December 20, 2006
Austrians, MySQL, Batman
Why yes, I have been quite busy, thanks for asking.
A short notice, first -- if you know my brother, super_late, you'll know of his upcoming nuptials. A bunch of his male friends are gathering on Friday at my house at 8pm, and probably moving from there into town around 10-11pm. If you should be at this thing, and don't know where my house is, you might want to email me. :) If this is the first you've heard of it, it's not that you aren't invited; it's that I'm not particularly good at organizing this sort of thing, and super_late hasn't given me any sort of mailing list.
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It's all very exciting at the moment. There are currently six people in my house -- as well as my two flatmates & C, I've managed to acquire a couple of Austrian backpackers. (Some people may remember a previous collection of Austrians; these are friends of those ones.) They have agreed not to vote me off the island, on the basis of my cooking. :)
They arrived yesterday, and C & I took the opportunity to pop down to the Red Shed to pick up a tree (since we weren't organized enough for a real one, and a pine might make a somewhat overpowering companion if you're trying to sleep). They helped us decorate it, and it's standing proudly in the corner; now all I need to do is put some presents under it.
I'm not doing too badly on the present front... which I suppose is good, since it's not that many days until Christmas. I should really make a list, and see who I still need to buy for.
And then there's the wedding... I really need to find out what I'm meant to be doing.
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There's been a lot happening in the World of Weta, as well. I've had the first formal training in something like five years; a chap from MySQL came out and gave six of us the quickie version of the Admin and Developer training courses. I was quite nervous, since I've been maintaining our servers for a while now based solely on what I'd been able to gather from the online docs; but apparently I don't have anything horribly wrong in our config files, and the one really dangerous thing that we're doing is that way deliberately. I was also happy to find out that I had picked up a lot of stuff in my reading, even though there was a heap of new useful information to spur me to do more on the whole admin front.
Oh, and I've been extended yet another year. :)
In other Weta-related news, I've heard mixed reviews about Eragon; some people I've talked to have liked it, while some online reviews have told me that it makes 11 year-olds who love the books cry. So... that's pretty mixed. I know that they changed a bunch of things to get it a PG rating; this may have hurt it. But I saw the bits that we did (big dragony battles) to the tune of Alexi Sayle's "Didn't You Kill My Brother?" and Strongbad's "Trogdor!", so they looked a-pretty-pretty guuud.
"Burninating the countryside,
Burninating the peasants..."
Bridge to Teribithia looks pretty cool, and has had an excellent response from it's target market, so I'm torn; I think I'd be more keen if I didn't know anything about the story, rather than the snippets that I do know.
Oh, and Weta was involved with two of the seven shows that are under consideration for the Visual Effects Oscar: Eragon and X-Men: The Last Stand. The other movies that go into the bake-off are Casino Royale, Superman Returns, A Night at the Museum, Posiedon, and the one I'd pick as the likely eventual winner, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Damn you, Nighy! Anyway, there's a good chance that at least one of them will be among the four that the Academy as a whole chooses from.
(Actually, now that I think about it, I think we might have had a shot in Night at the Museum, as well.)
Now, Oscars don't mean anything, politics, blah blah blah... but I still think it's pretty cool that we're likely to continue the streak of being at least nominated every year. So, yay for us. :)
Oh, and while I'm talking about movie-related stuff -- I know some of you enjoyed the movie Brick, so I thought that people might like to have a look at the Brick Script.
And, um... Edward Scissorhands as a ballet?
And there's a documentary that might be quite interesting to watch, if it ever makes it down here, called Nerdcore For Life. I remember the first time I heard the MC Hawking rap "Fuck the Creationists"... and now they're enough of a musical phenomenon to spawn a doco. Cool.
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And now, onto the even more random crap.
First, how about conclusive proof that Batman works for the Russians? Or that, you know, whoever designed the logo for the GRU has rather more of a sense of humour than you might assume.
And here's the British Ukulele Orchestra, with their version of Nirvana's "Nevermind". Ah, YouTube, endless waste of productive hours that you are...
And... that's about it, actually. I hope to post during the break, but I make no promises. Have a fun and safe Christmas and New Year.