Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

So tonight for Denise’s birthday we went out to see the Simpson’s movie.  I was really worried about this film as I love the Simpsons.  I’ve adored the show ever since the first time I caught an episode of it.  When I lived with Brian and JC it was one of only a couple of shows that we could both agree on.  So of course I was worried the film would fill like they were trying to drag out one long joke for 90 minutes, or that it would be a rehash of things they’ve done a million times.  Maybe the jokes would be stale, or the transition to the big screen would just fall flat.I’m happy to report that everything turned out all right.  The wit was there.  The stupid humor, the deeper jokes referencing all aspects of pop culture were carefully woven in to the script as they have been through the past nearly two decades of the show.  The slow moments were perfectly timed to give me the chance to catch my breath before breaking in to the next marathon of laughter.  The best part was they didn’t try to be a big screen movie.  They were the Simpsons, pure and simple.  They were the four fingered yellow family that we’ve come to love for their dysfunctional values.  Right from the beginning FOX studios intro until the last credit finished rolling up the screen it was pure Simpsons. 

There we go, a few days ago I got World of Warcraft running on my Ubuntu linux box.  It requires WINE to play, but it runs just peachy keen.  I didn’t play for an extended period of time but after 15 minutes everything was still working.  I’m not sure I’ll really play much on it, but its nice to know there’s a backup in case anything weird happens with the laptop.  When it comes to computers I like having backups of the backups and everything else.

Yes, I was a big dork and read the Seventh Harry Potter the same day that it arrived. It took roughly 10 hours so basically that’s all I did Saturday. Did I enjoy it? Yes, I did indeed. I also wasn’t terribly shocked by some of the revelations in it, and I’m still not sure whether or not I’m satisfied with how it all came together, but overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s the depth of the characters that really makes all of the books work for me - that and all the little details of the wizarding world. The stories were always fairly elementary, but they are told well and that makes up for a lot. I can say I’m satisfied that the series (at least this story arc) has come to an end.

Now I’ll be going back to the reading of the Dresden Files series. I’ve read the first four books in that series. Again, it’s made up of really deep characters and lots of interesting little details that makes the world feel real.

I need to do some reviews of books - I read a lot. Okay, I don’t read as much as I used to and as much as I would like, but I do have a degree in English. I could, after all, do something at least moderately useful with the time spent in school.

I may have been down and out because of my back the past couple of days but I did manage to do something productive. Well the relative merits of how productive it actually was could be debated, but for my purposes it was productive indeed. The chair in the house that gave my back the best support happened to be the one that sits in front of my computer desk. This gave me the chance to play with my long neglected Linux box.

I’ve always had some machine kicking around with some various Linux distro on it. Mostly I’ve been a casual user of it - keeping tabs on it as it grew from a hobbyist system to a surprisingly capable modern day OS. My current distro of choice is Ubuntu(Fiesty Fawn is currently running on it). I’ve kept it fairly up to date so when I powered it on there weren’t too many updates waiting for me. One of the first things that I did was to uninstall GAIM so that I could try their newly developed Pidgin (the GAIM replacement). it reminded me a lot of a simplified Trillian (Windows app), and it was pretty easy to get it up and running with preferences the way I wanted them. It really does make me wish I had a second laptop to install Linux on as I rarely feel inclined to sit at my desk.

What really got my geek juices flowing however was installing World of Warcraft. There is no Linux native version, but I had seen many screen captures of people running WoW on various Linux distros so I knew with a little bit of googling I’d be able to figure something out. It took very little poking and prodding of Wine’s settings (I wanted to avoid using certain virtualizations that were designed to work with it, but cost money) before I was able to get the installer up and running. I learned the hard way not to install WoW, then Burning Crusade, then run the updates. Doing this caused all kinds of strange issues so I was forced to delete the install and start over. This time I installed WoW, logged in until it ran through every update it needed to do, then I installed Burning Crusade and ran through all its updates. Success! However that’s where my geekgasm fell short. When I logged in, selected my realm and character and tried to join the server the loading screen would reach 100%, then hang. Whatever it was doing was eating nearly 100% of the processor. This is where I ended playing with it. I felt satisfied with the progress I made and I’m sure I’ll poke at it again sometime.

I’m amazed every time I play with Linux how far its come, especially seeing how much of the work is done on a purely volunteer basis.

After fracturing my back and hip when I was younger I always knew later in life it would lead to problems. Of course back then I didn’t think about it or care much because that was so much further down the line it seemed like forever. Well welcome to forever.

The other day my back locked up to where even sitting up wasn’t an option. Taking aspirin for it was like using a band-aid to patch up a freshly cut off limb. I upgraded to something a little stronger and that helped me sleep for the night. When I woke up this morning I felt fine, until I got out of bed and I nearly crashed to the floor.

Still, here I am at work (how’s that for work ethic?), just praying time goes by a lot faster because the pain goes deep in to the bone. If you’ve never experienced that feeling I recommend you do everything in your power to keep it that way. I really don’t want to take anything too strong for the pain right now as I doubt I’d be able to function today.

All I can think about right now is going home, laying down with the heating bad and a happy little white pill.