Category Archives: Uncategorized

Classic movies

I’ve been watching a number of classic movies lately.

Due to a … ahem … slight clerical oversight, a few years ago, I get an absurd number of cable channels for the ultra-sub-basic price. Attempts to correct this oversight have been met with “What? Are you crazy?!” kinds of responses, do I eventually gave up.

Anyways, two of the channels I get, and just about the only ones I watch, are AMC, where they show classic movies, and USA (or is it TNT? I never can remember), where they show classic-but-newer movies.

So over the last few weeks I’ve watched “Rebel Without a Cause”, and “Cool Hand Luke”, both of them for the first time.

Rebel was fascinating – a rebel movie set in a time when rebellion meant rather different things than it does now. I feel like I need to see it again, as I didn’t really grasp what it was about. I think that in a time when we’re used to much higher body count, and the rebel/hero is almost a cliché, it’s hard to recognize the profound bits, even when you’re aware that you’re missing them.

Cool Hand Luke was a lot of fun. Luke was entertaining in a strange sort of way. Another rebel/hero, bored with life, being destructive because there just wasn’t anything interesting going on.

And, of course, I finally heard the original of that phrase that is part of our language and culture – “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. There are a lot of these phrases that folks say that are from movies that I’ve never seen – one of the side effects of growing up an expatriate. That, and all of Saturday Night Live, I suppose.

The big difference with these two movies was just that they were interesting and enjoyable and just good stories, whereas so many of the “you’ve got to see this” movies that I’ve put in my Blockbuster movie queue have ended up being a waste of time and postage. Well, you win some, you lose some.

Site admin responsibilities

My ethical dilemma for today. I know, because I’m the site admin, that a particular user is posting things under multiple names, agreeing with himself to lend credibility to a position that nobody else holds.

So, the question is, when users have an expectation of anonymity, and one user is intentionally exploiting that anonymity to be cruel, can I “out” this user, because it’s my site?

I dunno, but he’s seriously making me angry, and I suppose I should just take the moral high ground and ignore him, but I’m finding that very hard to do.

More about the discussion forum

One of the features of my discussion forum that folks seemed to like was the fact that all the post titles could be seen in a hierarchical tree when you first load the site. The trouble with this is that the recursion necessary to generate this tree is very CPU-intensive. You can either select all the articles, and then recurse through the data structure in memory, or you can recursively select articles from the database until you have the tree that you want. Either one of them causes lots of problems, and this is probably why most discussion board stuff opts not to do the hierarchical tree view as the main view.

So, while my load has been overing around 1.2 for the last 9 months, it’s at 0.13 now, and has been less than 0.1 for most of the last couple days.

But, of course, folks aren’t happy about it. posting delightful messages like:

For An Open Source Guru, Rich Bowen Has Really Really Let Me Down. This Site Is Bloody Silly. Even Though White Men Cant Jump, This Is A Real Low For Even A Mzungu.. Rich Should Pull-up His Socks

What I’ve noticed fairly consistently, however, is that the folks that hate it the most are those who always post anonymously and don’t actually have anything to say. The ones that have consistently posted thoughtful articles over the years simply registered a new account on the board and resumed posting their thoughtful articles as though nothing had changed.

I really wish I could understand what it is that they dislike so passionately, but, with very few exceptions, none of them will tell me what exactly they dislike – merely that it is terrible and they want me to go back to the good old days.

Meanwhile, from an administration perspective, the new software is really making me happy, and I might just end up keeping it indefinitely.

Hinglish and Sheng

Several blogs I read have linked to this article about Hinglish. When I lived in Nairobi, all those years ago, folks spoke Sheng, which was a mix of Swahili, English, and pretty much anything else that came along. It mutated so fast that you either knew it or you didn’t – there was no way to learn it. These days, it’s called something different, and has a completely different vocabulary. It’s interesting to watch the changing vocabulary used on my Kenya site, even though I no longer understand most of what is said there.