Riba Rambles: |
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LiveJournal
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Rassen-frassen Internet...
My net connection is down more than... well, what's your best simile, because I can't think of a clean one in my current mood... The cable modem log keeps repeating lines like:
Googling the error message (when I can connect) isn't terribly helpful. Meanwhile, my plans for tonight involved oodles of online research... 
Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Been very very busy. The dentist (my cousin) filled my tooth, so that's now okay. But we're leaving for Europe in five days so most of my time has been consumed in travel planning. I'll post my itinerary tomorrow so it'll be in next week's archive file. And I think, through the cell phone, I'll be able to blog short updates (of the "I have arrived @ ___"), maybe even with pictures. This afternoon, we've been packing -- get that chore out of the way and give us a few days for those post-packing "Oh drat, we forgot to pack ____" while we still have time to do something about them. So that's what's going on in my life. How are you?
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
LOL yer own
Go to http://lol.ianloic.com/ and enter your LJ name or Twitter ID or any ol' syndicated feed. LOL Feeds will then match your entry titles to randomly selected cat pictures from Flickr. Unfortunately, my blog titles tend towards the short, rather than pithy phrases, so I'm not overly enamored by the LOLcats generated from my feed. Ian gets some good ones, though: 
I'm also rather amused by the latest headlines from CNN and the BBC: 
 Now that's one way to add entertainment value to the news -- fluffy visuals, not fluff for content... PS: For a truly surreal take, apply random cats to I Can Has Cheezburger.
W00t! Drink up*
* Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1 -- yes, Hamlet says “w00t!” -- look it up! 
Announcing
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} shakes_that_fic: The Shakespeare Pan-Fandom Ficathon!
Deadline is August 17.
More information in the Rules page. See also:
Monday, June 04, 2007
Night's tale
My last six-month checkup, the dentist expressed concerns over one of my fillings near the back. He said it seemed fine for now, but he'd want to x-ray it my next visit. Well, the good news is the filling still holds. Unfortunately, I managed to crack off a piece of tooth, exposing the filling and leaving that tooth sensitive to cold and touch. Needless to say, I'll be calling the dentist first thing in the morning to try to get an apppointment as soon as possible. We're leaving on vacation in a little over a week, and I have so many other demands on my time... At least I have a week; I suppose it could've happened while I was in Europe and far from relatively cheap quality dental care. [No slur on foreign dentists -- it's just that here I can get dental care from relatives.] Oh, and while I broke my tooth, I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3. My brief impression of an overly long movie: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I'm sure Ian will be writing more, if you want to check his blog. Once again, I find myself wishing the original film were left in isolation, as I really didn't care for any of the canon added by the sequels. How has your evening been? UPDATE: Ian's PotC review and commentary; contains spoilers. UPDATE THE SECOND: Dentist appointment Wednesday morning, 8am
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Weird
So, I recently got a Visa Giftcard, which needs to be activated before I can access the money on it. It can be activated by toll-free phonecall or by website. So, I went to the website, which says:
Um... huh? Can anybody explain what the USA PATRIOT Act* has to do with anything related to accessing funds that were given to me? * USA PATRIOT is an acronym, standing for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." Therefore, that is the proper spelling and capitalization of the name. UPDATE: Doubly-weird All the site asked me for was the card number and PIN. No other information was requested, nor actually are there any screens where I could enter further personal information. All I can do is see card activity and/or a statement. So, what kind of TSA-crack were they smoking with that warning?
Wiktory!
And we have wireless connection again. Took a little extra tweaking on the firewall for my telnet connections to work (yes, I still use UNIX shell mail -- don't have to see the pornographic spam!), but... We get signal!
Regarding LiveJournal
We're having problems posting anything much longer than a sentence to LiveJournal. Stewardess has one of the best summaries I've seen of what really happened during LiveJournal's "Strikethrough 2007" But Ian sums up the root problem more succinctly:
An important lesson to remember -- not just with LiveJournal, but any ad-supported service. LiveJournal has long fascinated me by having a different feel from other blogging services, one which I've thought would make an interesting subject for research. In the early days, the only ways to get an LJ account was (a) buying one, or (b) getting an activation code from an existing user. That meant that LJ use often followed existing social networks. Friends lists (talk about an emotionally-loaded term) and the ability to lock posts made it advantageous for real-world friends of LJ users to get their own LJ accounts. And usericons made it easier to notice and recognize fellow users, leading to "friending" of people met through your friends and communities. Of course, they've since lifted the bar on LJ account creation, but by that time the seed took. You friend a person or community, and you eventually hook into someone with a social network worth following... That's also why it's so difficult for people to leave LJ. You're not just moving your blog to another service, but you're losing an entire social network. In contrast, with other blogging services, each blog is relatively isolated. Sure, you can add blogrolls, but blogs are not connected to one-another in the same way that LJ is. Peg Kerr found several other interesting links on the recent UPDATE: In response to Ian's entry, Burgundy posted a link to some related comments by Oakthorne which deserve repeating (emphasis mine):
LiveJournal has changed its default account creation to the ad-sponsored version, but it's just a radio-button click to make it a Basic account. Let's protect them and ourselves from this kind of vulnerability...
Regarding our wireless router problems
which I blogged about last week, Given that the wifi log is currently repeating lines: (none) user.warn klogd: Atheros Pseudo Ethernet Driver for AR5513 PCI I suspect he may be right and the wireless transmitter/receiver part of our router is hosed. Good news is we found a new all-in-one cablemodem/firewall/router cheap at Tweeter's going out of business sale. Bad news is it didn't include the cables or installation disk, though I've found manuals and drivers online (though not the CD). But as soon as I can find a 12-volt adapter of the right size, I think I'll be able to get our home wireless running again. Which is really good news because I lost my desktop to the clutter ages ago and wired internet means trying to find a comfortable position in front of Ian's filing cabinet. 8D
ASP's Love's Labour's Lost, a review — by Ian
The Actors' Shakespeare Project is finishing off their third season with an extra, bonus play, a six-person Love's Labour's Lost, a light, fluffy, and funny play to balance out a season which would otherwise be entirely about psychotic princes killing their families. If you include the 2000 Kenneth Branagh movie version, Lis and I have now seen LLL four times. In those four times, we've seen it done more-or-less straight once. This wasn't that time. (For the record, it was the 2006 Huntington Theater production, reviewed by Lis and by me. The other one was the 2005 ART student-troupe production, which I also reviewed.) As pure entertainment, it works very well. If you want to laugh and enjoy yourself for two and a half hours, this is an extremely good way to go about it. The belly-laughs started within thirty seconds of the actors' first appearance on the stage. They use physical comedy, including slapstick, and very clearly let you know what you're in for -- and they deliver handsomely on that promise of entertainment and humor. So it works as entertainment. Which makes it worth watching. But how does it work as a production of Love's Labour's Lost? Let's start with some basic things. First, it's a six-person cast. Now, there are nineteen characters in the play -- but you can safely ditch three of them. Here are all of First Lord's lines: "Lord Longaville is one." Here are all of Forester's lines: "Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice; A stand where you may make the fairest shoot. " And here are all of Mercade's lines: "God save you, madam!" So there are actually sixteen real characters. The young actor Khalil Flemming plays Moth, one of Shakespeare's better roles for a child actor, since he actually gets to use other characters as his straight-man and deliver the punchlines himself. And the other five actors each play three roles apiece. Now, given that there are several scenes in which nine or more characters are on stage at one time (heck, I'm pretty sure that, at the last scene, pretty much EVERYBODY is on stage at once) this is a bit of a challenge, which is one of the things which makes the performance fun. So, how do they manage this? Well, each actor wears several hats. Literally. Each character is signified by a hat-and-wig combination, which sits on a set of hat-trees which are at the back of the stage (and which also work as the trees in which various characters hide.. .) As actors play different roles, they get different hats. As it turns out, it takes very little re-organization of the text to make this flow smoothly. Let's start with a brief overview of the play. The young King of Navarre and his three buddies swear to study day and night for three years, and for that whole time, not even see nor speak to any women. Just as they finish up swearing to this, they remember that the Princess of France and her three buddies (along with Boyet, their servant) are about to show up and they need to deal with them. Then, some other stuff is also happening in the "B" plot. Costard and Don Armando both love Jacquenetta (which is convenient, because Jacquenetta appears to be one of those women who loves anybody who's got a buck or two), Holofernes and Nathaniel use lots of big words, Armando attempts to use lots of big words, but isn't very good at it, and Moth makes fun of him. In the "A" plot, there are, obviously, four pairs of lovers. You have the King and the Princess, you have Berowne and Rosaline, who are the lovers who are clever and witty and get all the good lines (think Beatrice and Benedick), and you have the Other Two Pairs, who are, um, extra. So: Johnny Lee Davenport gets Boyet, the servant of the Princess in the "A" plot, and Don Armando in the "B" plot. He also gets Constable Dull, a sort of "utility infielder" character who gets to carry people off to jail and be made fun of by the people who use big words. And Khalil Flemming gets Moth. The other four actors each get one male lover, one female lover, and one person in the "B" plot. Marianna Bassham gets Dumaine (Spare Male Lover #1), Costard (Rustic Horny Guy), and Rosaline (Clever, Witty Female Lover). Jason Bowen gets Berowne (Clever, Witty Male Lover), Holofernes (Pedantic Schoolteacher Who Uses Big Words), and Katharine (Spare Female Lover #1) Sarah Newhouse's roles are Longaville (Spare Male Lover #2), the Princess of France, and Jacquenetta the bicycle, while Michael Forden Walker portrays the King of Navarre, Maria (Spare Female Lover #2), and Nathaniel (Pedantic Curate Who Uses Big Words). All four of the important lovers (Rosaline, Berowne, the King, and the Princess) are done well. All four of the unimportant lovers (Dumaine, Katharine, Longaville, and Maria) aren't. Bassham does try to distinguish her Unimportant Lover, Dumaine, by making him unusually stupid. I thought it was a good idea to try to do something to distinguish Dumaine from Longaville, but Lis thought that it was just more distracting than useful. As far as I could tell, the other three actors don't even particularly try to distinguish their Unimportant Lovers, focusing their energies instead primarily on their Important Lovers, and secondarily on their "B" plot characters -- and, frankly, I think that's the right choice. I may someday watch a production of LLL which makes me care about Dumaine, Longaville, Katherine, and Maria, but I haven't yet, and, for now, I consider them important only in that they make up the numbers, giving enough characters to make up funnier scenes with more confusion. If anyone reading this wants to consider this a challenge, of course, I'd be thrilled to see what you can come up with to make those four interesting and distinct. But, for this production, I was happy to see everyone get one good lover, and one of the spares. How about the "B" plot? I think Lis and I disagreed almost completely down the line about who we liked best in the "B" plot. But neither of us disliked any character. I thought Bassham's Costard was okay, Lis thought he was great. I loved Newhouse's Jacquenetta; Lis felt she was acceptable. I didn't have any problems with Walker's Nathaniel, but he didn't really "click" for me, either; Lis really enjoyed him a lot. And, of course, for me, every performance of Holofernes I ever see, I'm going to be mentally comparing it to Robert Jason Jackson's performance in the 2006 Huntington Theater production. Bowen's Holofernes was perfectly fine -- but it wasn't Jackson's. About the venue: We didn't notice any of the problems with heat that she'd had, but, then, this WAS an evening performance on a pretty nice night. So, to summarize: first, it's a heck of a lot of fun. Second, doing it with a six-person cast is not simply a gimmick, but it strengthens the play by allowing everybody to concentrate on one or two of the stronger roles in the play, while de-emphasizing the weaker ones. Third, after a season of murder, psychosis, paranoia, and treachery, the ASP really deserves to get to do a fun, light play. And finally, you deserve to see it.
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