Year: 2004

Yet another blog

Some time ago I have registered at LiveJournal.com. Originally, I did it to be able to search for blogs by region. It turned out that this feature was available only to paid accounts. I thought that I won’t be needing this account anymore.

After some time I found myself posting comments to different LJ blogs using my account. But I was getting warning that my account is about to be deleted due to inactivity.

Today I got an interesting idea. I am getting emails from some mailing lists with jokes and funny stories. I usually forward the best ones to few friends of mine via email. Instead, I will post them in my LJ blog and will do the forwarding from there using RSS feed and a simple Perl script.

This way, I will be able to maintain my LJ account and share the funny stuff with more people, while doing less. Long live Perl and RSS!

Fonts for programmers

Via this entry in Joe Grossberg‘s blog, I came across a couple of pages that link to and compare monospace fonts. Programmers spend a lot of time looking at text monospaced text, thus the choice of good font will probably increase the productivity. Apart from the usual requirements of sharp letters and multiple encodings, good differentiation between “o” (lowercase “o”), “O” (uppercase “o”), and “0” (zero) as well as “i” (lowercase “i”), “I” (uppercase “i”), “l” (lowercase “l”), and 1 (one) are greatly appreciated.

These pages are here and here.

Great Balls of Fire!

Watched “Great Balls of Fire!” on TV. This movie is based on the biography book of great musician and composer Jerry Lee Lewis. One of the co-authors of the book is Jerry’s “problematic” wife Myra Lewis. “Problematic” she is because that is one of the argued over love stories of the last century. Myra was Jerry’s cousin. And not only that, she was only 13 when they married (he was 22). Not to mention the fact that her father was playing bass in Jerry’s band.

This film is all about music and love. And it has plenty of each. The very usual and beaten to death story of rise and fall is nicely mixed with marriage to very young family member. Excellent acting makes it all interesting to watch and lots of Lewis’s music gives some time to think things over.

7 out of 10.

P.S.: I tuned accidentally and didn’t see the title of the movie, so it took me some time to find what it was. There is still a slight chance that I am talking here about a different film.

Familiar face

Having nothing better to do and having no movie to watch I was flipping through the channels on TV. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was showing on one of them. I didn’t want to watch it, so I passed. But few minutes later something was bugging me in my head and I couldn’t understand what it was. So I sat down and started thinking. Everything was pointing to that “E.T.” movie on TV, so I went back to the living room and switched it on.

Watched it for 2 more minutes and than it struck me – the face of the little girl, named Gertie, was really really familiar. That felt very strange since the movie is pretty old, from 1982 and I am too young to remember faces of children from movies of those times. And suddenly I recognized her! Yup, she did that thing with her lip that identifies her from the million others… She is Drew Barrymore. And she is only 7 years old. Cool, eh…

Conspiracy Theory

Finally I watched “Conspiracy Theory“. I saw bits and pieces of it on TV several times, but I never managed to see the whole thing. Finally I did.

It turned out to be not as good as I was expecting or imagining it to be. Lots of boring story telling, wierd plot, and long pauses. There was not enough action. Considering the fact that one of the best action actors – Mel Gibson – is in the movie, that sounds like a terrible mistake. The guy was still excellent. Oh, and the music was good.

6 out of 10.