a Dream - one of the best movies about drugs. Ever.
• Beyond Borders. This one is not as highly ranked as others, but it is very inspirational to me.
• Enemy at the Gates - because I just love sniper movies. And because this is a really good movie on its own.
• Fight Club. Do I even have to comment about it?
• Man on Fire - one of the best action movies that were released recently.

Update: I should sleep more or learn how to count to ten. Missed “Man on Fire”. Fixed.

I am starting to lose track of films that I would like to see. I have them written down all over the place - in my phone’s notes and organizer, in the emails to myself, in the blog, on the numerous pieces of paper everywhere. Some I try to remember…

It is obvious that I will never organize myself to put all of them in one place. Instead I will try to compile individual notes and messages into some sort of heaps. One of these piles will be here. Internet is a truly magical thing and I have it available almost everywhere I go, so it seems like a good idea to use it for this purpose.

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