Wed 06 Jul 2005

  • evince: We got a bunch of patches this weekend from Matt Wilson of rpath fame to fix up the tiff backend. If someone wants to hook us up to some telephony software, we’d make a pretty awesome display for a fax program. I also read in the ChangeLog that Marco put some code to make evince ‘spatial’. I do not think that that word means what I think it means. It sounds pretty cool, but sometime I’m going to have to figure out what it does.

  • cinema: When I was a kid, I remember watching the Three Amigos. I loved that movie, and remember laughing and laughing a lot at it. A decade later, I rented it to show it to Zana, promising her it would be a great movie. “You’ll love it! It’s funny!” It was terrible. None of the jokes were watchable, and we turned it off before we got to the end.

    (Actually, the bit where Martin Short shoots the invisible swordsman by mistake was pretty funny…)

    After watching Revenge of the Sith recently, I thought I’d rewatch the original Star Wars trilogy again. I’m not a really a Star Wars fan, but I do remember enjoying them a lot when I saw them, and, like everyone else, was disappointed with the second trilogy. I was afraid that watching the originals again would ruin them like it did for the Three Amigos, or at least diminish them in my memory.

    I needn’t have worried. It turns out that the first two were genuinely much better than the later movies. However, the Return of the Jedi was a surprise for me, as I really enjoyed it a lot. I remember it as good, but not great, and not as good as the other two. That also appears to be its reputation on the internet. In particular, the final lightsaber battle between Vader and Luke has got to top my list of favorite movie duels. It wasn’t as technically impressive as other sword fights, but the emotion of the moment and the music really swept me away. It was really worth a rewatch.

  • words: Nat is my literary hero this week! Not only did he write a play in a day, he used the word ‘uxoriousness’ in his blog. +1 style point for that.

  • independence day: Groton had its independence day celebration tonight. Zana and I went to go listen to music, eat fair food, watch the fireworks. We had a great time. It wasn’t clear to us why the town had their party a day late, though. I guess they just wanted to have their own Fifth of Fourth…