Updated the FDISK guide, including the associated PDF. This is the site's 3rd most popular feature, and has been seeing heavy traffic lately. I try to give more attention to the more-popular guides.
Receive my first message from an old high school buddy, after registering at Classmates.com. I grew up on the East coast [Connecticut], but moved West, to the land of sunshine and surfboards, after growing weary of scraping ice off my windshield.
I can still recall that fateful morning: standing in snow up to my knees, at 5:30, heading to work, still pitch black out, wind howling ominously thru the trees, and having that yellow plastic scraper snap in my hand. It had rained the night before .. temperature plummeted overnight .. covering windshield with ice .. couldn't see squat.
More than that scraper snapped that January morning. Two months later, found myself heading West for a new job in SoCal. Bought a Best of the Beach Boys CD and played it the whole way. [And I don't even like the Beach Boys.] Bought a surfboard and took up the sport. [Much harder than it looks, unfortunately.]
But I did look cool driving around town with that 9-footer wedged into the passenger seat like a tall, skinny date, sticking out of the top of the Rad mobile [the top comes off]. Still have the broken scraper stashed away in my glove compartment. Whenever I get tired of living in Southern California [traffic here sucks], I take it out and fondle it. Helps me remember...
Haven't kept in touch with anyone from high school, and only a few buddies from my days in the Navy. Stopped flying home about 5 years ago. Seems like I was only returning for weddings and funerals. Funerals depress me and the dead never seemed to notice I had flown 3,000 miles to pay my respects. Last time I was there, I told the family, "Nobody is allowed to die for 10 years." [And nobody has.]
None of the weddings I attended worked out [not one] .. as if I brought bad luck. Every wedding I missed since boycotting the East coast has worked out .. every one of them are still married. Coincidence? You decide. You know what I think. Instead of flying home for vacations, I now go to places here like Yosemite, and do things like climb Half Dome.
Got tired of getting on the plane in Los Angeles [70-degrees and sunny], and getting off in New York [20-degrees and snowy]. So I saw no point in returning. There is one thing I miss however: the pizza. Anyway, the email from an old high school buddy got me thinking about life back then. I wonder how the heck they're all doing now.
The site broke 1-million hits-per-month yesterday .. for the first time. See here. This milestone is arbitrary, but sounds cool nonetheless. Going to celebrate by taking the entire Radified staff out to dinner tonight. [Hope I don't get too lonely eating by myself.] It took almost a whole year to accumulate the first million hits. Now it's becoming a monthly event.
While running the beach barefoot yesterday, here in Laguna, I passed a guy running the other way. I called out, "Hey, what's that patch on your arm?" He stopped. Never met him before. [Beautiful day: hot & sunny. Water cold, tho.] This guy had a 1-inch square patch taped to his right shoulder.
He jokingly said he was a member of the "Drug corp". Apparently, he had gotten busted for possessing an amount of marijuana over the allowable limit. Instead of getting arrested, the state [California] lets "offenders" participate in a rehab program where they attend meetings & wear a patch, which is sent to the lab on a monthly basis .. where it's analyzed to see if you've been doing drugs. Technology at its finest.
I didn't know about this program. He seemed like a friendly, intelligent guy, probably 30-ish. The patch struck me as odd for some reason .. kind of like a criminal wearing an electronic beeper on his ankle. Anyway, I'm a little sore after that run. Got sunburnt. Ran down to Heisler Park and back.
Updated the Guide to Norton Ghost. This is the site's single most requested feature. Also updated the accompanying PDF files. These hadn't been updated for over a year. They require a little more effort. Been receiving a lot of requests for that [updated PDF files].
I didn't want to update them until I updated the guide .. which is now done. There's even an online HTML version with a black background, which some folks find easier on their eyes.
Wendy graduated from USC Film school in Los Angeles this past Friday. Ceremonies were held at the Shrine Auditorium: right across the street from the USC campus .. the same place the Academy Awards have been held over the years.
She received an MFA in Film & Television Production from the finest Film school in the world .. a grueling 3-year program. A few photos from the day are posted here > PHOTOS. Chronicles of the semesters are posted here.
Wendy's thesis project film is titled Breakwater. Photos from the days of shooting are posted here. Wendy's web site is Lagunacinema.com. The master index page for her Film school chronicles is posted here. She'll spend the summer in Italy, studying Italian Cinema and Screenwriting at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome. Scorsese's Gangs of New York was filmed there. More info here.
Stumbled across a site worth mentioning: Beige.org - The Virtual Canvas. Experiencing life through a second pair of eyes. Well organized with both photos and commentary. Thoughtful and insightful. Downright artistic.
The work of Thomas Mannfred Carlsson, from Finland. Discovered his site by searching Google for Mann's Chinese Theater, where I found upon his photo essay on Los Angeles.
Interesting to see how foreigners view the city. Those of us living close usually come to synonymize LA with traffic and smog. Excellent job of capturing its favor and texture. Rad kudos.
Saw the Matrix Reloaded today .. at the "largest screen in the west" .. aka The Big Newport. Place was packed. Especially for a weekday night. Seats 1100. The line wrapped around the block.
What a roudy bunch. Kids were amped. Yelling & carrying on. Theater management tossed out 6 or 7 beach balls. The crowd tossed them around while waiting for the show to start. Kinda fun. Before the flick started, a lady came down front with a blow horn and told everyone to shut-up, turn off their cel phones & behave.
Filmmakers went all out on this movie. It's a spectacle. I try to give you my impressions without spoiling it for you. Things that got my attention:
1. plenty of passion in this flick, surprisingly so .. downright erotic in parts .. all done well.
2. the loving making scene was excellent .. realistic and vulnerable .. one of the best such scenes I've seen. Kenau & Trinity get naked.
3. kenau reeves, who i've never thot of as a great actor, did a superb job. this performance puts him in another league.
4. morpheus seemed chubby, which diminished his stature in my eyes. I mean, he's supposed to be this great warrior.
5. trinity gave a great performance also. this helped, cuz she's in a lot of the movie.
6. Cool as the battle scenes were (and they were), they got a little carried away. These began to drag on.
7. One of the coolest parts is when Neo does his launching-into-superman thing.
8. Filmmakers wax metaphysical in parts. Felt like I was back in Philosphy class, studying the question of "free will vs determinism". BF Skinnner would've loved it.
From many different sources, MetaCritic compiled a bunch of reviews on the Matrix here. On the way home, we saw the lunar eclipse, right in front of us, which added to the magic.
Saw previews for T3: Terminator 3 .. Arnold's baaack. And Bad Boys II. It's going to be a good summer.
Installed Movable Type v2.63 today. [Notice that the name of this application contains only one 'e' .. Movable vs Moveable .. but the site's URL will work both with and without the second 'e'] The software you see demonstrated here is touted as the best blogger, "hands down". Wonderfully configurable, it also comes with a nasty reputation for being difficult to install. I must admit: the install and config was rather complicated, but went without a hitch.
The MT installation reminds me of the forum software Radified uses: YaBB [Yet another Bulletin Board]. Both use a Perl-based CGI script, so the concepts are similar. MT also makes use of MySQL database, which YaBB lacks. But I'm familiar with configuring MySQL from another Open Source forum package I installed: YaBB SE [to test its features and speed].
The MT user interface, which uses your web browser, looks like this. This chick showed me how to modify the template's code to darken the background [making it easier on my eyes]. I've been curious to see what programs such as MT offer, especially since I've been "blogging" for almost three years now .. before I even knew what the word meant. [The term 'blog' is a contraction of 'web log'. I just learned this today.]
I've never used any of the other popular bloggers, such as Greymatter, Radio Userland, Blosxom, pMachine, b2, Nucleus or Blogger Pro .. so I have no point of reference to compare MT with. [See here or here for a list of more.] Which software you choose depends on the particular features supported/offered by your web hosting provider. I'd rather start with the best, even if it means a more complicated install.
Because it's difficult to install, MT isn't for everyone. But they do offer to install the software for US$40. This is a bargain, trust me. Okay, 'nuf of this drivel. Let's click the "publish" button and see if this badboy works.
Edit: Well, I'll be. It worked! To be honest, I expected to spend a few hours consulting the Troubleshooting file and groveling for help at the MT support forums. This tells me the installation instructions are better than the usual unintuitive crap you find out there. Kudos to who-ever wrote them.
Moveable Type offers serveral different pre-configured styles. I choose this black-gray-blue CSS template because it most closely resembles the Radified home page. More elaborate designs can be found at places like the Glen Road Girls and blog styles. Helpful and clever config tips can be found at girlie matters.
