Barkerburgh

Seven words you won’t be able to say on TV anymore.

I will always laugh about Cardinal Glick.
(more…)

I’m just sayin’.

…while I was housesitting for Peter and Leslie. Go on. Guess! (more…)

I guess the title just says it. Except that there’s this - no, never mind.

I have recently reacquired copies of two of my favourite albums; Joni Mitchell’s 1985 album ‘Dog Eat Dog’ and Jennifer Warnes’ 1986 Leonard Cohen tribute album ‘Famous Blue Raincoat”.

Wow. Listening to these tracks after not hearing them for a few years is still visceral, still exciting and suddenly startling.

Why startling? Well, my situation is considerably different now from what it was in, say, late 2001. The music while still beautiful, means so much more. Email me and I’ll send you a breakdown. I dare you.

I’m listening to ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ as I type this. ‘Bird on a Wire’ right now, as it happens.

Ah. Cohen’s poetry and Warnes’ voice.

Kill me now.

Well, not now. But you know, let me finish listening to the albums again. And I have a week of house-sitting to do involving feeding cats, and I have a doctor’s appointment on May the 8th, and some genetic counselling and testing in July, so kill me later. We should talk.

Laura invited me to join her on Thursday evening at the Princess of Wales Theatre to see “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part I”.

It was based on/cut down from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of Charles Dicken’s 1838-1839 serialized novel of the same name, minus the ‘Part I’. In 1980, the RSC produced a version that “lasted more than ten hours (counting intermissions and a dinner break - the actual playing time was approximately eight-and-a-half hours)”. This play, and Part II, which I will again be joining Laura to see, were condensed out of that first grand production. Both parts together are six hours, so we didn’t lose much.

In 1982, a miniseries of the production was produced and was later broadcast on America’s PBS. I remember it being on and being interested, but I didn’t watch it, and I don’t remember why. Maybe the length…

Laura, being a big fan, had lots of background on the original production and the original novel, and I enjoyed her sharing immensely.

Being unfamiliar with the story but for the very basics, I did some research on Wednesday about the novel and the stage presentation, which I had heard of, and was intrigued and impressed.

And just so I could catch up a little, I downloaded the Gutenberg text of the novel. I hope I can be prepared for Part II.

(Sometimes when I am really impressed or moved by a show like this, including a TV show or a cinematic movie, I tend to try and replay it in my mind, to think about the language or the imagery or the story, and maybe I have cool dreams. Well, I had cool dreams last night; I just can’t remember what they were - and I really wish I could.)

Late the other night/early the other morning on TVO, I saw this National Geographic produced show about Greece’s Rion-Antirion bridge, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. And it crosses a fault line beneath the sea.

It links the two towns across the Gulf of Corinth, replacing an old ferry.

The construction techniques to earthquake-proof the bridge (as far as that’s ever possible) are fascinating and the progress of the construction is amazing to watch.

One of the coolest aspects of the whole plan is that the foundations of the piers on the bottom of the Gulf are not secured in bedrock (or even to bedrock) at all. They sit on many meters of sediment stabilized with huge steel posts driven deep into the muck, and then topped with several meters of gravel.

It’s a beautiful structure, too and looks very good and fitting in this, the Future.

Just saw it for the first time last night on Bravo.

Wow.

If you’ve never seen it, please do.

It’s got it all; layered flashbacks, voice-over explication, sex, drugs, angst, twists, verisimilitude (but only similitude), did I mention sex? I did; so let’s make it a hat trick - sex.

Sorta/kinda reminds me of ‘A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum’ but without the songs. Yes. Really.

It’s the most delightfully self-referential movie since ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.’ And almost as funny.

Peter C. says I now have to see “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich.” Ain’t gunna argue.

Anybody for a movie marathon some Sunday afternoon? You bring the movies. I’ll bring the anticipatory glee.

Alas, poor Donald.

The divine punishment problem was with my client machine and it’s more or less fine now.

After I’d finished that religious observance, I began to have problems with my server, whereon reside the WAMP family of divine servants, Apache web-server, MySQL DBMS and the delightful sprite, PHP.

Well, WAMP started to fail intermittently.  It appeared to be associated with Google Desktop Search’s indexing operations so I disabled that.  It seemed to be okay for a while.  Then it happened again.

There appeared to be a connection with Windows’ own screensaver kicking in.  When that happened, the MySQL server would fail, but not consistently.  I disabled the screensaver and the frequency of the problem lessened.  (I was testing all this from the ritually restored client machine, in case there was a networking component to the failure.)

I thought, ‘Dear Gods, screw this’ and I reinstalled WAMP, being careful to back up my databases and websites.  (For simple laziness I have taken to installing a separate instance of Mediawiki for each project; it’s easier to plan and navigate the project, the harddisk footprint is small and they all use the same MySQL, so the processor overhead isn’t all that bad.)

The reinstall didn’t help and when I restored my databases, it saw the tables but said they didn’t exist if I tried to SQL them from the management interface.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, thinks I.  (It’s an ancient expression of dismay and concern among my people.)

I analyzed the Windows system logs, the MySQL error logs, the ini files.  I examined the database files as if they were simple text files to see if the data was there; I was terrified I’d lost it all!  Everything was where it should be, yet it wasn’t working.

Long story short, about 3:30 this morning I reinstalled WAMP again and everything worked as if there’d been no problem in the first place.  I have no idea what I did or didn’t do rightly or wrongly; it just started to work.

My people’s ancient gods at work again.

Every year during the winter solstice holiday season, I celebrate my people’s ancient Sacred and Revelatory Restoration of the Crashed Operating System.

This year, as an atheist, I was planning to forgo it as outmoded and irrelevant to this, our modern world of the future.

My people’s gods are angry and petulant, capricious and heedless.  I was forced to repeat the primal, days-long ritual.

Finally, on Friday I succeeded to my gods’ satisfaction.

Again I am blessed.  For a year.