waider dot i e

October 07

Dinner and a show! How novel!

Dinner was at the recently-opened Eddie Rockets branch at Point Village; there's another restaurant beside it advertising that it's opening in October, but it looks a little ... static so I wonder about that. In any case, I think I first visited a Rocket's in 1992 and I've been back periodically in the interim without ever having a bad experience. It's not haute cuisine, but they do what they do well. The only slight niggle was that the music was (ha ha, old man Waider) a bit on the loud side. As in, "let's shout across the table at each other to converse" volume. Hopefully they'll sort that out because I'll happily go back. As it was we chose to decamp to the nearby Costa for post-dinner coffee and chocolate.

From there, Blade Runner 2049 in the iSense screen at Odeon Point Village. I don't think I've been in the iSense screen before, and it was totally the right thing for this movie. First take: incredibly good movie. It's beautifully filmed, it respects the original without cannibalising it in the way that The Force Awakens did to A New Hope (and hey, I liked TFA!) and the cast does a stellar job of conveying the whole thing. Yes, it's not perfect: for some reason the design team felt that Las Vegas wasn't gaudy enough as-was, and what it was really missing was a bunch of giant statues of naked women; likewise, there were bits of gratuituous titilation elsewhere in the movie that could have as easily been omitted with no loss to the atmosphere or plot. Then the music: for the most part, it worked, and it echoed Vangelis' original, but there were a few spots where it was hard to tell whether Sudden Loud Noise was the foley or Hans Zimmer dropping an anvil on a stack of Korg equipment. And I'm still turning one tiny plot point over in my mind with dissatisfaction (basically the whole bit with K/Joe being lo-jacked) but for a movie of this scale I think that's a pretty short list. Given that I'd skipped almost all the pre-movie faff (I watched the two trailers, and that was it), I'm gonna go back now and watch the mini-features and wait for the inevitable taking of sides over whether it's a worthy sequel or some sort of huge mistake driven by a desire to strip us rubes of our cash.

October 04

Errrrr... (BBC, as ever)

2017-10-03 23:12:02	America's gun culture in eight charts
2017-10-03 23:12:02	America's gun culture in seven charts
2017-10-03 23:12:02	America's gun culture in nine charts
2017-10-04 18:15:45	America's gun culture in 10 charts

(timestamps are BBC's; actual timestamps are more like 2am, 6am, 5pm and 6pm on October 4th)

October 02

My upgrade to "High Sierra" seems to have been fairly straightforward, although I notice ClamAV crashed on startup. About the only thing I've checked so far is if they've upgraded the version of OpenSSL, and yes, they have, so now my various SSL-scraping Perl and python scripts are once more functional.

Oh, and I need to figure out what types of keys MacOS (macOS, whatever) allows by default because I keep having to fix the client-side "can't use that key" setting every time I upgrade.

September 08

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was an absolute barrel of fun. Drax gets all the best lines, of course.

August 26

Logan was really enjoyable, with the minor niggle that the dynamic range of the audio meant that I missed some of the dialogue (including Logan's last line in the movie, dammit). It's a thoughtful story, with an awful lot going on in it. Interestingly it's chosen to not really build on any of the existing X-Men world, other than to use some of its characters; everything in terms of backstory is contained in the movie, and not via someone giving expository speeches, either - Xavier's backstory is given in a radio report, for example. I think you could also have played Johnny Cash's Hurt cover for the entire movie, because it'd be fitting at all times.

August 20

BBC works on their reporting:

2017-08-19 18:07:01	Boston march against alt-right rally draws thousands
2017-08-19 18:44:33	Boston march against right-wing rally draws thousands

RTÉ on the other hand, nails it first time:

2017-08-19 20:29:50	Thousands march in Boston against far-right rally

August 18

Celebrating that time we both said, "I do".

I definitely enjoyed how Collateral Beauty started out, and when Time got his initial lines I wanted to hug the scriptwriter, but then when it got to the boardroom confrontation I was a little iffy on the path the movie took. And then the whole bit with Melanie confused me further, and the closing scene in Central Park just kinda annoyed me. I think there were a few ways to take this idea - the concepts are "real" and hoodwinking everyone, the concepts are just the actors being put up to it, the concepts are, in fact, how Howard sees each friend, and so on - but instead it seems like the scriptwriters couldn't quite decide which option to go for and the result is less impactful for that. And the Melanie angle just seems... tacked on. It jars. This is a lovely movie, but it could have been so much better.

August 13

Watching the Waterford/Cork hurling semifinal. Funny to watch these guys shrugging off the sort of physical tackle that'd have a Premier League coach calling for a stretcher, and smaller things like playing the sideline cut from the point the linesman marks, not ten meters closer to the opposition's goal.

August 12

Eye in the Sky is an interesting movie in that the basic premise is of fairly limited scope to base a 100-minute movie on. Once the setup is gotten out of the way, it's basically that whole "lives of the few/lives of the many" scenario, and to be honest I don't think it really manages to pull it off. Which is a shame, because there's an excellent cast (including Alan Rickman in his final role); ultimately I found myself waiting to see which option the filmmakers would go for - hard-ass "collateral dammage is inevitable" or something more "every life counts", rather than being particularly engaged with how they got there.

August 09

Bought a YubiKey, somewhat as a thing to play with and somewhat as a thing I might actually use. First problem: can't use it to lock my password safe if I expect to use my password safe on iOS, since Yubi don't play there.

Second problem: configuring my screensaver to require at least one of password, YubiKey, but not both. I've managed to get it to allow you to fail the password but succeed with the YubiKey challenge, so far; also, if you use the YubiKey, the keychain is still locked. Being cautious about this so I don't accidentally lock myself out of my laptop!

Broken emacs turned out to be an unescaped "<" which for some reason caused the search page to return a 404.