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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: June 2012

  • Adaptation Consideration

    I had time to kill last night, between finishing “game night” (came in a strong second at “London” and kicked Mike’s ass at “Stone Age”, hah!) and starting on some client work, and didn’t feel like being On The Computer. So I put in the first disc of my recently-acquired set of the BBC/A&E “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

    Now, I’d last watched the show when it first aired back in the late 1990s and remembered (vaguely) that it was a cheesy, breezy little adventure yarn. You know what? It still is, and it hasn’t aged as poorly as I might have expected. Richard E. Grant is still a brilliant lead, playing the Bruce Wayne / Batman dichotomy as well as anyone could ask. Elizabeth McGovern is still pretty, somewhere under all that pancake makeup and somewhat-ratty wig. Buckles are swashed, entendres are doubled, and so forth.

    The Internet, of course, begs to differ. Apparently what I watched last night is “atrocious.” You see, liberties were taken with the source material. Heaven forfend! So-and-so wouldn’t behave like that! They killed whats-his-name! After all, the only good translation of novel to film is a completely and totally literal one, right? I mean, really now. Those “Lord of the Rings” movies clearly suffered from the loss of all that dratted Bombadil-ish and elvish and hobbitish poetry & song every dozen pages, right? Right.

    Now I’ve made the Tolkien nuts mad at me. I can live with that.

    There are some gripes with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” but they’re mostly just quibbles, regardless of how you rate Liz McGovern’s acting talents. (Seriously: The vitriolic posts I’ve seen online almost all mention one or more failings on her part. Does she have a history of drowning kittens and kicking puppies that I didn’t know about? Because, sheesh.) One scene comes to mind involving the sharpening of a guillotine, which is supposed to sound ominous (scrape, scrape) except the stone’s being dragged across the broad side of the blade instead of anywhere near the edge. Weird details like that, where someone just wasn’t paying attention, jar you from time to time.

    But, you know what? The good guys won, the hero rescued the girl, love triumphed over evil, yadda yadda. Some days, that’s all I really want.

    (Yes, there’s a rant coming later about the current state of modern high fantasy novels. Hint: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF GRIMDARK. STOP IT.)

    So I’ll be watching the other discs in my boxed set, even if I have to do it alone. I’m okay with that.

  • Fixed! But Not! Then Really Fixed!

    It’s been that kind of week. I can demonstrate by detailing my most successful support ticket so far. Note that it’s halfway through Thursday by this point, and this is the highlight by far:

    Tuesday: Ticket assigned. Contacted software vendor, found that the IP address they were given to configure their firewall rule for our client was off… by two entire quads. The first and third quads in the IP address were correct, the second and fourth weren’t even close. Gave the vendor the correct address, told them to contact me if problems persisted.

    Wednesday: No contact from client or vendor. Good!

    Thursday: Mid-morning, decided to close the ticket. Not five minutes later, the vendor emailed to say that they’re still getting the same error. Cue facepalm. Figured out the permissions needed for the user to run the program & save files successfully (note that up to this point, we were never given or shown the actual error message), used a command line utility to remedy, problem solved, client’s happy. Closed ticket for the second time this morning.

    Everything else I’ve worked on this week has gone much worse. And the less said about unresponsive product vendors who can’t read what we put into the ticket updates, the better. Grr.

    Is it the weekend, yet?

  • No Pain, No Loss

    Speaking of numbers?

    Push-ups completed this week: 41

    Sit-ups completed this week: 11

    I started a morning exercise routine this week, and yes, I’m starting small. I figure on doing ten push-ups and five sit-ups per morning until that gets (relatively) easy, then move to some combination of more of those activities and another activity yet to be selected. The idea isn’t to turn this into some massive workout or use this as a weight-loss program; I just want to get my body back to a place where I can do things again without becoming winded way too quickly or just plain being too weak.

    Unfortunately my abdominal muscles flat-out gave up after the second day of sit-ups. Wednesday’s attempt was accompanied by “OW OW OW.” Which scuttled my push-ups as well. Since then I’ve been starting with the push-ups since I know I can do those. My sit-up attempts yesterday and today were met with a big fat “NOT HAPPENING” from the abs.

    I think they’re on strike.

    There’s talk of putting in a workout space into the office expansion (yes, we’re expanding again). This might be a good thing, as I can’t afford or schedule a proper gym. (Nor would I want to deal with that environment, really.)

    So. There’s me, trying to get a bit healthier. Yay?

  • By The Numbers

    This post marks 2000 entries to the journal.

    On June 26th this journal will be effectively 11 years old. Now, we achieved this partly by importing some back-dated entries from the previous website, but there you have it.

    We’ve racked up nearly 4000 approved comments, and let’s not speculate on how much spam we’ve deleted in over a decade.

    It’s worth mentioning that since posting dropped off precipitously after I lost my job with Entercom six years ago, the bulk of these 2000 posts took place in the first half of this site’s existence. C’est la vie, I guess.

    I have more content queued but when I noticed in the WordPress Dashboard that there were 1999 posts in the system, I figured I should mark an occasion somehow. And here we are.

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