history
indoor fun
by anders pearson
Mon 14 Jun 2004 12:31:17
the weather in new york was so beautiful this weekend that i really should be punished for not taking advantage of it.
my excuse is that i had a new toy to play with.
my primary machine at home has been quite flakey for a long time. hardware issues. it's also big and loud. so a few weeks ago i broke down and ordered a new system. it's a "Shuttle SN41G2":http://us.shuttle.com/specs2.asp?pro_id=439 based system. smaller than a breadbox, quiet, reasonably powerful. i ordered it from "Los Alamos Computers":http://www.laclinux.com/en/Start, who ship it with "Debian GNU/Linux":http://www.debian.org/ pre-installed.
of course, once i'd spent a few hours failing to get "mplayer":http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ working on Debian, i decided to wipe it and install "Gentoo":http://www.gentoo.org/ instead, which is the only linux distro that i've ever actually managed to get mplayer and all the video codecs properly installed on.
installing gentoo involves a lot of waiting for things to compile though, so i watched a few movies while it chugged away:
* "Bend it Like Beckham":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286499/
* "Wild at Heart":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100935/ (when it, or any other David Lynch movie is on TV, i can't not watch it)
* "One Hour Photo":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265459/
* "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth":http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0296362/ (i was particularly excited to stumble across this on PBS since i'm almost done reading his "The Hero With A Thousand Faces":http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691017840/)
now i have a brand new, fast, stable machine running with a fancy 2.6 kernel, every bit of hardware on it working nicely, and mplayer installed.
comments
TC - Mon 14 Jun 2004 15:18:26
And you said there was nothing fun lately. You LIE!! Lie like the... the... the Anders you are. Do not mock me!ouwiyaru - Mon 28 Jun 2004 14:24:05
Bend it Like Beckham was playing on the plane-ride back from Moscow. While the positive-ness nearly left me blind, it was a cute movie. I saw the Campbell PBS special a while ago and was intrigued though I haven't been able to finish any of his books.anders - Mon 28 Jun 2004 15:31:47
i think the PBS interview format suits Campbell better than a book. in both, he just relates story after story about different myths and intersperses commentary explaining how they're related and what is important about each. there isn't a lot of structure or direction to his writing and it gets a bit tiring after four of five hundred pages. in an interview though, it feels more manageable. he also gets quite animated and the interview conveys more of his excitement about the material than his writing. still, his books are incredibly information-dense and have lots of footnotes, and a solid bibliography which is always nice.