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October 11: I will confess to not knowing anything about Nina Simone other than that she sang a few songs I recognised, and did so rather awesomely. No idea of nationality, background, even what specific era she belonged to. So pretty much everything in What Happened, Miss Simone? came as a surprise. Born in segregated America! Trained as a classical pianist by a white woman who saw her play at a church revival! Played in bars to support her family when she mysteriously failed to get into a very white music school! Married to a man who basically was her version of Elvis' Colonel Parker! Turns out he was also an abuser! Got involved in the civil rights movement! Hung out with Malcom X, MLK and the like! (and, uh, Bill Cosby. Oh well.) Wrote protest songs! Got pretty much dropped from the entire music industry because of it! Fled the country! Turned into an abusive parent! Was diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder! Triumphant comeback! Only died in 2003, something I'm sure I should have been aware of! This is a great documentary, and well worth watching even if you already knew all of the above. In addition to various archive footage, there's also some interview time with her daughter to colour things out.

So after that we flipped around the channels and found Jaws, which had been running for about an hour. So we watched that.
October 05: Well, that was weird: somewhere in the swings and roundabouts - OS upgrades? random editing? - my contacts got mangled such that the links from my contact card to Mrs. Waider's went from "spouse" to some sort of URL-encoded variant of "Spouse", which meant that "Siri, call my wife" stopped working. It's a bit disappointing, because one of the things that impressed me with Siri early on was it reacting correctly to "give me directions to my wife's office", and figuring out why it no longer recognised the relationship should have been unnecessary and certainly wasn't broken in an immediately obvious way.

We watched Exposed mainly because I'd seen it was a Keanu Reeves movie I didn't know anything about and it was available as part of our Prime subscription; it's an odd movie. Essentially I like the general ide of it - you're guessing at the facts when it becomes obvious early on that something is distinctly wrong - but I think ultimately the setup is too long, there's a few too many complicating elements (the dog, the husband at war overseas) - and in the end it all feels like it could have been much punchier if some of that had been cut back.
October 03: Spent a good chunk of time trying to script the process of updating SSL certificates on a MacOS Server.app-managed machine. It is needlessly complicated and has a couple of one-way doors from a scripting perspective, at least on the older version of MacOS I'm dealing with; for example, if you add a private key without an access list, there's no way to fix that without using Keychain Access to delete the private key or manually add the access list you want. I got about 90% of the way there and parked it.
September 28: The Hitman's Bodyguard dragged just a tiny bit in the third act, was generally predictable, and, well, I didn't much like the denoumant for the Big Boss, but on the whole was a complete laugh riot and something I'd happily watch again to see what I missed the first time around. Some of the stunts - which I take to have been practical - were pretty spectacular.
September 27: Anthropoid is an excellent movie, although not one for cheers and smiles - it's pretty much grim from the get-go. By all accounts it's a pretty accurate telling of the true story, which is a little surprising given some of the dramatic beats like the failure of the gun to fire at a critical moment. Definitely worth watching.

(half-watched a few other things over the week as I was travelling. Wild Card is a completely forgettable Jason Statham "I need the money" vehicle; its most bizarre feature is that the sequences of Statham kicking the crap out of people, which are what you'd assume is supposed to be the big draw, are all edited into distracting slowmo or weird cuts and angles. There were, I think, two other movies but I've completely forgotten what they were.)
September 23: DSPsrv admin notice: something broke yesterday that's preventing logins. Haven't figured out what but I'm guessing something auto-updated that maybe shouldn't have.
September 20: So, ah, John Wick Chapter Three: Parabellum (which I now know, thanks to the movie, means "prepare for war"): it has no story. Really. Or if it does, it's an accident. It's basically one long shootout/brawl briefly interrupted by cut-scenes where noone shoots. There are some gags, such as "oh no we're all out of bullets at the same time" but really I was hoping for a bit more from this than two hours and eleven minutes of Keanu Reeves kicking the crap out of people and/or having the crap kicked out of him. OH well. At least it had the dog.

In Nerd News, the latest release of Safari has disabled the handful of extensions I use because... er, because I don't actually know why. Apparently Apple would prefer I don't use my password safe, my ad blocker, or GreaseMonkey scripts. On top of that, the extensions "app store" is terrible - no search facility, and you can't even Cmd-F over the list of extensions to do a text search because WHY APPLE WHY. Gah. I'd more or less quit using Firefox and Chrome because I was quite happy with Safari; now I'm gonna have to go back to one or the other of those because frankly at the very least I need that ad blocker. The password safe disabling is REALLY irritating because it only had integration with Safari, and now that's gone.
September 19: Just to note that on this day in 2005 I stood outside the closed door of an office in Roe Lane wondering what to do next, because noone had told me I needed to bang on the door to be admitted. Shortly afterwards - once I'd gotten inside - Ted handed me a Post-It note with some random characters on it and said, "this is your password. I'm sure you can guess your username."
September 13: Really enjoyed Tolkien which for some inexplicable reason seems to have had a mediocre critical receiption. It's funny, poignant, and well shot; it has drama and character development and what not. I guess there are no exploding helicopters or spandex-clad heroes so maybe that's why it's not scoring higher. I think you should see it.
September 06: Despite having read the book, I couldn't remember the slightest plot element from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. It's an excellent movie despite its age, and the plot is actually rather good. Also it's funny seeing 1965 Dublin standing in for Berlin and parts of London (why they used St. Stephen's Green instead of, say, Hyde Park is probably a matter of logistics, but it was pretty funny seeing the familiar pond & island in what was supposed to be a London park.)

(now I look it up online and find references that say it's Battersea Park. I'm not convinced.)