Aren’t they visiting Japan or something?

/ net stuff

Apparently not — though they did just return, evidently. Ben and Mena Trott, authors of Movable Type (and, apparently, cyborgs who don’t need to sleep) are revving MT again, this time to version 2.6. I’m glad to see them releasing early and often, but a bit chagrined that I just installed 2.51 on a new host. Oh well. I’m guessing the upgrade will be painless enough. There appear to be plenty of tasty features in this release, although the one I’m really looking forward to, user-customizable fields, ain’t there yet. I know it’s on the wishlist, though.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

/ movies

Saw Confessions of a Dangerous Mind the other day. Movies based on the lives of obscure celebrities may be turning into a trend: first Auto-focus, now this. (Next up: The Nipsey Russel Saga, Scott Baio — Behind the Scenes, and Tragic Mediocity: the Unravelling of Dana Plato.) I jest, but it was actually quite an engaging movie.

This is George Clooney’s first stab at directing, and it made me realize that there must be incestuous cliques in Hollywood. George Clooney and Julia Roberts appeared together in this movie and in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven. Soderbergh is one of the producers of this picture, and (I suspect) had some influence over its look. Drew Barrymore and Sam Rockwell were together in this movie, as they were in Charlie’s Angels. Sam Rockwell and George Clooney were in Welcome to Collinwood, produced by Steven Soderbergh (I haven’t seen it either, I just checked). There are probably more overlaps and intersections.

Anyhow. Remember A Beautiful Mind? In that, John Nash, brilliant mathematician, had delusions of being an intelligence operative. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chuck Barris (yes, that Chuck Barris) reports that he is a contract hit man for the CIA. The movie is based on Barris’ autobiography. The movie does not editorialize on whether the author is nuts, and hints that he might have been telling the truth. I’m skeptical.

Baraka

/ movies

Saw Baraka at the Paramount recently. Amazing movie. Very much in the same vein as Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, that is, no plot, dialog, or story: simply a succession of loosely linked images of nature and human activity, with a very good score running throughout. Some amazing locations, including Angkor Wat, the Highway of Death, Everest, the Brazilian rainforest, and so on.

Mail down

/ personal

Due to a configuration problem, any mail sent to me between roughly noon Sunday (Jan 26) and 9:00 AM Monday (Jan 27) would have bounced. It should be working now.

Mesh networks

/ technology

aav.thumb.jpg

Locust World has developed the software and hardware to create mesh networks on the cheap (about $400 per box). This is potentially big. A mesh network allows one to extend a wireless network indefinitely — a signal will hop from one box to the next, until eventually finding one that’s got a landline connection. Obviously traffic could get backed up, but this makes all kinds of interesting things possible. via BoingBoing.

Geoblogging

/ Austin, meta-blogging

Still more news about GeoURL.

Joshua Shachter, who is responsible for GeoURL, has created a simple interface between it and Movable Type. This allows individual archive entries in MT to automatically generate the appropriate tags, and to ping GeoURL.

I’ve already begun putting this to work in a local blog-thing, so that local real-world places of interest can get in on the GeoURL action. Things are still very tentative and rough, but check it out: AustinURL.

iCommune

/ technology

Sometimes a bit of software just blows your mind iCommune is one. A seemingly mild-mannered plug-in for Apple’s iTunes music software, it turns iTunes into a streaming peer (that also, incidentally, allows you to copy MP3 files).

The weak spot is that the user must manually enter fellow peers to stream from/to: there’s no auto-discovery. But once they’re in there, your friends’ music is just as available to you as the music on your hard drive, through the same interface. The simplicity is very powerful. This may be part of the reason Apple forced the author to pull the plug-in. But if you can find a copy, check it out.

And let me know what your IP number is so we can share.

Soup

/ personal

For whatever reason, people eat a lot of soup when sick. Especially the canned stuff, since the invalid is feeling too lethargic to put together real soup. Having just gotten over the flu, and with Gwen ping-ponging back and forth, there’s been a fair amount of soup consumption in our lives lately. A lot of canned soup.

But here’s the thing: it’s a terrible over-extension of the word “soup” to use it to describe both the stuff that comes in a can or styrofoam container, and the stuff you actually make yourself. The two things really have very little in common, I’ve decided.

As of last night, Gwen was still sick, and when she asked what I could bring over food-wise, she suggested we could have soup. I’m not much of a cook, but I’d be damned if I had another can of Progresso or whatever. Bleah. Off to Central Market, where I assembled ingredients for something vaguely Thai-like. Okay it had lemongrass and ginger and cilantro and shrimp, and some other stuff. That’s about as Thai as my unculinary Jewish ass can get. It wound up being pretty good. A damn sight better than anything coming out of a package.

The mouse that roared

/ current events

We (as in “We the people”) have lost the Eldred v Ashcroft case before the Supreme Court. This fought the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of ’98, which was passed at Disney’s behest so that Mickey Mouse would not fall into the public domain.

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