Went out with some friends to see Tim Burton's "Corpse Bride" last night. It was actually a fun flick; it's nice to see some production houses still using traditional animation methods, as opposed to insisting on using computer animation for everything. Regardless of the animation method, though, it's the story and characters that make a film.

I don't plan to see "Chicken Little" in the theaters. It is my personal protest against the rape of Walt Disney Feature Animation, a division that created some of my favorite movies ever. For those who aren't aware, Eisner basically dismantled feature animation, firing most of the artists and keeping only a paltry few who were transferred to the 3-D computer animation department.

Disney is trying to be Pixar. Sorry, it's not going to work. The reason Pixar films are so successful is because of good storyline and characters, not because it's "3-D". The artists should be the ones in charge, not managers whose only training is an MBA. Until the company realizes this, they are going continue their current mediocrity.

You just gotta read this...

Well, it's been a while since I've updated. Probably because nothing much too exciting has been going on, outside work and the usual beginning of semester craziness.

I got a tile floor installed in my room/office/mad scientist lab at home. There was moisture coming up from the concrete slab which was causing the carpet to smell funny, and I'd had enough. The new floor looks and feels great, despite the room being a little louder since the carpet isn't there to absorb sound from equipment anymore. There's always a downside to everything!

Lynxie seems to like the floor too. He can slip under the wall unit much more easily now, and it's funny to watch him slip when he runs into the room too fast and tries to stop. Silly kitty!

This was also a great chance to re-do all the cabling behind my desk. It was an utter snakepit before, and now it looks pretty good! Though I'm sure in a few years, it will be a big mess again as I hastly add and remove things withoug caring so much about neatness...

Oh, and this has got to be the coolest "cracked by" screen on any pirated game in the history of the universe. (Beyond Castle Wolfenstein)

On another note, I'd like to wish EVERYONE who lives/lived in the New Orleans area a speedy recovery. It's not going to be easy, and you guys don't deserve this misery. If you haven't found it yet, this blog is written by someone keeping an ISP up on generators right in the middle of all the chaos. A fascinating, if sad and a bit scary, read.

Well, Hurricane Katrina just blew through here, causing all kinds of chaos. Total damages here? Not much, actually; a few missing roofing tiles and some landscape damage, but both should be easily fixable. Insurance is a good thing!

Others in the South Florida area were not so lucky. Many low lying areas were flooded, with people having up to a foot of water in their homes. Some folks may have to wait many days to get their power restored, and as of the last time I heard, four people have lost their lives.

I guess this is a lesson to all of us; do not underestimate hurricanes, even if they're only a "category 1". I've been lax in preparing for this one, and things could have been a lot worse had a window blown out!

The power and phone just came back, but the DSL is still down. It's been about twenty minutes; a DSLAM shouldn't take this long to reboot! There's probably connectivity issues somewhere. If it doesn't come back by tomorrow, I'll have to call. Unfortunately, DSL is probably a low priority for Bellsouth at this moment...

Okay, I'm not kidding, this has got to be the coolest optical illusion ever.

Make sure GIF animation is turned on, and click here.

Stare at the cross in the center for a bit.

Isn't that cool? The ring of purple dots sorta fades, and you just seen a green dot going around!

But there's no actual green in the image! Look directly at the purple dots and you can see the complete lack of green. But the animation still fools your mind into thinking its there...

Spiffy, eh?

Okay, here's a good one.

So apparently, a modification called "Hot Coffee" to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (story here) has pissed off some politicians and parents who are afraid that kids might see it.

Okay, let me get this straight. GTA:SA is a game where you are required to kill people, usually in bloody, disturbed ways, and you can run around beating old ladies to death with tire irons, blowing up cars, and causing all kinds of destructive mayhem, but... people are upset at a patch that shows a couple of people having sex?!!!

People, get your fucking priorities straight already!!!

I am getting tired of this hypocritical attitude people have when it comes to "protecting the chiiiiiiiildren!" Apparently it's okay to show kids murder and wanton destruction, but sex is verboten, no way, that will corrupt their minds!

Get a grip, folks. Turn your brains on; if you want to protect kids from something you perceive as "evil", protect them from all the "evil", otherwise you'll just look like freakin' hypocrites. The fact that politicians are taking these people seriously is disturbing.

Not too much has been happening lately. Work has been busy; I've spent this week upgrading miscellaneous daemons and services for security reasons, and brought our new backup server online, officially. It's been working well, backing up all the department disks at lightning speed.

The weather has been so hot and muggy outside during the day lately that I just haven't been motivated to do anything outdoors, Vanishing Species or otherwise. I've spent the weekends lazing around at home, going to the mall, and in the case of July 4th weekend, blowing stuff up with friends.

Yup, about $80 worth of fireworks went up in smoke on the 4th. Mostly bottle rockets, firecrackers, and mortars. It's always fun to set off the things yourself; those people who tell you to play it safe and just go watch the professional shows just don't understand the fun of playing with fireworks. Ignore them. }:)

I rearranged my desk at home, and retired the second monitor for now. It was simply getting too cluttered, especially with the HP 1150C multifunction scanner/printer they let me take home from work.

I installed Linux on my Powerbook G4 last night. This was rather painful because the optical drive on the laptop is hosed, and Yellow Dog doesn't support installation from an external firewire CD-ROM (like OSX does), so I had to do some heavy hacking.

To make a long story short, I ended up doing a network install over http from hushpad, by loopback mounting the iso images (in order) inside hushpad's webspace. It worked pretty well, though it was a major kludge, and got the OS installed. Whee!!

Linux on a G4 867 is fast as hell. It feels a lot faster than OSX, but of course doesn't have a lot of the pretty eye candy, which makes sense. The primary downside to LinuxPPC is the lack of a Macromedia Flash plugin for the architecture; for some reason they don't just compile the thing on a PPC to make the community of Linux PPC users happy.

My next goal is to get MacOnLinux working. This lets you boot up MacOS X *INSIDE* LinuxPPC. Should be fun!