Shawna’s Whimsical Weblog

The movie industry truly has gone to crap.

1)Hot Parts Three strippers turn to stealing cars for their day job.
2)Hunt for the Unicorn Killer An account of early 1970s social activist Ira Einhorn, who allegedly murdered his girlfriend and then fled the Country.
3)Hunting Humans Meet Aric Blue. He’s young. He’s handsome. He’s successful. He’s also a serial killer. He picks his victims at random…

4)Hustletown Mobbin’ An urban tale of aspiring Hip Hop artists trying to make in the industry.
5)D.L. Hughley Live D.L. showcases his standup act, raw and uncut.
6)Hunger: Web of Desires David Bowie hosts another collection of four erotic tales of horror.

Now I like movies about gangstas, strippers and pyshopaths as much as the next person, as long as they are well done. However, I think most movies released these days are utter junk. Looking at a number of websites about movie release dates last night, I came to realize that there is even far more put out than I had originally imagined. There were 175 DVD/VHS releases last week alone, and that’s a typical number of weekly releases. Yes, many of those are children’s or instructional videos, but there’s still plenty of crap in there as well.

Tim and I were feeling a bit under the weather and decided to have a nice relaxing night of movie watching last night. We hit the local Hollywood Video store and it was then I remembered why I so rarely head to the movie theatre. We were greeted with row after row of bad, bad movies. The list of movies depicted above were on one shelf together in new releases. Now aside from the D.L. Hughley video, whose work I really don’t know, the rest of the movies look god-awful.

It wasn’t until I hit the O Section of the new release that I actually found a movie I wouldn’t mind watching. In fact after browsing through the entire 300+ new release section I could count on one hand the number of movies that didn’t look terrible. They included:
1) Once Upon a Time in Mexico (I enjoyed the first two in the trilogy, Jeannine and I plan to have a showcasing of all three some night.) Whee, mindless violence!
2) Pirates of the Caribbean. Saw it in the theatre. Good times.
3) Spellbound -A documentary following teenagers through to the 1999 National Spelling Bee.
4) Underworld. -I like vampire movies. The general consensus was “it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” We selected this one. See Tim’s review.
5) Whale Rider. I always like stories that don’t conform to the typical hollywood story.

Now bear in mind there were probably some good indie flicks in the new release section somewhere, but with so many choices how can you tell? For instance, just the night before Ayal had brought over Talk to Her, the 2002 Golden Globe winner for best foreign movie. Now I had seen another flick by director Pedro Almod�var, All About my Mother, so I was prepared for the movie to be a little bit odd. Talk to Her was about the relationship between two men and their loved ones in comas. I pretty much felt like Homer Simpson through the course of the movie “It’s still good, It’s still good…”, until the giant model of a vagina came into the movie. At that point I could only shake my head and think “WTF? This is the best foreign movie of 2002? Well I best stay clear of the rest of the movies put out by other countries that year.” But clearly I can’t rely on the U.S. to put out many good movies either. What to do?

I think I’ll stick to watching the third season of the X-files on DVD.

I think the most common question I get asked these days is, “How’s the wedding planning coming?” And my typical response is “eh… nothing really going on at the moment.” But at the beginning of the year I decided to get me some updates a happenin’.

1) Hotel Reception -Called to check in with Jim (our reception coordinator). He told me to call back in March to set up a tasting in May. I also found out from one of the girls on my soccer team that the pastry chef at the hotel isn’t any good. So I talked to Wendy (cake decorator extraordinaire) about hiring her to decorate our cakes. It’s still up in the air as to whom we will have make the cakes.

2)Wedding Attire -Checked in with Bridal & Tuxedo Galleria to see when my gown and bridesmaids dresses will be in. My gown is supposed to show up 10 days after the shipping date (March 12), and my bridesmaids dresses are due in at the end of March as well. Tim ordered his wedding outfit earlier this month. He still needs to meet with the nice folks at Bombay Fashion to pick out outfits for his groomsmen.

3)Honeymoon -Tim and I started to look at cruises last night for our honeymoon. The top two destination spots are currently Alaska or the Caribbean. If anyone has opinions on any of the cruiselines, please send them our way.

4)Wedding Webpage -Woohoo! It’s up and running, we still have a link or two to add, but you can check it out here.

Tim was relaying a work story today in which he was sent out on an assignment. At the end of five hours it became clear that he absolutely didn’t need to be there. What a cluster fuck. Or according to government lingo, a Charlie Foxtrot.

Tim then told me that local PD uses a different alphabetical coding for the letters C and F-Charles Frank.

A Charles Frank? I can’t wait to tell Troy tomorrow that the remainder of our IT department consists of a cluster fuck.

That is just too perfect.

This post goes out to my first real server project- Epsilon.

Epsilon is our fax server here at work. It also serves as a redundant domain controller. Not many people actually use the fax server at work, so it was ok to take it out of service for a day. However, it was down for four and a half days. Epsilon and I have a very special relationship now.

Day 1. I was to install a raid controller on the server. We had always just had one drive in the server, but we recently up-ed the server to have three. It was time to provide some disk redundancy. I started the morning by redirecting the customer service faxes to another fax machine. With no files in use, I was ready to do a full back-up. The back-up ran flawlessly. Installation of the controller was relatively harmless; after one cable switch the server was happy to have the controller on board. Time to test out “Intelligent Disaster Recovery” put out by Veritas. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Spend the afternoon hours fighting with IDR trying to restablish my server. As my IS Manager Frank irritatingly says, “it no workey”.

Day 2. Decide to call in Veritas to fix my problem. Spend 7 hours on one phone call. I think that may be the longest phone call I’ve ever made. Part 1: Hold for 1 & 1/2 hrs before being put through to Tier 1 Mike. Tier 1 Mike stumbles through textbook help (which is no help) for another 1& 1/2 hrs, before passing me onto an Advanced Team Member. Wait another hour. Advanced Team Member Jim walks me though textbook stuff, but at least he does it correctly. Jim imparts to me that IDR doesn’t support raid controller changes. Gee, that would have been helpful to put in your manual. It’s nearing the end of my work day and I decide that I’m just going to go with using HP’s Smart Start and restore the data the old fashion way. Jim is convinced that it won’t work. Start the install and head home.

Day 3. Finish the Smart Start Operating System install (take that Jim!). Tinker around with our backup software to be able to recognize and authenticate to Epsilon without having it on the network. Perform a back-up of the main hard drive and system state. Reboot the machine. Grumble as Epsilon mocks me in not wanting to reboot. It doesn’t have the proper drivers to use the RAID card silly. Try the Emergency Repair Disk I created last December -blue screen. Try the Windows Recovery Console to install the drivers. The Readme informs me that there’s no manual way to install these drivers. Project Analaysis: FAIL.

Day 4. Time to try and put things back the way they were. Remove the Raid Controller and switch the cable back to the regular SCSI bus. Perform a Smart Start Operating System install again. Run the restore of the C: drive and system state. Make minor changes to the boot.ini. Server boots back up into Windows. Let the server sit to resync the domain controller.

Day 5. Restore the D: Drive. Install the Raid Controller Card with the most recent drivers. Reinstall ISS to remove some minor PerfLib errors from the Event Viewer. Do another full back-up of the server. Restart the fax services so Customer Service stops complaining.

So there it is. 4 and 1/2 days later and all I’ve managed to do is install a card. No, the card is not actually being used, but at least it’s installed.

Worst installation. Ever.

I’ve now played Seafarers of Catan twice. Seafarers doesn’t really add many new components to the game: it brings in ships(including a pirate ship) and gold field hexes (wild cards). What it really provides is a larger board. Thus, both the original 4 person game and the 5-6 player game come with 10 different scenarios to play. That’s pretty dang cool.

The two scenarios we’ve played so far have been interesting, but what I’m really looking forward to are the exploratory games. Games in which you send your ships out and turn over the resource hexes as your ship comes into contact with them. Needless to say, I think I’ll be entertained for awhile.

Tim returned home yesterday after spending the week in Linthicum, Maryland. I’m so happy to have him back home. Last night we headed to O.G. (open gym for floor hockey), and then onto Pope’s birthday celebration at Friday’s. The party was pretty large (~25 people). Pope is such a great guy, it was nice to see everyone turn out to wish him a happy one.

Today has been one for much needed cleaning and laundry. We squeezed some time in to visit GameKeeper at UTC to see how their out of business sale is going. They are down to 30-40% off, with plenty of inventory left to go. Tim picked up some D&D manuals and I picked up Seafarers of Catan, plus the 5-6 player expansion pack(the last one they had). I’m going to see if I can scrounge up some people to test it out tonight after Tim’s hockey game. I asked one of the clerks at Gamekeeper how long they think they’ll be there. He and his co-workers bandied about what rumors they had heard, and the consensus was they’d be in business until sometime between February and March. They had at least 8 copies of Settlers of the Stone Age left. As that one is originally priced far more expensive ($50) than Seafarers ($38), I decided to hold off until next month to see if it gets discounted further.

The thrill is gone.

No more do I long to play Settlers. Sure, I still enjoy a game, but it’s shiny luster of newness has dulled. I was playing a relatively slow casual game last night with Ayal, Adam and Eryn. I don’t really know Adam and Eryn very well; they’re both high school classmates. I had seen Eryn mention Civilization in his blog, and as I have heard that Settlers is similar to Civilization, I thought we should get together and test out both. (Eryn had just recently received the Civ. board game). I think a good time was had by all and I do hope we all can play more in the future.

However, as I mentioned before, I need to add something to my regular Settlers diet. I was looking through the various Settlers expansions this morning, and came across Settlers of the Stone Age. I think this expansion interests me the most. For some reason it makes me smile to think of “building” fire instead of building settlements. As both Zany Brainy at the end of Mira Mesa and the GameKeeper at UTC are going out of business, I will have to see what I can pick up. It’s painful to think of spending $50 a pop on each expansion, and then another $25 to make those expansions 5-6 player games.

I like to start my day with a laugh.

I am a great fan of Dave’s comic collection. However, if work isn’t too busy I crave a little more. It crossed my mind that I hadn’t checked out the 2003 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize awards.

Thank you champions of the Earth for doing your imperative research. It does my heart good to know that Lichtenstein can be rented out for bar mitzvahs.

Some will call me a blasphemer for this, but I think the marketing department did a good job with these items for sale at Landover Baptist.

I especially find the image of the flaming man who has plummeted to hell funny.

p.s. I’m not an “in your face” athiest like these webmasters. I agree with Tim that they are just as bad as religious zealots. I hope I haven’t offended anyone. Really. I’m all for religious (or lack there of) diversity!

Thank you Ryan for this wacky quiz. I love it.