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The Big Snore
If you’re going to make a boring movie, at least have the common courtesy to keep it short. I’m talking here about Kingdom Of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s movie set during the Crusades. Now, Scott has directed some of my favorite movies – Alien, the classic Blade Runner, the criminally neglected Matchstick Men – but this one is a 2 hour+ snooze, and I think the director is the prime culprit. There’s just not enough variety. The pace is leaden and monotonous, with even the battles displayed in dreamy slow motion, and the tone is dreadfully dreary. Thank God for Netflix, my wife wanted to buy this turkey, so I saved $16 and get to watch The Adventures Of Robin Hood for the same money.
Still, Kingdom doesn’t suck as bad as Alexander. What was Oliver Stone thinking?
Croupier. The whole family’s been sick this week, coughing and sneezing, but the 18-month-old has had the worst of it. Yesterday the wife took him to the doctor to get him checked out. The diagnosis? Croupe.
Goddamn, I could have figured that out. “A baby? Coughing? At night? Sounds like the croupe.” What is croupe, anyway? Is there a microorganism called Bacillus Croupus? And even if there is, do we live in Victorian England? Next he’ll be saying it’s consumption.
XML Update. Jon, you can stop reading now. My XML engine now groks binary data, so I have fixed up the Bleeker Books site so that the author photos are returned using this system. Before I had to maintain two separate methods of connecting to the database. Now it’s all unified (if a bit slower). Best part: it only took about 20 minutes to put into place, much less than I had expected.
And I finally realized that the addition of CDATA support means I can use a simpler method to cache XML, so it only has to be regenerated after it’s modified. Progress marches on, etc.
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Patch Work – Updated
10.24.05 | Permalink | 3 CommentsI took my daughter to the pumpkin patch this weekend. She’s just turned six, and she already had a pumpkin, but she wanted a little one she could keep in her room and more or less treat like a doll. She even told me she had to “feed” it, which consisted it setting it in a pan full of water, which it apparently “drank”.
She carried it around with her all day, which turned out to be a bad thing, because while she got the beauty gene from her mother, she got the clumsy gene from me, so she ended up dropping her baby on its head, resulting in a rather large cut.
She was very upset of course, but we thought we had fixed Punky’s head and her nerves with the application of a bandaid. Later, though, she came out of her room while I was ironing my shirts and said that her pumpkin had “died” and that she wanted a new one.
“Can’t you just pretend it’s alive?” I asked.
“No, I want one that’s really alive.” And out came the Death Pout, the Lower Lip Of Darkness, the Scowl Of Despair.
“But honey,” I said, pressing the Guilt Gun to my own head, “they’re dead as soon as they are cut off the vine.”
Oops.
Cowboys Update: They suck. Offense: two trips inside the 20 in the second half, resulting in 3 big points. Plus the big pass play that led to the winning field goal – for the Seahawks. Defense: impenetrable all day, until the last two minutes. Just like last week. Despite his big numbers, I still think that Drew Bledsoe is too inconsistent and will be riding pine by week 17.
Update: No Way, Jose. The Cowboys have now released alleged kicker Jose Cortez, who not only missed a bunch of field goals including a chippie that probably would have won yesterday’s game, but stared down his holder each time (check the pic with this article), which caused a confrontation with guard Larry Allen earlier this year. All year long Cortez kicked like his bags were already packed and in his car. Now he’ll drive off into sunset, leaving nothing behind but fond memories.
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In Case You Missed It
About 10 million Iraqis went to the polls last weekend in a referendum on the new constitution – roughly 70% of eligible voters. Even the ones who voted no – and there were a couple million at least – voted, instead of picking up a gun. And those who chose violence were even less effective than in the January elections to the constitutional assembly.
Even if you opposed the war, this seems to me to be an unmitigated good, and it shows that when you give people a chance to vote, they take it, even at the risk of their lives.
Bad news always outruns the good, but this news leaves me feeling hopeful.
Cowboys update. So which team would we see this week? The Good Cowboys, or the Bad Cowboys? As it happens they both put in an appearance.
The offense made way, way too many mistakes. They turned the ball over, missed field goals, and generally did little to inspire confidence. The defense, however, was terrific, to the point where New York was +4 on turnovers but trailed by a point. Then they went on a takeaway tear themselves, putting an end to at least three drives with New York in scoring position.
So of course they gave up the tying touchdown.
The ‘Boys took care of business in overtime, though, and if their defense keeps playing they way it has the past two weeks, they should compete for a playoff spot. But no one is breaking an ankle jumping on the bandwagon.
Oh BTW, I sold another story. Details to follow.
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Merry XMLmas
10.12.05 | Permalink | 4 CommentsThe last of the XML jokes, I swear. I managed to get around my problems from the post of last week and get at what I’m really trying to do: blast unedited HTML into the middle of an XML without any errors.
After a few false starts I settled on the method I’ve been using for months – make the HTML part of the XML itself, and display it using the proper codes in the template. I wasn’t exactly hot for this solution, much less married to it, because you can have valid HTML that doesn’t conform to the specifications for XML.
For example, take the <br> tag. Perfectly valid HTML. But XML requires all tags to be terminated, so in XML this should read <br/>. Same thing with <img> and lots of other tags. And if you make a typo? Crapville. As it happens there’s not a handy way to enforce this, and if you mistype even one tag the XML programming interface pukes on you. Which is not just discouraging but smells bad, too.
One solution is to define the HTML as a CDATA section, so it’s not evaluated as markup. The problem is that my templates don’t display the ouput correctly. They display it as text instead of markup (it looks like <b>this<b/> instead of this).
Happily, I figured it out today. If the template tags that dump the CDATA are inside other tags, such as an ‘if’ command, they don’t work, but if I put them in a separate template and invoke that – hey presto, it works.
I can see your attention wandering, so I’ll shut up now. But let me just say, this is cool, because now I can open up some of the apps I’ve been working on without worrying about the users (aka ‘lusers’) mucking up the markup.
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Say It Ain’t So
10.10.05 | Permalink | 2 CommentsSo today I was thinking about a girl I knew back in college, and this being the 21st century and all, I decided to Google and see what turned up. It wasn’t what I expected.
Ho. Ly. Crap.
She became a reporter, but she’s the one in the news lately, when she pled guilty to a charge of illegal wiretapping. And not the “cool” kind of wiretapping either, where she brings down corrupt politicians as they leave sexy messages for local women of dubious virtue – no, apparently she wiretapped a co-worker’s phone in her the office.
(Sidebar: How my though process works. I went to the doctor last Friday –> He asked what I thought about the upcoming Texas – OU game –> I told him I went to a very small college and didn’t follow college sports much –> Turns out he spent a year at the same college –> Which got me thinking about W&L’s athletic achievements –> Namely, they won a D-III national championship in tennis –> And we hosted the tournament, so we would have won on our home court –> except that it got rained out, so we finished up at an indoor court in [city name] –> Where [girl's name] went to school. Hey, I wonder what she’s up to!)
I went to a summer camp for high school seniors with this girl, and didn’t find out she went to college around the corner from me until my sophmore year. From today’s vantage point, with almost ten years of marriage to my hothothot wife behind me, it’s hard to remember just how desperate I was back then. Beyond plain desperate, actually. Triple capital D DDDesperate. Super-turbo-uber desperate.
So I called her up and invited her to to a party. We hit it off and saw each other a couple of times, but I never got beyond a heated, if sadly abbreviated, makeout session in the front seat of my car… in the pouring rain… ten feet from the front door to her dorm. (Note to the wife: this was fifteen years ago. Five years before I even knew you existed. Had I known then, well – things would have been different.)
But after a while I got a bit disenchanted. It was the little things. For example, signing out of her dorm and seeing her teeny-tiny handwriting signing in someone else a bit higher up the page. This was the first time I ever thought, “It’s not worth it,” and stopped calling.
Of course, I wrote a make-up letter later. I was DDDesperate.
Along with my mad-bomber friend, this is two people I knew in school who are looking at a rent-free stay as a guest of the state. Not quite sure what that says about me.
Cowboys Week In Review. After I predicted that they’d fall to earth, they played perfect, and Donovan McNabb finally played like he was hurt. And Vinnie Testaverde, who I just finished trashing last week, let the Jets to a big win. The lesson, as always: I’m an idiot.
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