Copyright ©
Carey Evans.
Last modified: Wed, 11 February 2004.
These are the entries I wrote from September 2000 until the end of the year. Now that it’s 2001 (as I write this), I’m archiving them off my home page to make room for new information.
So what’s been happening recently?
I tried to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics last Friday night. I was a bit tired that night, though, and I think I fell asleep somewhere around P.
On Saturday, after getting a bit of sleep, my brother and I rented and watched a couple of videos. First up was Enemy of the State. It’s a good fun action movie, although given the subject matter of identity theft and big brother, I would have expected it to be a bit more chilling. I’m not sure where this went wrong.
The second movie was Dark City. This is a much better movie. Although it’s allegedly science fiction, it’s more like fantasy — the aliens are obviously really demons. You can tell it’s science fiction though, because Kiefer Sutherland. Speaks like. William Shatner.
I’d rate Dark City as, “It’s only $4 to rent it, what are you waiting for?” And it deserves a better review than that, too.
I was planning on updating this again over the weekend, but after spending much of Saturday discovering how bad a hangover I can still get from just wine, I didn’t get much done at all. Oh well.
Anyway, last Thursday I went with my brother Tim [1] to see Tadpole performing at the Civic. Just arriving there made me feel old — I think the median age of the crowd around the door was about 15. We visited a bar just down the street for about half an hour to wait for the doors to open, and things were a bit better when we got back. What do you expect for an all-ages gig with tickets for $18, though?
Tadpole were supported by local bands Munchas Dodgy and 7 Tongues, who each played for about half an hour. We were quite impressed by the music and performances of both bands...
Until Tadpole came on and started playing. They started off with their first hit, Blind, and continued on playing many of the other tracks off their album “The Buddhafinger”. For a bit of variety, You Know It segued into a bit of a track from Portishead. All the songs were performed really well, from the rock track Alright to their ‘ballad’ No Man.
I started trying to remember each of the songs Tadpole performed, but I only managed Blind, No: 1, You Know It, Set To Fade then Backdoor before I realised I should just be enjoying the music, and stopped trying. I can’t even remember which Split Enz track they covered for the encore, though it was done in quite a unique style.
The evening was worth more than just $18; Tadpole are a really good live band, and anyone who likes their music a bit should take the next opportunity they get to go along.
On a completely different note, I’ve installed a new version of 4Suite, the Python libraries that I use to generate my web pages. In conjunction with a few simplifications I made, the whole process is very noticeably faster now. Yay!
[1] I don’t think Tim has a web site — the best I could find was this music video.
I guess the big news from Christchurch recently was the big storm the city experienced on Thursday. I’ve heard it described as a once in a decade storm, as as the worst storm in twenty five years, or even as a one in 40 year storm.
Whichever, it was some of the worst weather I’ve seen. It’s the first day since I bought my car that I’ve driven it to work instead of walking for ten minutes; I got a park really close, too, and still got soaked running to the building.
Even after the rain died down, the wind came up even more. There wasn’t any damage done to my apartment, but many trees throughout the city had branches blown down, or were just uprooted. The roads were covered in bits of leaves and blossom by the end of the day, and most of the parks were covered in branches and debris.
After going out to breakfast at Drexel’s with my family on Saturday for Tim’s 23th birthday, we had a look at some of the work that was being done to clean up the mess. A large tree had blown down on the side of the Avon, near the Worcester Street bridge, and was being worked on with chainsaws to get it into manageable sized pieces. Opposite and a bit further up the river another tree had come down, and had had just the section of its trunk cut out where it lay across the path, which seemed a little pointless since it would be easy to walk around.
Apart from that, I haven’t got much to report. Except that my birthday is coming up next month, and it’s going to be hard for my family to choose presents for me since I don’t even know myself what I want. Actually, $10,000 worth of computer equipment would be nice, but I’m not expecting that.
It looks like the weather decided to remind us who’s boss, in case we forgot after last week. Tuesday night at 8:30, a southerly change came through. It started with quite spectacular lightning a few kilometres away, which was quickly followed by a cold wind direct from Antarctica, then a heavy hailstorm.
After this had piled up in drifts for a while, still with the lightning accompaniment, it turned to heavy rain for an hour or so, then cleared up. All we were left with was the cold, the wet streets, and the reminder that there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
In more personal news, I’ve bought myself a couple of quite different CDs, and got a bonus giveaway CD a the same time. They were:
Lisa Ekdahl, “Back To Earth”
Fur Patrol, “Pet”
“Homegrown”
None of which seem to have decent web pages available.
For this entry, I’ve got a warning, and a couple of pieces of very important news.
First, the warning, for anyone using a Unix-based OS: if you’re going to stuff up one of the lines in /etc/fstab, don’t make it the one for ‘/’! (And remember, it’s ‘defaults’, not ‘default’.)
Now that that’s out of the way, here’s the first piece of important news: it’s my birthday tomorrow! Yay! I’m turning 25 on 7 November this year; pretty much like last year, but then I was only 24.
And the really important news: there are now three astronauts in space on International Space Station Alpha! See Yahoo’s International Space Station Full Coverage for all the latest news. I think it’s incredibly important that we (humanity) keep up a presence in space, and the space station is a very good example of the international cooperation needed.
Yeah, I’m slack about keeping these up to date. I better catch up on a bit of what’s been happening.
For the night of my birthday, I had a nice quiet dinner with my parents and my brother Tim. I got some very useful presents: a very good knife sharpener and a set of nice glass cappucino cups from my parents, and a good-looking stainless steel that will go well on my new LPG range. This was overshadowed a bit, though, by Tim buying his first house on the same night.
The weekend after that was ripping-out-the-kitchen time. My family came around on Saturday to help. We shifted the fridge and all the food into the lounge, then completely ripped out everything in the existing kitchen. Most of that went to the dump, although one cupboard and the range went to the recycling depo there.
That was really the fun bit, and fortunately I didn’t have to do anything for the hard bit since I paid for the new kitchen to be installed on Monday. I’ve now got all new cupboards, sink, dishwasher and gas range, so all I need to do once I get some more money is to slap on a bit of paint, stick up some tiles, and stick down some lino.
Ripping everything out was also a good excuse to go into town afterwards on Saturday for dinner. We all went down to the Lichfield Street Diner, which is a very good place to eat, and seems a lot less popular than it should be.
Sunday was a chance to relax a bit, and I went to Akaroa for the day with friends from work; Mel, Andrew and Pankaj. We went out on the Canterbury Cat and saw Hector’s dolphins, a seal, a penguin, lots of shags, lots of seagulls, and a couple of seagulls shagging. I also managed to get just a bit sunburnt. I did enjoy myself though.
I’ve decided my taste in music is maybe a little unusual. Sitting next to me in front of the computer are now:
Mer de Noms from A Perfect Circle, whose web site looks like Quake, and whose music is a kind of experimental hard rock.
Back to Earth from Lisa Ekhdahl, which is a modern recording of old Jazz songs, like Now or Never and Night and Day.
Pet from Fur Patrol, a Wellington band with hits ranging from rock with Holy, nearly to pop with Lydia, and other wierd songs on the album like Man in a Box.
I’ve also decided that XML or HTML of any form is no good for writing quick entries like this. A really cool concept that I’ve come across is that of the Wiki. Pages are edited as very similar to plain text, with links between pages (and new pages) created automatically using CapitalizedWords.
There’s a lot of implementations, including a few in Python like MoinMoin, PyWiki and ZWiki. I just have to work out how to get one of these on the web myself, to replace my current pages.
Nearly Christmas, and I haven’t done any shopping yet. Yikes!
I have been getting a bit of the Silly Season in work functions though. There’s been dinner at the Opawa Shell Cafe and Bar for the whole office down here, as well as a smaller do after work by the finance company for their suppliers and other people (like me) that have done a bit of work for them, and also a night at the races for the computer department.
All this, along with visiting friends, helping my brother shift into the house he’s bought, getting my car fixed so it’d pass the WOF test, getting a big project at work to “guinea pig” stage, and updating the man pages for tn5250.
The main reason I’m actually posting this, though, is to update the link to the Munchas Dodgy website I had linked below, which I’ve now done. Looking around the site a bit, it looks like they’re being hosted by “treshna Enterprises”, a Christchurch company doing Linux consulting and development, and running their web server on Debian. Cool!
Wow, I actually wrote quite a bit last year.