Eddie's Fancy

Brian, Mary and Cam finally make the holy pilgrimage to St. Arnold’s.

Although I’m not as far to the left as Al Franken I do like his skewering of self-righteous assholes. What can I say. “The Truth” was fun and short, but not quite as good as his previous two political books, probably because this was didn’t have as focused of a topic.

A few years ago, about the time that Takeshi Kitano’s version of Zatôichi came out, one of the cable channels started running Shintarô Katsu’s movies. I became addicted quickly.

This is the last Zatôichi movie Katsu made, fifteen years after the tv show version. It was worth watching, but not as good as his earlier movies. The earlier ones had more of a sense of fun while this was more melancholy and violent, plus a wee bit of nudity.

I can honestly say this is the best Russian Vampire movie I’ve seen. Not to say in an underhanded way that it’s bad; there are parts that look great and the underlying story is interesting, it just doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense.

This is the first of three, Dnevnoy dozor (Daywatch) is playing now, I’d consider renting the others but won’t be going out of my way to see them.

There was a bit of a hiccup but the site appears to be working again.

I finally found a Linux distribution that almost works on my Jornada 720.

Firefox 1.5 and my wireless card work, but I have had a few lockups. If I can it a bit more stable I’ll have the perfect “I wanna check mail but not boot my laptop or go upstairs” device.

For years I’ve used ssh port forwarding to access my home server. It works, but has it’s issues. I hated having to setup another forward for each service I wanted to use. Turns out, there was a better way. I kick off ssh to start a proxy server to my home box:

ssh -qT -f -ND 7070 user@homedomain
-q quiet, -T no pseudo tty allocated, -f go into the background after we enter the password, -N no remote command required and -D set SOCKS port.

and then configure the applications to use localhost and port 7070 for a proxy.

To make this really usable, I installed foxyproxy into Firefox and now only requests to homedomain are routed through the proxy server. All others are handled normally by the local network.

Neat.

Here’s a set from Gavin’s Pub in East Durham, NY that I recorded on 7/14/2006 that Larry Mallette recently transcribed.

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A nice smokey dark beer with a bit of a kick, 10.5% ABV. I let it sit for a bit and the sharpness seemed to settle out. I assume this is a by product of the bottling process. A bit carmely without the sweetness.

Here’s one big difference vacationing while married versus single, I only read two books.

I haven’t been very enthusiastic about the last couple Stephen Baxter books, too much of the same. Coalescent worked though, jumping back and forth between the present and the past with a brief preview of the future.

George Poole discovers he has a twin sister he never knew about, and she’s living in a human warren under the streets of Rome in a eusocial society, not unlike naked mole rats, that’s been evolving since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ok, sounds goofy, but it works.

I enjoyed the last book by Philbrick I read, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, and this one was just as good. Some have called it a revisionist history of the Plymouth settlement, but I saw it as more even handed. Neither the Native Americans nor the immigrants were portrayed as wholly good or wholly bad.

I was surprised how quickly the area of New England was settled. Only a hundred and fifty hears from settlement to revolution.

Photos…

A quick jaunt around New England…Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware.

Phew.

Princeton was nice, New York was busy. A great region but I don’t know if I could handle the winters or the population density in the city.