Lazy Spring Break Monday

Submitted: Monday, March 22, 1999 12:47

Gotta love it. Got connected to the net again last night. After a brief glance at all the slashdot headlines since I left, it's probably just as well I was disconnected for a few days. Flamewars are fun but tiresome.

I got up this morning and went to the dentist. Oh God, this really is starting to feel like one of those online diaries. Oh well. I've gotta take better care of my teeth. I just know everyone out there surfing the web wanted to hear that.

Plans for today. Do some more web authoring. I gotta get these barely-there scripts completed and maybe add some bells and whistles. I'll be heading over to an SQL tutorial and reading for a while. (Actually, I'm already there in another Netscape window on virtual desktop 3.)

Right now, the new pre-alpha mozilla is downloading. I think I'll give it a spin and see if it tries to hog all my memory while typing stuff into forms. Actually, I'll be lucky if I can get it to compile and run. All the different gtk libraries on my system are in such a helter skelter mess, it's lucky I can even load anything using that widget set. One of these days, I'm gonna have to purge and recompile everything that uses anything earlier than 1.2. That'll fix it. Famous last words, I know.

Rented a couple movies last night. Object of My Affection, starring Jennifer Aniston, and The Crucible, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. (I probably slaughtered those spellings. Time to open an imdb window and fix them. There. Now no one will ever know the difference.)

Anyway we watched Object of My Affection. Haven't gotten to The Crucible yet. We'll probably watch it later today. It was a relatively good movie. I'd give it two and a half stars. The short on the plot: Jennifer Aniston's character falls in love with her male roommate. He really likes her, considers her a great friend, but can't really return the same sentiment because he's gay. It was kind of touching, and brought out some good points about relationships and friendship, etc. It was worth seeing, on video anyway.

I suppose this should really go in my movielog, but I make it a policy not to put VHS viewings in it. Actually, originally it was supposed to be only for theatrical viewings, but I made a couple exceptions for DVD viewings. I don't want to degrade my standards with what is considered a real movie viewing. A theater is considered a worthy medium because I see the movie in its entirity, relatively free of distraction, and on a large screen; the way movies are meant to be seen. DVD viewed in letterbox in a good home theater comes close to the quality of a theatrical viewing, so I decided to add it. VHS can also be ok under certain circumstances, sometimes not. Broadcast tv versions? Forget it. Even if it weren't for the commercial interrputions, they are usually edited beyond hope. Cutting shots short to make it fit in the allocated time blocks, removing scenes and overdubbing dialog to kiss up to the FCC's archaic regulations, and the annoying little logos popping up in the corner of the screen. Ugghh. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent.

The problems with including VHS viewings in my movielog are as follows:

Pan and Scan

This is probably the biggest one. How can I accurately review a movie if I can't see the whole frame? To have a complete experience, one has to see the entire contents of every shot. Of course, the occasional VHS movies released in letterbox would be excepted from this. Even if a letterbox edition is released, it can be a pain to find rentals for all but the most prominent titles.

Picture resolution

This varies a lot depending on the hardware you use. Generally, though, VHS delivers a much lower picture quality. This is a well-known fact, so I won't elaborate any further.

Sound quality

Even with a Hi-Fi VCR, most tv speakers suck. Unless you've got a stereo wired up to the VCR (which isn't the case in this house), the sound is gonna be inferior.

Ok, with that out, I think I'll change my movielog policy to this: I may enter a movie viewed in VHS format if it is letterboxed and I get to see the whole thing without significant interrputions or distractions, and the viewing conditions are deemed sufficient to make a reasonable assessment of the movie. There. On to another topic.

Netscape's CGI form engine definitely sucks. Never noticed it until I did this whole CGI-based web entry thing, but it leakes memory like crazy. Before I started entering this, about half of my physical memory was used and my swap was almost all free. Right now, my physical memory is just about totally consumed, and I'd say my 128 meg swap partition is a good third of the way full. And it's also getting slower by the minute. I haven't done anything but type this, and I opened one additional Netscape window to look at imdb. This is insane.

Back to movies. Watched the second half of the Oscars last night. The part I saw was relatively boring, and from what I heard on Howard Stern this morning, the first half was at least as bad. Well, I'm gonna have to watch Shakespear in Love. Maybe tonight. Gotta see 8MM sometime soon too. I've heard it's really good. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow night. And of course, we wouldn't want to let a good rental go to waste, so it'll be The Crucible video this afternoon. Did I mention that I like to watch movies during vacation? :-)

Woohoo. Swap is 2/3 full. I'm gonna submit this before we have another incident like Friday night while I was typing in my movielog. Then I'll have to close all my Netscape windows and reopen it to get it to free the memory. How annoying.