Last night (since my stupid dish network is still out), I watched Jungle Goddess. It starred George Reeves, who played Superman on the TV show. The original black and white one that used to be on Sunday mornings before Church when I was a kid.
Anyway, this movie was about two guys living in Africa that owned an airplane. A reward is offered to anyone that can find some guy’s daughter, dead or alive, who was aboard a plane en route to Johannesburg when it crashed (okay, that’s plausible). This was about six years in the past, just before WWII started.
Now it’s just after the end of the war, and our two intrepid entrepreneurs are off to collect on the reward. They find her six year old downed plane almost immediately (not so plausible), then execute a landing on the ground through trees and everything (totally not plausible). You could see the model plane knocking the miniature trees over as it was “landing.”
They head off to find the girl, are intercepted by spear-toting natives (plausible, but stereotypical), and one of the guys shoots one of them. The natives then take them prisoner and deliver them to their “white goddess” (guess who that is?) to pronounce judgment. She condemns the death of one of the natives by sentencing the shooter to death in 8 days, at the next full moon. In the meantime, she makes plans with Superman to escape the African jungle and return home. She had some really weak reason for not trying this on her own during the six years she lived there, but I forgot what it was.
Anyway, the shooter stowed a pistol that the natives didn’t search him for, so he shoots another one during a scuffle with the Man of Steel, who tries to take the gun away from him because he shoots people all the time and it makes the jungle goddess antsy.
Jungle Goddess sends the natives off on a hunting expedition, then runs off with Superman and his sidekick back to their plane. Sidekick goes crazy, beats up Superman, takes the gun and their only compass to find the plane on his own. Superman laments the fact that the compass is gone, because it was the only way they could get back to the plane. I can only assume this is because it is magnetically charged so strongly that it overrides the Earth’s magnetic North pole. They do get there, however, by following the sidekick’s trail. Sidekick jumps them, tangles with Superman, but the natives find them all at this point and sidekick takes a spear in the back for his karmic reward. Superman and jungle goddess escape on the plane and the movie finishes with jungle goddess wondering what feminine hat fashion has been up to.
I really can’t recommend this movie, but if you read this review you can pretend you saw it. I rate it two empty seats—one for each dead native killed by sidekick guy.
A few days ago I watched The Sidehackers (aka Five the Hard Way). What a piece of work that was.
A “sidehack” is a motorcycle with a steel cage welded on to the back and side that a second person hangs on to and moves around to help the motorcycle take corners faster. There weren’t more than maybe two race scenes in the whole movie! The basic story is about a guy that works on sidehacks, is asked to repair a motorcycle by a local gangster, and gets tangled up in his gangsterly goings-on. His girlfriend gets killed, and he sets out to get revenge on the gangster. In the end, he gets the better of the gangster, beats the tar out of him, you hear police sirens approaching, then the gangster grabs a gun and shoots the hero in the back. The end. No, really. That’s how it ended.
I rate this movie 74 empty seats—one seat for each minute of my life I’ll never get back (the movie is 82 minutes long), minus 10% for the stupid ending.
Those of you that know me know I hate political commercials. That’s why I love these, done by some of the people (including Michael Nelson) that brought us the infamous Mystery Science Theater 3000, and especially this one:
It’s a long way to November. Thank heaven that my Dish Network crapped out two days ago (but they can get a technician out next Monday, so I’ll only be down 7 or 8 days…) or I’d be watching more stupid political commercials without the commentary. Oh wait, I have TiVo, I don’t watch commercials unless I want to (eg., never).
I got a letter in the mail yesterday from the realtor that helped me buy my house several years ago. It contains the following:
I really like to find homes for people and helping their family build there future!
Hehe, he got the first their right, how do you suppose he missed the second one??
Here’s a sweet PDP-11 running UNIX v7 emulator for your computer!
Even I’m not old enough to remember those good old days…
Thanks go out to Ellie for this coconut cookie recipe. Lorien and I had a taste of them a few weeks ago when we stopped by her place and just had to get the recipe!
Coconut Cookies…
By popular demand- the coconut cookie recipe!!
1/2 c. butter
2 c. flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1 tsp. pure vanilla
2 1/4 c. sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1/2 c. brown sugarPreheat oven to 350.
Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
Place 1/2 c. coconut into small bowl, Set aside.
Place remaining coconut into food processor, pulse until coarsely ground.
Using electric mixer, beat butter with sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in egg and vanilla.
Gradually add flour mixture and coconut until combined.
Bake until lightly golden around edges- about 10-12 minutes.Hide some for later, because they will be gone within the hour.
Yesterday I took down my machine for two reasons. One, I was running low on hard drive space (I store a lot of CD and DVD ISO images for the office). Two, my numpad stopped working. I have no idea why. I plugged in a different USB keyboard and its numpad didn’t work either.
Anyway, I took the machine down, added the drive into the third SATA hookup (I have two drives in there already, with a maximum of four), and started everything back up again.
I couldn’t log in after it started up. I almost panicked, but being the calm, cool, sysadmin that I am, I tailed some logfiles which led me to discover that despite the new drive being in the third SATA port, it got named /dev/sdb, and the drive that was /dev/sdb was now /dev/sdc. That also happened to be where my /home partition was mounted. So I fixed /etc/fstab, mounted /home, and voila!, I could log in again.
After a quick XFS format of the new /dev/sdb1 partition, I was in business. See how easy Linux is? And people say it’s not for everybody…
I got to work a little late this morning because I installed a new mailbox at home. Our mail carrier destroyed our old mailbox. I think she hates me or something. I’ve had the same mailbox since I built the house 7 years ago. It wasn’t fancy, but it did the job. The first thing to go was one of the rivets that the door hinges on (the bottom left of the mailbox). I zip-tied it closed, only to find the tie cut the next day. So I zip-tied it again. The next day it was gone. I didn’t tie it tight enough to not allow the door to be opened, just enough to keep the door on straight. She cut the ties off anyway.
Lately, it’s gotten worse—even the top piece that lets the door snap shut was broken. I was keeping it together with two rubber bands, but the evil mail lady wouldn’t replace them. She hates getting out of her little mail car to deliver packages to me. Once though, she did get out to leave a nasty note about not leaving the trash bin near the mailbox. The irony here is that she wouldn’t deliver the mail, but she’d get out of her car and walk her fat pigu up to the door to leave a nasty note.
Anyway, the new box is up and looks nice. It’s bigger so she doesn’t have to get out of her little car anymore.
I just hope she didn’t run over the new mailbox today.
I finally got my SQL server upgrade project finished! Despite a few rough patches (namely the Reporting Server not working) things went fairly smooth, although I did write up a document on how to migrate a Microsoft CRM v3 SQL and Reporting Server to a new machine so I don’t go through quite so much pain next time.
Our new server is a dual quad-core Xeon box with 16Gb of RAM, it’s flipping sweet. Unless you run something like this you have no idea how seriously fast it is. It’s awesome. Our old system took so much longer, and I thought it was a good server. I guess that just goes to show you, when you go with Microsoft, you’d better get the fastest hardware you can afford.
Last night when I got home my wife was watching some period romance movie that TiVo picked up for her. I went about doing dishes and making dinner since I didn’t really want to watch it.
After the movie was over, she tuned the TV over to Animal Planet and was watching a show about lions eating other, slower creatures, during which time she mostly averted her eyes. I was laughing, and she responded “I know it happens, I’d just rather not watch it.”
I told her “I feel the same way about romance movies.”
I just don’t know what else I can say. See it for yourself.
As I mentioned earlier, here are my favorite pictures from last night’s total lunar eclipse.
The small blur to the left is Saturn in this next image. The one towards the top is the star Regulus:
I took some pictures of last night’s lunar eclipse and posted them at an online gallery until I can pick my favorite to post here.
This morning was pretty cold and there was a lot of frost along with fog. I took this picture in my back yard.
I spoke to the people at Imbris, a local ISP, today and I’m finally getting a better deal for my Internet service. I end up paying about $30 less per month for the same service. I can get a big speed boost (probably, but I have to wait for the official word) for $10 less than I’m paying right now. That’s my kind of deal!