Saturday, January 17, 2004
Just a week away! I will be in the Nasville in six days with three good friends (one of them also being my sister) seeing a wonderful work of music involving at least one absolutly wonderful voice! And who knows what else we will do, but it will be FUN!
And then a couple of days after that I shall trek to Augusta and visit my sister and go see th opera. Also I will apply for JOBS. And I will go to First Presbyterian in three Sundays!
The above is what has gotten me through the past few weeks. I do not know what will get me through the weeks after that. :)
Oh, I almost forgot to mention, the director is Darren Aronofsky, who also directed Pi, another disturbing movie but not for any of the same reasons, and I would recommend it to far more people, it's intense also, but not the same kind of thing at all. It's also beautiful in it's own way.
Requiem for a Dream
What an intense movie. I saw it last night for the first time. The movie is beautifully shot, and well written. It's also very, very intense and in your face. There are a few unfortunate scenes that would fit in better with hard-core porn, however, and that would be the reason I wouldn't recommend this film to many. It would have gotten an NC-17 rating, but the company that released it decided against a rating at all. There is aparently a cut version that is rated R, I would like to see what they cut.
What is it? It's a movie about addictions. Drug addictions is what it deals with mostly but it also touches on food and television addictions. It follows the lives of four people: A son and his mother, girlfriend, and friend. The three younger persons are all addicted to crack and will do anything to get a hit. The mother is addicted to television, food, and later to diet pills (Her's is perhaps the most tragic story of the four) for which she will end up in a mental institution after becoming highly addicted to the uppers that were prescribed to help her lose weight. The son ends up losing his arm because of an infection he got from shooting up. The girlfriend ends up selling her body to men in exchange for drugs. His friend ends up in prison doing hard labor after being caught.
The scenes I mentioned that would fit in better in a hard-core porno flick mostly involve the girlfriend selling her body, though there is one scene of the friend with his girlfriend. They don't leave a lot up to the imagination there, unfortunately.
Anyway, I rented this one from Netflix, didn't buy it, and I'm glad because I think it's a one time deal.
The cinematography, however, is absolutely beautiful in many places, even when the scene that is shown is intentionally horrible, the filming is beautiful.
Not for the squeamish, young, or anyone who has a problem with sexual acts taking place on camera. The sexual acts aren't shown in a way as to make them attractive, but to show the horror of what she has brought herself to do because of her addiction, but I really could have done without them.
Friday, January 16, 2004
The recipe worked great! If you would like to try it (it's not that hard) or the bread recipe I made (bread isn't that hard either, it just takes some arm power to kneed!) check it out at Platypi's Kitchen. The chicken dish is under "Entrees" and the bread is, surprisingly, under "bread." Bon appetit!
I have spent my afternoon and early evening cooking! I decided I was going to make some bread, but we didn't have enough yeast, so I took the girls to the store (I'm here with them, mom and dad went on a date to Meridian since they have a babysitter living at home now). While I was there I picked up a few other things with a dinner creation in mind. So now there are two loaves of bread in the oven with a chicken casseroll thing that I made up. Chicken, sauteed onions, garlic, and bell peppers, cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soups, sour cream, some cheese and spices mixed in (if you MUST know, oregano, basil, rosemary, and some chives).
I'll throw some corn on and maybe some beans in a bit, hopefully mom and dad will be home in time to taste of the goodness. Otherwise I'm probably the only one who will enjoy the chicken dish that much (the girls will likely eat the chicken and nothing more). At least I know they will like the bread. :) Ah! Rice, I should cook some!
In reading back over the past week in my blog I have noticed what borders on a gross overusage of the word "well" to begin paragraphs. I will attempt, in the next week, to not do this so much as it is really annoying looking.
Odd, I don't think I've ever had an MP3 get stuck before... Sounds just like a record that keeps skipping to the same spot... Oddness.
Well, that's about all I have to say for now.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Well, my computer decided today that it would hate me for a while. The case fan I ordered came in the mail today (almost as quick as 2 day shipping, but three times less the cost is the FedEx Saver Shipping that NewEgg offers!) and I installed it. It works fine and is much quieter than the old one ever was (Thank you ball bearings!).
Well, after I got it all started back up my modem would not dial. It said it was dialing, but it wasn't even opening the line. And unless I let the dialer time out (after 60 seconds or whatever I have it set to) instead of clicking cancle the dialer would crash and I would have to restart the computer to use it again.
Well, I uninstalled the modem. Then windows didn't want to re-install it. I found the setup file I have for the modem and ran it. But windows did not recognize the modem. I rebooted countless times, uninstalled and reinstalled the modem countless times and a myriad of different ways, but nothing seemed to work. I did it once more and it all worked just as if nothing had gone wrong. Stupid computer.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Well, I got a computer up and running. It's a 400mhz celeron with a 6gig hard drive and now has near 200 megs of ram. No modem yet but I just ordered one. This is quite a step up from the 75Mhz Pentium with 32 megs of ram and 1gig of hard drive that my dad has been using at his office, and we plan to set up the old one with a monitor dad will be getting ahold of for the girls to play games on.
Well, now that I have ordered a new case fan...
Dad brought home four computers he got from a guy so that I could look at them and see if there was anything worth salvaging. They are all Compaqs, according to the label on the side era 1995, but designed for windows 98 with Celeron chips in them.... So they must be newer than that, I don't know why the labels on the side say '95 (they are from the paper mill in town and the stickers are inventory stickers).
Anyway, so I start opening them (stupid modular design nonstandard crap...). They are all the same model, though they have been apparently canabalized in the past. Two have CD-roms (8x) and only one has a hard drive (unknown size at the moment). There are also only two with video cards. They all have floppy drives, the motherboard and processor and ram (one has two sticks, the others have one, there are three DIMM slots in each, I don't know what size these sticks are yet) and network cards. Two have a second serial port as well. And they all have ATX power supplys but they are huge and small (huge in size, small in wattage) with short connectors, so they won't work for anything but the highly specialized design of the compaq cases. Anyway, so I think that I may be able to piece together one working computer out of it, depending on the size of the hard drive, that is bette than the packard bell P75 dad has at work. I'll put three of the RAM sticks in that one. Also I plan to canibalize the extra CD ROM and floppy drives, network card (which is PCI, not ISA), and all the fans, case and power supply, as they are all 80mm fans.
That was all said to say this: I no longer need a fan! Ah well, I am sure the one I ordered, with it's 36 CFM airflow is much better than these are. Not to mention it's new and not old.
Monday, January 12, 2004
Soon...
Soon I must make my way to the Radio Shack and buy an 80mm case fan since mine sounds like it is grinding itself to death. It's not so much the fact that the fan is going to die that bothers me as it is that it has chosen to do it so loudly...
Well, I went to church this week at the local Presbyterian church (It's PCUSA) and was less than impressed. No, nothing struck me as critically wrong with anything theologicaly or any such thing, it's just there were a total of 11 people there, including me, and no pianist. The hymns were all played on a tape (I am assuming that the pianist was out this week) and it was just not the best thing. And then the pastor read his sermon which was basically just a recap of the two New Testament scriptures that were read.
I have decided that I will probably go visit some churches in Meridian just to visit churches while I have the freedom to do such, and then if I am here much longer, go to my dad's church where at least the preaching is good.
Well, other than that the next part of my day was mostly lazy. I played some Command and Conquer: Renegade and beat the game. Pretty tough game even on the easiest level, espically the last level and the one two levels before that. Anyway, I doubt any of you care about that.
After I finnished the game I decided to watch a DVD, so I put in the last of the four DVDs for the Two Towers and watched it straight through. Interesting stuff, interesting indeed. I had not realized that the sword teacher/director was the same one for the Princess Bride. I had also not realized that most of the crowds in the battle scenes were actually done with a CG program which had an AI brain programed for each character. Pretty nifty stuff.
Well, after that was over I actually got industrious, started a fire, and cleaned up down here. I put away everything that I still had not put away since moving in, re-arranged some things down here, and swept. It's all nice and spacious and clean down here now. And warm. Yay.
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)