gottahavacuppamocha

A few things going on today. First, I added a plugin to WP that allows me to rate films. Review Haiku are nice, but they mainly sum up the film, rather than saying if a film is good or bad. Using the plugin, I can give the films a score, which I’m basing off the ratings I gave them at Netflix. Netflix ratings run like this:

• 5 stars – I loved this film!
• 4 stars – I really liked this film.
• 3 stars – I liked this film.
• 2 stars – I didn’t like this film.
• 1 star – I hated this film!

I don’t think Netflix allows zero stars, because their system will just look at it as being unscored.

I’ve got all the Review Haiku in a text file for easy reference (for myself), but the file only had the name of the film and the accompanying haiku. After adding the plugin, I went back to my Netflix rental history and grabbed the ratings I gave each film to put into the file. As it turns out, I missed a few haiku. There are three films I saw, but didn’t write haiku for. I’ll have to work them in at some point.

Also, I got linked to by The Film Cynics for the Review Haiku. Nice to know they’re appreciated :-)

When it comes to politics and sports, I always find myself rooting for underdogs. I probably follow politics more than I do sports, but that’s not saying much. About the only time I pay attention in sports is when it comes to playoffs and one of my “teams” is in the mix.

For baseball it’s mostly the Red Sox, then the Rockies. I was born in Massachusetts but lived in Colorado for over 20 years. It’s more about the Sox though because the Rockies are a team that didn’t exist most of the time I lived in CO. During the last World Series, I was torn. I wanted the Sox to win to prove their Series win a few years ago wasn’t a fluke. OTOH, I would have been very pleased to see the Rockies win so Denver would have another type of champion sports team in addition to the Avalanche and the Broncos.

For football, the teams I usually root for are the Broncos, the Patriots, and the Colts. The past few years have been good ones for those teams. This year, however, I find myself eager for the Giants to win. It’s not like I’m a Giants fan, but since the Pats have been pretty dominant the past few years, it would be nice for them to get beat.

I remember a Super Bowl back in the 80′s where the Patriots and the Bears went. The Patriots were the underdogs. It seemed like everybody was rooting for the Bears, so I rooted for the Pats. At the end of the game, the Patriots got their asses handed to them. The game was incredibly lopsided. I have a feeling this year it will be another lopsided game, this time in the Patriots favor, but that still won’t stop me from rooting for the Giants. I’ll still be pleased if the Pats win, but I would probably be happier if they lose.

Edit: Well, it wasn’t lopsided and the Patriots did lose. Overall it was a great game. The defense on both teams were fantastic, so the final score was low. Good jorb.

Crazy day today. Work was busy and will be busy tomorrow. It was mostly cloudy and drizzly today, but the temps got into the low 50′s so it wasn’t too bad. In the evening, during class, a thunderstorm rolled through and there was a tornado warning. We finished class about half an hour early during a break in the weather. Good thing too. By the time I got home it was snowing.

To top it off, about an hour after I got back to the apartment, the fire alarm went off. Strange, because we had a fire drill at work yesterday. Anyway, I put on a jacket and shoes, pretty much wearing what I was wearing earlier, but the temps were in the low 30′s and it was very windy. Most people who left the building went to their cars, but since I don’t have one, I just sort of huddled next to a minivan, using it as a windbreak. The drizzle started turning to ice, so the roads will be chaotic tomorrow.

Right now, weather.com report the temperature as 14 degrees F with a wind chill factor of -5 F. The wind is supposed to continue tomorrow, so it will be an interesting trek into work. Luckily, no classes for me tomorrow, though I have a test in French on Thursday.

I guess my tagging the articles paid off in an unexpected way. I was just going through the spam messages in the moderation queue and found one that read exploitation films with a link to some other site. Of course, it was spam, so I deleted it, but I thought it was funny because it was very unexpected.

I’m an independent, so the primaries don’t matter too much to me. However, they’re interesting because one of those people is likely to become the next President. So while the parties decide who they want to put forward as a candidate, it’s interesting to follow as an outside observer.

This year, a whole bunch of states moved their primaries up with the idea that it makes their state more important in the process. I think this is and isn’t true. On February 5th (a/k/a Super-Duper Tuesday), twenty-four states will hold their primaries. That many states holding their primaries on the same day is pretty unprecedented. In 2004, seven states held primaries on the same day in March (a/k/a Super Tuesday), but that was the largest primary date until this year. This has changed the traditional calculus of primary season. Rudy Guliani decided to more-or-less ignore Iowa and New Hampshire and concentrate on winning primaries in states with more delegates and are only a few weeks away. Since the primary candidates know they can’t win every state, they will focus on the states with more delegates (Alaska and North Dakota probably won’t see a lot of campaign stops), and states where they are likely to win (e.g. Utah is pretty much a gimme for Romney, Arizona will probably go for McCain, etc.) Candidates will pick and choose the states to campaign in. Instead of making their state primaries more important, they may have diluted their value to campaigns.

Some people might think it will be all over on February 6th, that both parties will have a clear candidate, and the rest of the primaries will be superfluous. However, I think they’re probably wrong. Both the Democrats and Republicans have strong candidates who are capable of getting votes and money. On February 6th (or later that week) the field will probably narrow to 3 – 4 for each party, with no clear winners. Subsequent weeks in February will bring a bunch more primaries, but if the candidates keep winning or making strong showings, then they will keep bringing in money to keep the campaigns going. This makes the states with later primaries more important. Texas and Ohio both have lots of delegates, and their primaries are in March. Pennsylvania is another delegate rich state, but has a primary in April. If there are no clear winners early on, the importance of later states rises, which means they will see more campaign stops. Indiana holds its primaries in May, but I expect by then there will either be a clear candidate for each party or it will be down to 2 or 3 for each party. It’ll be very interesting if that happens.

Also, the best place to go if you want to follow the elections is www.electoral-vote.com. Since we are in primary season, it’s being updated daily. Check it out.

Slashdot has an interesting poll up, asking who would be the best person to direct The Hobbit. Personally I voted for the CowboyNeal option, but if you don’t frequent Slashdot you aren’t likely to understand the cliches associated with that. The poll itself isn’t that interesting, but the responses are hilarious, and here are some great examples:

Quentin Tarantino

• Have you seen my ring? It’s the one with “BAD MOTHERFUCKER” inscribed in it.
• Say Precious again! I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker. Say Precious one more goddamn time.
• Elvish, motherfucker, do you speak it?

George Lucas

• Hobbit lightsaber duel
• Yoda as Bilbo

There are plenty of other funny comments, so go check it out.

It may seem like a weird thing to write about, but usually when I am heading towards the bathroom, I take along a book. In our world of new media, I suppose it is only a matter of time before TV’s, computers, phones, and whatnot become prevalent in the most private of rooms, but for now books will suffice. I know I’m not the only person to read while sitting on the porcelain throne. Over time I’ve found some books are better for this than others. The best ones, IMHO, are the ones with stories or articles just long enough to keep me entertained while going through the motions (sorry, had to do it).

I know there are some books out there specifically for this purpose, such as The Great American Bathroom Book, but I don’t have a copy of this (or any of the other volumes). Instead, I tend to rely on The Straight Dope Series of books. They are informative and humorous, and a worthwhile addition to any personal library. Of course, as nice as those books are, sometimes I want something a little more topical. In those instances, I tend to turn to The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson (My current reading material) or The Literary Life and Other Curiosities by Robert Hendrickson. Both books more or less restrict themselves to their designated topics, but they are full of interesting facts and humorous anecdotes that make for an entertaining read.

One of these day, the time may come when my bathroom is wired with a computer or some sort of device connected to the net, where I will be able to watch short films, or read blog posts or discussion forums. However, until that day comes, I anticipate reading a few more books.

Hmmm. Something strange has been going on with my web browsing lately. Sometimes the browser will quit for no apparent reason. The most troubling part is when I try to login to my own website, it quits. As it goes with a lot of Linux distros, I have more than one browser on my computer and most of them are based on Gecko/Mozilla. I double checked my site with each browser and it kills all of them except Konqueror, which isn’t based on Gecko. Not that Konqueror is all that great. It renders my login and admin screen very strangely. I don’t know what to do about other websites killing the browsers, but for my own site, I look at it as a sign I should upgrade. The site currently uses WordPress 1.2 and the most recent version is 2.1.

Anyway, the site will be down for awhile this weekend so I can do the upgrade. Getting the blog set up again should be no problem, although it will take awhile to get everything else looking spiffy.

A couple of years ago, I quit smoking with the help of Wellbutrin/Zyban and it kind of worked, although I picked up the habit again after about six months (by taking breaks during Japanese class).

Recently, I’ve been given two good reasons to quit, other than the usual “It’s bad for you” stuff. 1) I am about to be involved in a double-blind healthy subjects study for an eyedrop. I can earn $600 in 10 days for taking an eyedrop twice a day, but there are some rules: can’t smoke, no cold medicine, 12.5 mg of caffeine daily (approx 4 cups), and no alcohol being the big ones. The eyedrops can make people drowsy, so they don’t want people taking stimulants or depressants since they might affect this side effect. If people will react to the medicine, they want to see real reactions, not ones that are dulled or enhanced. Anyway, I keep reminding myself about the $600 in 10 days, which brings me to…

My latest adventure in dental care was a fairly short visit. The dental student checked over everything and did three separate pain tests (my tooth is becoming necrotic, so there was little pain) and we talked about the various treatment options. One option was to extract the tooth, then get fitted for a bridge. The problem is the teeth on either side of the bad tooth are healthy, and they would have to be “prepared”, which is something they are reluctant to do to healthy teeth. Another option was to do a crown lengthening and put a crown of some sort on the tooth. This is what the dental student was leaning towrds, although there were some concerns about whether there was enough of the actual tooth left to make this a viable option. In other words, we might have tried it and had it fail. The last option, which is the current plan, is for a dental implant. It’s not cheap, but it seems like the best option. The tooth gets pulled and replaced with a bone graft, which takes six months to heal. After that, the dentist goes in and places a prosthetic tooth into the jaw by screwing it into the bone graft. Anyway, this seems to be the best option, but it also has a higher failure rate with smokers, so it was strongly suggested that I quit smoking.

I think part of the problem with smoking is physical addiction and part of it is habitual. I seem to be doing okay with keeping the physical part under control, aside from episodes of pacing and fits of energy – last night I started rearranging my apartment. The habit part is harder. I used to make a trek several times a week to the convenience store to buy cigarettes. I had to stop that habit. At home, I usually surfed on the web, often with a cigarette in my hand. That had to stop. Smoking is something I did when I was online, when I read books, and when I watched movies, which are the three main things I would do when I was at home. Part of breaking the habit, I think, will also consist of breaking those other habits. I still love movies, books and the net, but until I can get the smoking habit under control, I’m trying to stay away from those as much as possible.

What I am thinking of doing is picking up sewing again. It’s one of the reasons I was rearranging my apartment. Since I have the degree in Apparel Design, I might as well try to get some use out of it. At the very least it should make an interesting hobby, and it should help me to quit smoking. It’s kind of hard to hold a lit cigarette while trying to neatly feed fabric into a sewing machine.

Last month I changed my PC from Slackware, which I had been running for a year or more, to the latest stable version of Ubuntu Linux. On Slackware, I used Mozilla Thunderbird to check my gottahavacuppamocha.com email. Being the slacker that I am, I haven’t set up Ubuntu to check that email until last night. Imagine my surprise when I had nearly 10,000 emails in my inbox! It was 9979 to be precise.

I have 5 actual email addesses setup for this domain, and one of them was set as a catchall. What happened is some spammer (calling them an asshole would be an insult to assholes everywhere), affixed my domain name as the REPLY-TO address in these spam emails. The email addresses were completely bogus, but since I have the catchall address, everything got sent to that address. It took Thunderbird over two hours to download all the emails, and it took me nearly another hour to sort through them (separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak). I just hope I didn’t get rid of any legitimate emails.

Anyway, I changed my email setting so there isn’t a catchall address, and any mail to a bogus address gets bounced back to the sender. I hope that does the trick. I’m pretty sure nobody actually cracked one of my email accounts to send spam from.