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December 04

Man in the High Castle Season 4 really feels like the showmakers have finally found their stride, just as they're wrapping the whole thing up.

December 02

Ok so I have one question about the Mr. Robot bank hack: why did they need all the phones, if there was only one 2FA code sent? Or do we assume that 100 were sent, and the one Eliot sends to Darlene is because she'll have captured the other 99 herself?

November 24

Oh hey. Final season of Man in the High Castle is out. Watched the first epsiode and once again I've more or less forgotten what's going on.

November 23

That poor ending is still bugging me. It's a six-year-old movie, so spoiler alert and all but lemme talk about what might have been a more interesting outcome.

Immediaely obvious one, Emerson's "asset" is the bad guy. Arc of the story is to teach Emerson a lesson about trust. Doesn't work for me, but it's an approach. I've not given this enough thought to figure out how it would pan out, as in how you'd reveal it, why she'd wait so long, etc.
Emerson's boss is the bad guy. See, for me, this idea has legs. First, we already know he's a cold-hearted bastard who probably wouldn't bat an eyelid at shooting Emerson (this is part of why the ending as delivered grates: if he was true to his character he'd have simply shot the two of them in the hospital room and left). Second, he knows how the system works; he assigned Emerson to it - you'd have to drop the bit with the fake operator callsign since that wouldn't make sense. Third, he wants to be kingpin, so he stages the breakin to take out 14 real hits and 1 fake (his own) which will leave him last man standing in the agency upper ranks. So we've got means, motive, opportunity, as they say. How does this pan out? Emerson figures it out somehow, maybe when he makes the cellphone call to his boss. Lures the boss to the base on some pretext; boss falls for pretext on the grounds of wanting to clean everything up; mayhem ensues. Probably bonus points for getting the asset critically involved, e.g. shooting someone who's got the drop on Emerson. Sort of getting a bit into Bourne territory here but that's ok. Then they plant evidence of their deaths, destroy the location, and off we go to an island in the Caribbean with Emerson's millions or whatever.
Variation on this: it's a test for Emerson to see if he'll shoot the asset, since that's the reason he was put on this task in the first place. Again, I haven't thought this one out because it doesn't really work for me, but it'd sort of fit. This could be a subplot of the above scenario because Emerson's boss wants to leave no trace.

Anyway, this is clearly the start of my highly successful script-doctoring career, so I'm off to search the internet for an agent.

November 22

The Numbers Station was chugging along nicely, and I thought I could see a very nice twist coming, and instead they went for Bad Guy Monologue and Rogue with Heart of Gold and really I felt like throwing the remote at the TV. Such a wasted opportunity.

November 21

Pretty sure I'd seen An Audience with Billy Connolly before, but that's no reason not to watch it again. Half the fun was in trying to identify the '80s celebrities in the crowd.

No good reason for the gap in the diary other than that I've been a bit busy: hoping to move back into renovated house soon, busy at work, a trip to London, various other things.

November 08

I think I preferred How To Talk To Girls At Parties as a short story. As a almost two-hour film, it was a bit uneven and sort of lacking in depth. Cute that they made the protagonist pretty much Young Neil Gaiman at the end, though.

October 29

Just remembered, we also watched Vincent, in which Leonard Nimoy plays Theo Van Gogh eulogizing his brother - and, to some extent - giving a biography of sorts - on stage in Minneapolis. It's really, really good.

October 27

Trying to figure out what's preventing SSH connections to one of the EC2 instances I manage. It seems to be running perfectly happy aside from that one thing, and that one thing is the one thing I actually need to debug it.

On the plus side I've actually scripted the annoying series of commands to diagnose it - shut down instance, detach drive, attach drive to another instance, give me a subshell where I go do stuff, then when I exit the subshell it puts everything back the way it was.

Well, I've found the problem, sort of: sshd privilege separation and, maybe, systemd are combining to fail. I say "sort of" because I'm still trying to figure out how to work around it, short of downgrading to a version of sshd that allows me to disable privilege separation until I've figured out more specifically what the problem is. I suspect I'll be building an old sshd and sticking it on some random high-numbered port or something to figure this out.

(out of frustration I installed a telnet daemon. Then discovered I don't have a telnet client. *flings laptop out window*)

October 26

Sweet Home Alabama: predictable, harmless, well-enough made. Whiled away the time but I wouldn't rush out and watch it again.