entertainment – Jonathan Blandford

Sun 02 Feb 2003

Entertainment: Not a very productive day, but a very fun one. I went out to see Chicago with the Foxes today. We strangely ended up carpooling in one car to downtown Chapel Hill for dinner and coffee. Then, we headed away from town to pick up the car, which Zana and I took right back into town.

Chicago was fun. Catherine Zeta-Jones was much better than expected, as she is much more talented singer and dancer than I had known. The rest of the cast were better actors than singers. Still, the music and script carried them along well. The one disappointment to me was Queen Latifah as Mama Morton. If there was one role that called for a big, brassy delivery, that was it. However, she didn’t sing nearly as aggressively as I would have hoped for.

Nonetheless, I can’t help but compare this to musicals of the past. The film was slicker, the quality of the editing and sound was much better. The acting was as good or better than any of the musicals I’ve been watching recently (especially the super-smarmy Richard Gere). But gosh darn it, the singing and dancing just wasn’t as good. Fred Astaire, where have you gone!?!??
basketball: Sometimes, it’s nice to just sit back, relax, and watch the Lakers win.

hacking (GTK+-HEAD): Did a bunch of small things to the tree widget yesterday. It was therapeutic to actually work on GTK+ again, as opposed to doing config tools. I found I had forgotten half my C. I kept leaving ‘;’ off the end of the lines, and tried to put a ‘print’ statement in my code. I did a bunch of small changes to the tree, including foolishly accepting a patch from alexl. Owen pointed out that his object, while being a neat feature, could probably be implemented easily in GtkTreeView. Going there to look, I discovered I’d already half done so. Sheesh…
entertainment: Watched Toy Story 2 with Zana. It was very entertaining, and extremely well done.

hacking: Spent half the day getting Crutcher’s printconf program automake’d and in CVS, and half the time trying to get a release of apacheconf. Phil claimed to have it generating httpd.conf files, but I’ll have to try it myself tomorrow. I think we’ll try and make a public release tomorrow.
entertainment: Movie of the night was 13th Warrior. Mr Cranky pegged it when he described it as “a cross between ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ‘Braveheart’ and two hours of television static.” I think there was a Miller Light commercial mixed in there somewhere.
dog: Time to walk the doggy.

hacking: started working on some tools to re-rip my CD collection into ogg files. I’m using the cool CDDB module available at http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/~ben/python/cddb.html
entertainment: Watched Fight Club with Zana again. Much fun.

entertainment: XFL sucked. A lot. So much so, that Zana sent me out to rent a movie. I rented Highlander, and watched it. Woo — that’s one more movie that I’ve been meaning to see watched.
consumerism: Went furniture shopping with zana this morning. We looked at a bench to put by our front door, so people can take off their shoes easily. Went to Ecko, and picked out some fabric samples. Also grabbed a CD-RW at stayonline. Now that I have the camera working, I’m going to want to store the pictures on something.
College Sports (hoops): Watched UNC beat Georgia Tech. Not a bad game — almost worth fighting through traffic for. Also saw UCLA beat Stanford. Should make my brother happy. I watched a lot of TV today.
work (apacheconf): Gave some more thought to handling Environment variables. I think we can get another public release out to the testers list on Monday.