musings

I don’t think I can phrase any appeal to aid those in need better than the wonderful people at Rochen, my web host. Thank you.

I saw House of Flying Daggers today, and it’s yet another masterpiece from director Zhang Yimou. Like Hero, every frame of the movie is postcard beautiful. While not as strong, story-wise, as Hero, it’s every bit as visually stunning. The acting was magnificent, the locations picture perfect and the dialog often sublimely beautiful. The BBC review is pretty much right on the money. Another must-buy on DVD. Once again, I have no more movie karma.

And I think I’m in love with Zhang Ziyi.

Days like today make me wonder what the Hell I was thinking when I decided to leave California and move back to Toronto. It was -25C this morning (which is -13F, for you those of you stuck in backwoods places that haven’t yet figured out metric), and that wasn’t accounting for the wind. After the wind chill factor, it was -35C (-31F). Yeah, bloody cold.

This rant on SFGate makes me proud to be Canadian.

The Texas Holdem bastards have spammed Jed to death. His site is currently down.

Why isn’t this a crime? These pricks consume our bandwith and server space. They drive up our collective blood pressure, endangering our health, and because we have to deal with their BS, they steal our time. Spammers must be destroyed.

For the few that read this, I have a question for you all. Would you find some kind of challenge based comment system offensive? Either requiring users to register, or having a challenge question come up on the comment post form. Something that a bot can’t easily automate. See, my stopping the Texas Holdem bastard involves me actually changing WordPress, and it’s a losing battle. Sooner or later the bot figures out my little hack, and compensates. The reason I stopped posting on my blogger account and moved this here was two-fold – primarily I wanted the content of my blog to be somewhere that I could retrieve it, and secondarily because blogger didn’t, at the time, permit comment posting. I’d hate to be forced to disable commenting altogether because of these jerkoffs.

I just got back from seeing Blade Trinity and I have to admit to enjoying it tremendously. It’s not a great movie at all but it’s almost unbearably fun. The movie’s pretty much non-stop action coupled with decent special effects and oh so much eye candy. Parker Posey has the seriously creepy-but-hot thing going on, and Jessica Biel in ass-kicking mode comes close to the Cole Factor of Kate Beckinsale in Underworld. I spent all my “Punisher” karma tonight.

A friend of mine sent me a ten dollar gift certificate for the Canadian iTunes store, and I spent it on one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard – “Chain Gang of Love” by the raveonettes. These guys just rock – they take 50s style pop melodies and wrap them up in Jesus and Mary Chain style fuzz. I have their first album, “Whip It On”, and it’s good, but “Chain Gang of Love” is utterly amazing.

Well, I’ve been nailed by that Texas Holdem S.O.B. again, so I’ve enabled a plugin that shuts off comments on posts more than 5 days old. Sucks, but that’s how it is. The spam wasn’t making it to the blog because I’ve got WordPress set to force moderation on comments with spam keywords in the comment or URL, but I was starting to get bloody sick of getting dozens of “Please moderate this comment” emails. I swear, if I find this Texas Holdem jerk’s place of business I’m going to burn it to the ground. I’m not a violent guy, but spammers don’t deserve to live. I don’t cry about the amoeba that killed when my water is sanitized, but I’d lose more sleep over them than spammers.

One definition I’ve heard for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Let’s accept that definition as accurate. Now, given that, today, on the way home, I saw the most insane man ever. He was working with a laptop with a usb keychain drive attached. It was pretty obvious that the key had failed – every couple of seconds this guy would jiggle the key, look at the screen, mutter “F_ck me” under his breath, pull the key out, look at the usb plug (as if he could tell what was wrong by looking at the damn port) and then plug the key back in. Occasionally he’d plug the drive into the usb port that the key wasn’t plugged into when he yanked it. He did this something like a total of 20 times in the 10 minutes I was on the train. Hey, stupid dude, if you’re reading this, here’s a gift from the clue fairy: THAT WON’T WORK. Either the drive is dead, or (equally likely) Windows has gone brain-dead and needs rebooting. (Yeah, Windows – it was a Dell laptop.) This must the same kind of guy that kicks the tires when he goes to buy a car.