Hello, my friends.
I haven't written much in the last few days. My last real post was on Tuesday. The post on the 24th was the Blog debut of the Ron Roberts interview. I am allowed to run the Frank interviews here 3 months or so after they run there. It is all fair.
Even putting that up took a couple of hours of work, since Windows Live Writer is not secure enough to play with Google any more. I ended up having to paste the thing into the default blog editor, which while it is better than it used to be, still pales before how Writer looks. Something else to look to fix in the new year.
Christmas was nice. We drove to a friend's home on Christmas Eve before driving to the Valley to spend the 25th.
Christmas morning we drove over to Mom's room and exchanged presents. She got me a gift card for Staples, and I spent it all today on some things that I can use for the column, and which I therefore may be able to write off part of the cost of. I will write a post about that down the road. We ended up having Christmas dinner at my sister's place, before visiting my other sister's place, before we returned to the family dwelling, where I washed the dishes we had dirtied and driving back to the city.
On the 26th we didn't do very much. Watched some movies. Ate some chips. Consumed some of the world-class dip that I make every year. I use the phrase "world-class" to tick off Tim Bousquet at the Halifax Examiner. He reads this blog from time to time. Hello, sir.
Today, we drove in to Bayers Lake. Patricia used her Staples gift card to defray the cost of a Samsung tablet. It is the high-end one, their answer to the iPad. I am not sure if I can justify a tablet. I use a computer to research my Frank column, and I suppose it would be easier to do that research via a tablet in my arm chair; but I am just not sure if I would use it enough to justify its cost. I will see how much Patricia uses hers. If she loves it as much as I think she will, I may revisit this decision in a few months.
One thing I definitely want to get is a solid state drive for this here desktop computer. The computer still works fine, but it is getting old, and the version of Ubuntu on it is out of date. The newer versions of Ubuntu are much more demanding on system resources, so much so that I am not confident that the computer will be up to the task. I figure that a SSD would speed things up enough to enable me to get a couple more years out of this machine.
The solid state drives at Staples were huge compared to what I need. I just need a SSD large enough to hold the OS and any apps I may need, while I store the data on one of the other 4 hard drives the computer has. 40GB or so. But the ones at Staples were 120GB and above and cost far more than I was willing to pay. I am not sure if Best Buy has smaller capacity ones or not.
When I got back home this afternoon I was going to go online and see if Amazon or Tiger Direct or Newegg might have a smaller SSD for a good price, until I remembered that I had bought a netbook a couple of years ago that had a SSD in it. This evening I grabbed that computer, carefully freed the drive from the netbook and put it aside, before I put another drive into that computer, making it useful to me should I need it down the road.
The SSD on that machine? It is a 40GB. It already has an OS on it, so I may put it in this here desktop machine and make it the primary drive and see how that goes. And it just occurred to me that I have written four paragraphs on a subject that is boring all 4.7 of you. I apologize. It is my inner geek, trying to get out. You understand.
Earlier this evening we watched The Interview, the very controversial film starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. Sigh. What can I say? I can understand why North Korea would be so angry about this. If anybody ever made a film that posited the death of, say, an actual sitting President of the United States, or Prime Minister of Canada or whatever, then those country's security details would go in to high alert.
As a satire, the film doesn't work. As a raunchy, hard-R rated comedy, it shoots more blanks than a choir of Castrati. James Franco's acting style makes me yearn for the understated William Shatner. Seth Rogen plays the straight man, trying at times to rein in Franco, and not succeeding. The man who plays Kim Jong-un clearly has fun with his role.
The laughs come around the mid-way point, where the boys make it to N. Korea and spend time with Kim Jong-un. Franco and Randall Park as Jong-un play well off each other, and it was so over the top that I laughed a few times.
There is an interview at the end, and things played out as you might expect them to. But I expected so much more from this movie. I expected to be shocked, to have to tape my ribs so that I wouldn't further injure myself from laughter, to run to Twitter and quote some of my fave lines. Instead, 3 hours later, it is already fading from my memory.
One of the reasons why the film was withdrawn from theatres, other than the fact that theatres didn't want the movie because of the potential danger, was that the suits at Sony knew that the movie wasn't very good. They knew that once it got out that the film sucked, that its only claim to fame was its audacious subject matter, that people were clamouring over a movie they had never seen but would be disappointed by it once they had seen it, that the jig would be up. Well, the jig is up. You are not missing much by not seeing this movie.
I guess I will turn in. I want to get a good rest before I try out that solid state drive tomorrow.
See you then.
Bevboy
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