So I’m doing this entry in Notepad.

Vic is explaining to me on Messenger why it is that Nucleus decided to no longer write administrator cookies, requiring me to log in every single time I try to move around in the back-end of my site. I don’t understand what he’s saying.

What a night. Hell, what a day – after the initial 3.5 hours of meetings, I did get to have lunch. And then another 2.5 hours of meetings after that. Not an ideal Monday, but I suppose it was productive in the grand scheme of things. Happy enough to get out of there today, though.

Band practice was cancelled, again. scheduling is a bugbear, let me tell you. I’m pretty much writing off December, we’ll call it hibernation, but am sorta getting prepped for going full-on again come January. The night off did give me the opportunity to get some errands run, though. First I wanted to swing by Ring Music and grab a few feet of George L’s cables for rewiring my pedalboard – been meaning to get to that for over a month now, but never did. And I still haven’t, since Ring is closed on Mondays. Who knew.

I still swung by the rehearsal space and grabbed my board, though. There were some other setup issues I wanted to address, so I spent the better part of the evening knee-deep in cables, 3M Dual Lock and pedals. This is my idea of a fun night – rewiring a pedalboard and listening to the Weddoes. Too bad it went downhill after that…

Nucleus begins throwing up the aforementioned errors as I go in to make a new entry on my blog. No reason, I haven’t touched the code since this morning when it was working fine, but now it’s gotten testy. And when I go to look at the PHP files that the error is being generated in, I find that Homesite has decided to kack out like ColdFusion did last week. Or the week before. Or whenever, Either way, I had to completely uninstall Homesite and reinstall it to get it to work again. Which still didn’t help because my site was loading slower than frozen molasses moving uphill – a ping of my site yielded average response times of 2 seconds. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting access to my files at any great speed which again, was okay, since when I finally did get in, I confirmed that I had no idea how to troubleshoot the code. Enter Vic – there’s not many things better than having an unemployed friend who gets off on coding. He’s got nothing but time to debug my messes.

Sometimes I wish I lived in a cabin way out in the woods.

I am the only one in the office right now. Everyone else is at lunch, me I just finished a lovely 3.5-hour meeting. It’s been an interesting day at work… Seems to be loads of work is starting to pile-on right before the holidays. We may need to conscript some more help, depending on the timing of the projects. Actually, we’ll probably need more help regardless of the timing. There is only so much that two monkeys can do before it just degenerates into a farce of feces-flinging and head slapping.

I’m thinking I need more Echo & the Bunnymen. I am slipping into a full-on British 80s post-punk/new wave indie kick. Be warned.

np – The Pernice Brothers / Overcome By Happiness

Having some server problems this weekend. Actually, no, the server is fine – it’s my ISP’s path to my site that is mucked up. Throughout the weekend I’ve had numerous periods of maybe 10 minutes where I cannot reach my site. If I do a traceroute during that downtime, I get about 15 pretty slow bounces and then it times out. If I use an anonymous proxy site, I can get in so I know that the site is still up, but it’s a bit of a pain to not have consistent access to my site, particularly if I’m doing work on the code. Not sure what I can do about this, unfortunately. I will treat this the same way I do medical conditions… ignore it and hope it goes away.

It’s bloody cold out!

I’m finding that I’m using Netscape 7.0 more and more – it’s essentially the same program as Mozilla and uses the same user registry so all my passwords and settings are preserved, but I’m thinking it actually runs faster than Mozilla. Maybe it’s six of one, half dozen of the other, but it amuses me to believe I’m just that astute and the one thing I do know is that they both kick Internet Explorer’s ass. Tabbed browsing man, you can’t beat that with a stick.

My email trash is asking me if I’m dating someone who’s already married. Wouldn’t that be an interesting development?

np – Neutral Milk Hotel / In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Yeah, you’ll note the titles says Red Dragon and not Adaptation as I’d promised… that’s because no one wanted to see Adaptation this week but everyone wanted to see it next week. What’s a guy to do? Thankfully my plans of wasting the afternoon in a dark room surrounded by strangers wasn’t totally torpedoed as The Bloor was running an afternoon matinee of Red Dragon, which I hadn’t seen. But I have now. ‘Cause I went. In case you missed that. Anyway.

Saw and enjoyed Silence Of The Lambs, haven’t seen Hannibal as it looked terrible. Heard better things about Red Dragon. Haven’t seen Manhunter, so there won’t be any ‘it was okay but Michael Mann did it soooo much better the first time’ jive. As a sidebar, I was curious to see how dirctor Brett Ratner did with some non-lightweight source material since he’s the fellow attached to the new Superman movie. But if you look at his IMDB entry, you’ll note a 2002 item for Hong Kong Phooey Um, right.

So Red Dragon – a reasonable film but I think it was flawed from the initial concept. It’s marketed as a new Hannibal Lector film – unfortunately, he’s actually only a peripheral character. His parts are ratcheted up for the film but that creates a subplot with him and agent Will Graham that can’t be satisfactorily resolved because it doesn’t really exist in the first place, save the first five minutes of the film. The real plot of the film lies with Ralph Fiennes’ ‘Tooth Fairy’, and that thread gets only the standard Hollywood serial killer treatment. The motivations of the titular character are only presented in broad strokes, and I was left unsatisfied at the end result. Fiennes does as much as he can with the part, but isn’t given all that much to work with. The impression I get is not that the film wants me to figure it out on my own, but that it doesn’t especially care since the Tooth Fairy isn’t the main attraction.

Sir Anthony Hopkins has the Lector character down to a tee by now – and I can’t help wondering if that sinister grin is so automatic now that Hopkins isn’t even thinking about it? Edward Norton is excellent as always as FBI agent Will Graham, and I have to say – for a relatively small guy, he’s awful resiliant. Graham takes an extraordinary amount of punishment but always comes up, well, alive. And I always like Mary-Louise Parker. Absolutely didn’t recognize Harvey Keitel.

Ratner did a servicable job with the film, but he’s not in the same league as the previous directors of the Lector films. I’m less concerned with him being behind the camera for Superman than I am about the script that’s purportedly being used. But that’s a rant for another day.

np – Fountains Of Wayne / Utopia Parkway

Finally got to sit down and watch Leon, The Professional. I’ve seen this before, though more than five years ago, and that was the North American version (simply titled The Professional). This edition boasts an extra 24 minutes of footage which for the life of me, I could not identify. There were scenes that I didn’t remember, but that went for a good chunk of the film overall. I remembered the beginning and the ending, and that’s about it. Jean Reno does well in the role that pretty much typecast him in North America (the stoic, mysterious Frenchman, armed to the teeth more often than not), Gary Oldman is twitchily psychotic (“DO YOU LIKE BEETHOVEN?!?”) as the evil DEA agent and what can you say about the very young Natalie Portman besides… well, she was very young then but she’s all growed up now. I enjoyed this movie more the first time around – this time it seemed more slight despite the additional footage, wherever it was. It’s always a mild disappointment when a film doesn’t hold up under repeated viewings.

Afterwards, swung by the Green Room to meet up with some of the usual crowd. Didn’t stay long – after an hour some of them wanted to go to Blow-Up so I just went home… not much in the dancing mood. I did stop by Second Spin on the way there and chanced upon the Starflyer 59 double disc best-of. An unexpected find but I’ll take it!

np – Starflyer 59 / Easy Come Easy Go 1994-2000