Somusing

We have a tiny public library where we live, and sometimes I get movies from them just because they have them. I always wonder how they decide which movies they'll buy, but many are probably donated, because why would a tiny library choose to purchase The Truth About Cats & Dogs or Love Potion No. 9 ? Of course, I don't know how libraries choose to purchase anything, so I'll shut up. Anyway, this is an okay movie, not appallingly bad and not particularly good. Janeane Garofalo seemed happier than in most roles she played. And it's the first time I've seen Uma Thurman play a dumb girl. I liked their characters and liked that it was also about their friendship, and not just about the guy/girl thing. It was okay.

Books read recently: Chocolat by Joanne Harris (all religious people are stupid and mean, did you know?) Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealey (Lucy Grealey was a poet whose face was disfigured as a child; interesting but somewhat disturbing) Truth and Beauty by Anne Patchett (about her friendship with Lucy Grealey; further reveals Grealey's amazing self-centeredness) Skeletons on the Zahara by Dean King (true story of a captain and his crew who were shipwrecked off the coast of West Africa in the early 1800s; they survive slavery with desert nomads. Fascinating!) The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom (true story of a Dutch family who hid Jewish people from the Nazis during World War II. Inspirational; probably everyone should read this) In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner (okay) Playing for the Ashes by Elizabeth George (a better-than-average mystery, but in general I'm not a big fan of mysteries) How Can I Help? by Lowell Bennion (Bennion has such an interesti...

What I watched while the blog was resting: Follow Me, Boys (the kids loved this, even though by today's standards it's about three movies in one) Blow (edited for TV) Mobsters and Mormons (funny) Spellbound Holes (so good! I love Mr. Sir, mostly because we know someone just like him) National Treasure Gone With the Wind Off the Map Cipher in the Snow John Baker’s Last Race Seven Years in Tibet (fun to see again after reading the book recently, which is fascinating, by the way) Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (five minutes thereof; hard to express how bad I think this movie is) Pride and Prejudice (2005) (after initial annoyance--because who can do better than the 1995 A&E production with Colin Firth?--came to like this very much) Master and Commander Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit Melinda & Melinda Good Night, and Good Luck. (I thought this was an amazing movie; and were people smarter back then? 'cause the people on TV sur...

So I talked Erin into signing up for an Amazon Associates account and adding salted links to the reviews on this blog. We'll see if anyone follows the links and wittingly or unwittingly sends some Amazon credit our way. My guess is it will take a long time before it amounts to anything, if ever. It also remains to be seen how we feel about profiteering (however meagerly) from what was never intended to be anything but personal musings. But we're giving it a try, and we'd be happy to have a little subsidy of our reading and listening purchases. In any case, we both still highly recommend that you borrow or buy books etc. from a friend or a local bookstore where possible. Amazon has its merits, but it can't replace the knowledgeable and personable help at a bookstore or a good friend's personal library! Updated 31 May 2011: I'm just finishing up removing all of the Amazon affiliate links so we can use a certain free spam filter that Jon found. The spammers h...

Thanks, Jon, for getting this up and working again. You must really love me to give me this delightful distraction from what I'm supposed to be doing. In the next couple of days I'll try to fill in the books and movies and some music from the last few months. For now, the baby is crying and demands attention.

This book was entertaining and somehow pertinent. I kept thinking of ways it applied to my life. Now if I could find the tipping point for getting my kids to clean the house, it would be worth its weight in gold. Or more.

It's been almost 5 months since I killed Erin's still nascent blog while trying to upgrade the Typo blog software. She has patiently waited for me to fix it. Now it's back, running on Ruby on Rails 1.1 with the latest Typo from the Subversion repository, backed by PostgreSQL . And finally on a publicly-accessible webserver instead of the Rails development webserver ( WEBrick ). Getting FastCGI to work from lighttpd was a lot easier than from Apache . Though I hear that the Rails community is leaning away from FastCGI nowadays in favor of Mongrel . Sounds like a good idea, but a change to consider some other time. Typo's data model had changed somewhat, so I created a new blog from scratch and brought over the important data (categories and articles) manually via pg_dump and a little SQL wrangling. Sorry for the delay and the lost momentum, Erin. And thanks to Johannes Evelein for showing me that revivified is a word that people actually use. :)