My Wushu Blog

I saw one of my Wushu Buddies picture on facebook (James). The picture is him as an angst filled teenager, with a closely shaved head and a goatee, playing an electric guitar. I sported a similar look, and I play as well, so that prompted me to dig through some old photos. I only have one picture of me during that time (I never owned a camera until 2000): [caption id=“attachment_543” align=“aligncenter” width=“573” caption=“Glenn, John and Me”][/caption]



I like to watch horror movies from other countries, and not just Asia (the entire J-Horror category is getting absurd). They tend to have different dogma’s in them, or cultural references that I’ve never heard of. This is a Swedish movie (Yay subtitles!!), and it takes place after The Great Norther War (1780?). Sweden and Russia are drawing new territory lines post-war, and a group from each respective country has to survey the land and get any town or village on the border to sign an agreement about the new lines.



It’s October, and that means I naturally start to gravitate towards horror movies. Ahh, it feels so good :) The smell of a smoldering chimney is in the air, or someone is burning evidence… I Sell The Dead is about two grave robbers, one of the two is eventually arrested and tried for murder. He tells his story to a priest, hours before his planned execution. Oh, its not as serious as it sounds, its pretty funny.



I was conflicted about posting a little blurb about this movie. I wanted to actually post some other movies, good ones, and I felt it was only fair to also post a little something about this one. If I don’t like a movie, I usually just don’t bother with a post. I think this is the first movie in which I was so disappointed with, I had to at least get that out there before I posted anything else.



This was a very cool conference. I picked up a lot of useful information on both the open source tool, Puppet, and some ideas on infrastructure. What also made this conference unique, is how honest the Puppet team and community were about the projects strength and weaknesses. Those that have deployed Puppet on a larger scale (MessageOne and Google) seemed to go through the same iterations in attempting to scale out their Puppetmaster’s.



The trail from Del Valle park to Rose Peak, the one we took, is about 21 miles round trip. 10 mikes up, 10 back, easy peasy right? I went with Jenny (and Velimir) and the hiking group she goes with, the Society of Outdoor Cardinals, lead by “V”. I went with Jenny and “V” in January on a 14 mile hike up Mount Diablo. That trip was a good deal of fun, and I didn’t die so I naturally assumed that a 21 mile hike would be difficult, but not impossible…



WTF?! Spring has passed, however, our garage didn’t get its fair share of attention. We used it as a staging area for some of the shed materials, and after I had returned the left-overs, we had the beginnings of a clean garage once again. There are no before pictures, that would be too horrendous; here is what it looks like now, and hopefully will remain that way. View from the Kitchen Door try to imagine the vacuum cleaner is a car My corner We also re-arranged where the server is, so I had to shut that down and move it down one shelf.



PC-BSD KDE Desktop PC-BSD is a nice mesh between FreeBSD and a ready to use Desktop (which uses about 6GB of disk space). It is based on FreeBSD 7.2, so it has all the cool features of the latest release. Best of all, without ANY additional configuration, I was able to: Use the official FreeBSD nVidia driver for hardware acceleration Watch clips on YouTube (with flashplayer) Play back all sorts of media types like mp3’s, divx, mpegs,wmv,qt…



This movie was LONG. 3 hours, and most of the time it’s pacing was perfect. Except when it wasn’t. I had decided to start this movie at 11pm, so I finished it around 2am and I was pretty sleepy. This movie has a lot going on, and I probably would have felt very lost if I had not read the graphic novel (okay, okay, “comic book”). Now, I read that almost 3 years ago (I flipped between that and a Reg Exp book during a very boring LANDesk training class), and from what I remember, the movie is nearly identical to the comic.



Let’s get this out of the way: My favorite band is Pink Floyd, and Sir David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives me goose-bumps. There will be little criticism of this concert, in fact, there will be only high praise. With once exception, there was a TERRIBLE audio delay on the concert disc. That really annoyed me, mostly since I pay very close attention to how he plays the guitar. The show itself was good, it wasn’t the typical Pink Floyd production (no large circular projections screen, crazy laser lights and flying pigs), it was very basic.

