The Piano Teacher
Erika Kohut is piano teacher at a music conservatory. While there she starts teaching a young male student and the two of them become obsessed with each other and explore their fantasies together. Going into the movie, I knew that it was going to be a little twisted, but didn’t know much about it. After watching it, I realized it was by Michael Haneke and everything made a lot more sense.

The Long Goodbye
Philip Marlowe is a classic private eye. There is only one small difference. He lives in LA during the seventies. The story line is much line many others of the film noir genre, the the time and setting allow it to present a different picture. Marlowe spends the film trying to find out what happened to his friend. The police say he killed his wife and then killed himself in Mexico, but Marlowe does not believed it.

Dances with Wolves
Kevin Costner moves to an abandoned fort in the western frontier after being awarded for his actions during a Civil War battle (he was actually trying to kill himself). Living on his own, he spends time learning a life of the land. In turn, he befriends a tribe of Sioux that lived in the area. Costner, a first time director, spared no expense to make the film as real as possible. The film features thousands of buffalo and a few “trained” wolves. This movie is the reason Goodfellas did not win Best Picture.

Babette’s Feast

Two sisters live in a small Danish village continuing their father’s work as a Protestant priest with a congregation that is aging and dwindling. The sisters do their best to provide for the community and bring meager meals to the elderly. One day a Babette, a refugee from Paris, arrives at their door with a note from a former suitor saying she would be a good housekeeper. Babette learns from the sisters and quickly becomes a part of the community by taking many of the chores. After many years, Babette wins a French lottery and convinces the sisters to let her cook a traditional French dinner before she returns to Paris.

In trying to right that short summary, it emphasized how awkward I felt the plot was. There is an extended flashback that details the back story of how each sister had a suitor that was refused based on their father’s wishes. Neither seemed to have much chemistry with the respective sister, but both reemerge in the story to have an impact. The entire thing is fairly drab until Babette starts showing her true self and preparing for the meal. The ending is heartwarming, but requires you to sit through a lot before you get there.

Au Hasard Balthazar

Tow parallel stories are told of a young girl and a donkey she befriended as a child. Neither have a happy life and deal with their troubles in their own way. This movie isn’t about flash or in your face action. Everything is very minimal and going through the motions. However, this makes the scenes that are filled with emotion stand out. I felt a stronger connection with Balthazar (the donkey), but understanding his sorrows gives you more insight into Marie’s life.

The Ballad of Narayama

A remote mountain village that rich with traditions and superstitions. At the age of 70, a person is carried up into the mountain and left to die. The second born sons are not allowed to wed and must help their family grow their crops. The film focuses on one family who has a 69 year old grandmother, her two sons (the eldest had to become the head when his father ran away), and a younger generation that no longer has a mother because she died giving birth to the youngest daughter. The movie follows a year in the life of this family and the village they live in. There are hard times and tough decisions to be made. There are a few brutal scenes that are the result of this situations and cultural customs. And all of this is pieced together with clips animals in nature doing the various things they do in their life.

The Band Wagon

Fred Astaire plays a washed-up movie star who has returned to New York City to try and restart his career by doing a Broadway musical. Lots of people and egos are brought together to produce a play that ends up being an interpretation of Faust for the stage. The plot is fairly simple as personalities clash, only to find out later that everyone does like everyone. Since the plot doesn’t have a lot to it, most of the acting scenes feel like they are just there as a way to get to the next song or dance number.

This show completely deserves the praise and recognition is has. Some people still brush off this show. Twilight isn’t helping the situation either. I know the concept of a teenage girl that world’s best hope for saving the world from evil seems cheesy. Joss Whedon is able to produce a show that can pull in a wide audience by not being a serious drama and having a “monster of the week” formula in the onset. But, then it does things that catch you off guard and surprise you. I say this both as plot points and cinematic presentation. Buffy is able to have episodes that are musicals, dream sequences and have no talking for 30 minutes without feeling out of place. Before starting Buffy, I was already sold on Whedon, but this is his master piece.

I haven’t talked about it much, but the reason I started watching Buffy was because of Evan. Through the course of that year we had been watching The Wire and Dollhouse and talking intently about both. At one point he said I would be better off if I started watching Buffy instead of Dollhouse, as it was better. The week after I tried to watch another episode of The Wire, it was too much. I needed to do something that was lighter, but still meant something. Buffy The Vampire Slayer was that thing. It is another thing to add to the list of things he introduced me to and I am grateful of.

That is all.

Stylistically it reminds me a lot of Firefly. Though, Firefly is more aggressive with the flares and un-steady-cam. They also both do a lot of space flying that utilizes zooming in on ships after they come on to screen. Other than that the shows are completely different as Battlestar stays very close to the space scifi feel and Firefly is all about the comedy and melding of genres and cultures.

Tonight I watched Primer a second time, I still don’t know how everything pieces together quite yet. However, some one has documented it. Don’t read through it if you haven’t seen it, but you can look to confirm it’s confusing-ness. It’s very well done and the actors are the people actually making the movie too.

In other news, work is going well. The thing I’m working on is very likely about to become much larger and will keep me very busy. While working I’m making some good progress on my For Review folder of music. However most of the progress has been bands I’ve decided not to keep around. One of the non-ill-fated bands is Ozomatli. Think Flobots, but take the string instruments and replace them with Latin influences. I also have a place to live for the next year, so that’s good

Bands That I Would Not be Listening to Now If It Wasn’t For Evan
Nine Inch Nails (My favorite band who we saw together live)
The Beatles (Arguably the best band ever)
Radiohead (His favorite band)
A Perfect Circle
Beck
Bjork
Fiona Apple
Flobots
My Bloody Valentine
Outkast
Pavement
The Pixies
Smashing Pumpkins
The Strokes
Tool

Honorable mention to Spoon. I only had their two most recent albums and didn’t know they had more and he only had their first two and hadn’t heard the new songs.

Those 16 bands make up exactly 25% of the albums I listen to and the percentage is slightly higher if you do it by number of songs. Take that and the fact that I listen to at least 40 hours of music a week to understand how frequently I am given a reminder.

Evan, you will always be with me despite the fact that you are not here.

Vertigo
Hitchcock never fails to disappoint. Vertigo was similar to A Beautiful Mind, in that, I was really getting into the story that surrounded the first half and was thrown when it shifted. Zooming in and pulling out is such an awesome effect. After going to look up how he actually did it, I realized that it was something I had discovered earlier and like. However seeing it again in Vertigo done with so much speed gave it much more of an effect.

Dawn of the Dead
Zombies are awesome. While they aren’t fast, there are lots of them and they are determined to eat you. Watching this made me sad of the current state of zombie movies. Today everyone is too focused on getting that shot where the guy’s head explodes looking just right. But when you watch this and Night of the Living Dead, you see more than just zombies. You see people being forced to interact with people they did not previously know and get what kind of person they are. Dawn of the Dead has a complete break from zombies for about 20 minutes where the 4 main characters just live their lives in the mall they have fortified themselves in. This is what we need to get back to.

Philadelphia
This movie was good. Tom and Denzel both have good performances throughout the movie. However, it didn’t grab as much as the other movies. It had all the pieces that make up a “good” movie. The homophobic lawyer, who already doesn’t like the client, takes the case because it’s right and shows the big time businessmen that they did wrong. It seem very formulaic to me and didn’t pull me into the court room like you do when you watch To Kill a Mockingbird.

Side Note: I did the math and since my start on the list in September, I am watching 1 movie from the list every 2.85 days. If I continue at this rate, I will be finished by the end of August 2015.

Now my work has been recognized and added to the Softpedia listing. PlaceMint has been tested and deemed good and safe for use.

From January to June I was working at Citrix working on Provisioning Server. If you are too lazy to watch the demo, it’s a system that will let you boot an OS streamed from a server. This lets you have a bunch computers all boot off one hard drive image on a server with out needing a physical hard drive in the computer. Not really a product used by consumer, but it is really cool.

I also did a bunch of work for the lacrosse website. That’s now running pretty stable and won’t need much work to keep running. And since I’ve played my last season with the team, I’ve handed control of the everyday work off to others on the team.

From there we go to my latest creation. PlaceMint is a tool that will allow you to arrange windows into defined slots based on window title. Slot are configurable by the user to ensure the windows are position to each users specific needs. Allows for drag and drop swapping of windows between slots. It has turned out really well and I’m glad that I spent the time writing it. It forced me to learn a lot about programing in C# and utilizing the Windows API, which are two things that are good to be able to get your head around.

Now I’m keeping busy by fixing/adding things mentioned by people that are beta testing PlaceMint. I’m also starting to do the planing steps for my Capstone project. This is the major project that I have to do before I can graduate, where we make something and then show other people and try to convince them that our idea is better than everyone else.

Hands down best present is the complete Twilight Zone series on DVD. A total of 28 discs featuring 156 episodes that would take just over 3 1/2 days to watch without interruption.

In addition I got the following DVDs:
Futurama Season 3 (completing my set)
Bender’s Big Score
SNL Season 1
Simpsons Movie

The surprise out of the group was SNL Season 1. I’m not sure I’ve even seen a full SNL skit that was made before 1985. But it should be really fun to watch all the old classic comedians perform.

And since watching DVDs isn’t enough, I go some games for my Nintendo DS. Most notably Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Plays like a visually spruced up version of the first Zelda games. The touch-screen stylus interface works very well for clicking on items and moving around the map.

The strangest gift was two books featuring pictures of my hometown. At first glance this seems like a generic gift that would get flipped through once or twice before it is placed on a shelf. What makes it interesting is the fact that two other members of my family received the same books.

—-

A few years ago I noticed that my cousins had very limited access to good music. Since they live in a town that is somewhere between rural and suburban, they are essentially limited to what MTV decides to show. Based on this I decided to give them CDs as Christmas presents to “help” them on their way to good music.

This Christmas it became extremely apparent that one of my cousins has terrible taste in movies. The two movies he received this year were Deck the Halls and 1408. I unfortunately saw 1408 in theaters and watched Deck the Halls Christmas afternoon.

I’ve got a lot of work to do.

In keeping with my habit of not actually posting about something when it happened, I waited about 2 weeks to get this up. I had a big splint on it over the weekend when it happened, which was pretty awkward. But now it now just keeping the last joint from bending (where the fracture is). Going back sometime next week to see how it is coming along. On the whole it could be worse. I can’t write, but I can do most other things with my right hand. Common task that is surprisingly hard with your weak hand: wiping your butt. Non-common task that I am surprisingly good at with my weak hand: Wii Sports.

There are a few ideas for posts that I’ve had, but pushed off. I’m going to force myself to go threw with the latest one, I just don’t have time now. But I think it will turn out well.

The lacrosse website is going through the process of being published. It will be nice to see it up and running after all the time I spent this summer putting it together.

That’s it for now. I promise to be back soon.

Thursday morning I was reading some blogs while I should have been getting ready for class. And then, black. The LCD of my laptop had become completely unusable. Faint outlines of where windows should have been could be seen, but even the simple task of following where the mouse was on the screen required much concentration.

Within a few minutes I had told my computer to restart. (Well, actually, I thought I had told it to shutdown. I ended up clicking the wrong button.) As Windows was booting up, the screen worked as it should. Within a minute, the screen had returned to it’s darkened state. Another minute passes as I try again to locate the shutdown option and this time succeed. I head to class considering the fact that I might be the owner of a new computer in a few days and the joys that would come with Vista. (Laptop screens cost around $400+, so it is often not worth it when that money could be used for a newer, better machine.)

The saving grace here is the fact that I have a second monitor attached to my laptop. This meant I could still use my computer, I just had less area to work with. Without the extra screen I would have been out of luck as working around the problem would have been much harder.

I get back from class and start searching for anything that could find that might let me resolve the issue of the broken screen. After scanning some “If you send us your machine and your first born son, we can fix it” websites and one “Ok, these are the steps you want to take to completely dissemble your laptop and do stuff to it” website, I went to Dell’s website.

Nosing around the My Account section I see those magical words listed above. My laptop is just a month away from the end of it’s three year warranty. I hopped on Dell’s instant messaging support service, had a relatively short conversation explaining my situation. They told me they would be shipping a replacement screen to their Boston office and to expect a call in 1-2 business days to schedule an in-house replacement. The call never came on Friday, which is fine, it came promptly Monday morning. We agreed that 3-4 on Tuesday would be a good time for both of us. Four o’clock that afternoon I get a call from the Dell service guy. “I’m sorry, I’m running a little late. I will be there in an hour.” I explained the misunderstanding and moved on as this was the worst thing done by Dell throughout the whole ordeal.

Tuesday comes and the technician arrives with my new screen in hand. I then watch, like a worried mother, as he begins to do surgery on my computer (which would be the one thing I’d grab from my room if the building was on fire). The procedure was fairly simply, lots of tiny screws and some cracking sounds as the plastic case popped apart as it was designed to.

The new screen has been working fine as I count down the next 23 days hoping that if something else is going to break, that it happen sometime before the 17th of August.

Select Points of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

• No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
• Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
• Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
• Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.
• The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.
• Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.
• In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.
• White slavery shall not be treated.
• Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.
• Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ – unless used reverently – Hell, S.O.B., damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression however used, is forbidden.
• Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot.
• Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are forbidden.
• Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains.
• The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.
• The use of the Flag shall be consistently respectful.

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 was written to be “A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures. Formulated and formally adopted by The Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. in March 1930.” Read the full text.

Things that Measure at (or about) 100 Feet

• One third of a football field.
• Length of Boeing 737-500.
• A 9 story building.
• 33 paces.
• The distance you are told to leave between your car and a fire truck or school bus.

Excerpts from a Two Page Ad in SkyMall for Gravity Defer Dress Shoes

• You will find a renewed enjoyment in walking places. You’ll park farther away at the grocery store, shopping mall, and the office just to get extra time walking in your Gravity Defer Shoes.
• It’s almost as if Aeolus, the Greek god of wind, himself has taken his powerful wind out of his bottles and put it into each of the Gravity Defer Shoes.
• The show is so much fun that the energy reciprocating shock of the Gravity Defer Shoes will actually give you the feeling of wanting to dance and be active. You might just find yourself joining a dance class soon!
• These ethereal shoes will transport you through life with such vigor that your friends and family will hardly recognize who you are.
• The shoes that world famous Secret Agents would wear the to black tie party where they end up doing reconnaissance before they are chased around a European city by evil henchmen … You will feel like you can keep up with the best of the World Famous Secrete Agents when you are wearing the Gravity Defer Shoes.

That was until I wanted to change something. Adding new things to the window was not hard, but it wasn’t clean and easy. I dealt with that fact for about a year. Then I said enough is enough.

I began work on The Opener. I set out to completely re-write PokerSelector so that it would be a dynamic window and fully customizable within the program itself. Two months of on again off again programing, sprinkled in during a great lacrosse season and a not so good run at poker, finally produced a result.

Today, I invite you to try out and use The Opener.

For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now. It is a Toyota Corolla.

Here is the new and improved Elsa-mobile.
For those that are lazy, here is what her car looks like now.

The phenomena in question is not that the sketch existed, but the fact that there is close to no record of it’s existence.

Searching the internet using various combinations of snoop dogg, dave chappelle, america, and means to you, no transcripts or video footage has been found. In my most recent attempts to find the full text of Snoop Dogg’s essay, I found two page to do acknowledge it’s existence.

Within Opentopia’s encyclopedia, there is an article on Chappelle’s Show. In the article’s comments on the DVD Releases, it mentions that:

“Some material from the show, such as What America Means to You did not make either DVD set and is as of yet unreleased.”

The Wikimedia article on Chappelle’s Show makes no mention of the sketch, but does mention that Snoop Dogg was a “Frequent or notable guest stars.”

From there we move to the biggest find to date. On a personal webpage (listed as belonging to the user “gilgamesh”), we have an actual excerpt from the essay. I will leave you with the words of this great lyricist in hope that his words will inspire others to dig deeper in to this mystery and see what else can be uncovered.

“…Chuuch, tabanacle, titty 1, titty 2, the prophet Eli. My mental gymnastics will flip you like an Aunt Jemima flapjack. Now, how ’bout that?”

The episode I watched was called “Pole to Pole” and was basically very very awesome. Even though I’ve seen it before, it’s still sick to watch the slow motion shots of great whites jumping in the air to catch a seal. The most entertaining thing from the episode was either the polar bear sliding down the snow when she first came out of her den after hibernating or watching the elephants swim and play underwater.

The most interesting part of the episode was the fact that they had footage of a pack of African dogs that hunted as a group. Just seeing them start as one group, then fan out to flank the antelope before the one leader chased part of the herd into the trap that was set.

However the episode was not all fun and games. There was one extremely depressing shot of a baby elephant who was almost blinded by a dust storm. This caused him to loose sight of his mother, all he had was her tracks to follow. Then the camera pulls back and show that he is walking the wrong way. Heading back to the desert, away from his family and away from water.

Hopefully I have enough time to watch a bunch more before I head back to Boston.