clock … watching time, the only true currency

A journal from John B. Roberts

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Entries from December 2005

Movie: Adaptation

December 31st, 2005 · No Comments

The movie Adaptation is just meta-meta-meta, and nuts. Sometimes in the best way, but damn. I don’t comprehend where these visions come from, and how the screenwriters and director communicate well enough to create these internal mindscapes as a visual story that hangs together.
I’ve never read The Orchid Thief, the book which is at the [...]

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Tags: Movies

Help with .htaccess redirects

December 31st, 2005 · 3 Comments

(Warning: LazyWeb request)
Solved! See comments. Thank you, Ben.
The format of my post links has changed from
http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12.html#a293
to
http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12/TITLE/
I need to use a regular expression redirect to change my 2.5 years of previous posts to something not broken (and I need a better 404 page, but that’s easier and separate), so I need to change
.html#wildcard
to
/
in the .htaccess file.
That [...]

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Tags: Blog management

Movie: Good Night, And Good Luck

December 31st, 2005 · No Comments

With this much free time, and the end-of-year flood of Academy Award-wanna-bes, we’ve seen a flood of movies. Thursday night, we caught Good Night, And Good Luck. Instead of the Manchurian Candidate version of McCarthy, we get to see the real McCoy… er, McCarthy, as the CBS News team led by Ed Murrow use the [...]

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Tags: Movies

Book: A History of Violence

December 30th, 2005 · 2 Comments

Driving around the city after Christmas, I heard a bit of David Cronenberg on Fresh Air, as Terry Gross was doing her 2005 retrospective of her favorite interviews. Cronenberg was answering questions about his most recent film, A History of Violence, which I haven’t seen.
Later in the day, I was in Borders, taking advantage of [...]

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Tags: Books

Movie: Shopgirl

December 30th, 2005 · No Comments

Christmas afternoon, we ducked out for a matinee showing of Shopgirl, the Steve Martin-Claire Danes film. The theater was small, but it was quite full shortly after 1pm. We weren’t the only ones taking a break from the holidays, or maybe we simply joined those who don’t celebrate this one.
Made from a novella, the movie [...]

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Tags: Movies

Book: Interface

December 30th, 2005 · No Comments

I started the holidays by reading Interface, a thriller by Stephen Bury.
Who is Stephen Bury?
Neal Stephenson.
But the marketing of this 1994 book has clearly morphed over time. At the URL above, you’ll get no details on the author. The paperback copy I bought new has a red promotional circle on the cover saying it was [...]

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Tags: Books

Movie: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

December 30th, 2005 · 1 Comment

Monday before Christmas, we did dinner and a movie with friends. The movie? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I’ve seen at least two of the three previous films; I think I missed Sorcerer’s Stone. But I didn’t feel lost at all. The appeal (and curse) of sequels and series is that everything is [...]

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Tags: Movies

How crime was mapped before ChicagoCrime.org

December 30th, 2005 · No Comments

Cleaning out the Safari bookmarks from the past year or so, and dumping those worth keeping into my del.icio.us account. Along the way, I came across SFPD CrimeMAPS. This page describes the San Francisco Police Department’s CrimeMaps service, where you can view crime data mapped against the city. I think this was originally rolled out [...]

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Tags: Maps · Tech

Movie: Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks

December 30th, 2005 · No Comments

I ordered the Project Aardvark movie as soon as Joel announced it. Still, it took me a few weeks to sit down and watch the 80-minute DVD before Christmas. Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks isn’t a video version of The Soul of a New Machine (read that if you have not). But Aardvark’d is a [...]

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Tags: Movies · Tech

Rebirth of Kinja

December 29th, 2005 · No Comments

Kinja seems to have been reborn as an amalgamation of every statistic and tool publicly available about weblogs. The appeal is to the individual blogger, at first, more than then general public as a “reader” — which is probably quite smart. The reader space is just oh-so-crowded, even though it remains nascent in many ways. [...]

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Tags: Tech