Mike Pirnat

I’m really excited by the amount of progress I’ve made over the last couple of weekends, hacking away at what for now is known as Shindig, a group management blog/calendar app written against TurboGears. Its primary purpose is to be something easier and faster for me to maintain than ClePy’s current Plone site. I’m sure much of what it solves has already been done, but I want something exactly tuned to giving me the most streamlined workflow possible, and, let’s face it, it’s just plain fun to write code.

So ordinarily, I’d be psyched about how much I’d be able to get done this weekend… Except that the stupid Harry Potter book is showing up in the mail tomorrow, and that basically means that it will consume every waking, lighted hour until it’s done. I love the books, I really do, but it’s really putting a crimp on my Python geek-out sessions. But I have to be done reading by Monday, that’s for sure, or else I will have to gouge my eyes out to avoid spoilers. My predictions: Snape dies (he’s obviously been set up for a hard-core double-agent redemption arc, so he’ll probably save the day somehow), Harry lives (and will be the best Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher ever), and Ron and Hermione will finally succumb to the powerful call of teenage hormones and romantic comedy conventions and hook up in a major way.

Oh, yes, and I’m going to see Howard Shore conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in performance of his Lord of the Rings Symphony tomorrow night, so that knocks out a couple more hours of potential coding time. Which I guess I can live with; enjoying some of my favorite music, conducted by its composer, performed by one of the world’s foremost orchestras, under the night sky, with a picnic and a nice glass of wine… Should be a real treat.

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Tonight marks 24 hours since the arrival of the Apple TV. So far, I’m very, very impressed. I have modest needs, primarily to replace an aging SlimP3 that’s prone to chronic buffer under-runs ever since I replaced my dying firewall, and it solves all of my most common use cases with total aplomb. I’ve been delightfully impressed by its streaming performance, which, even with an 802.11b/g setup, is nothing short of freaking amazing. I’m also very satisfied with the image quality out of the component video cables (chosen since our altar to the television gods predates HDMI by a generation or so). My advice so far, to any prospective owners, boils down to two points:

1. Don’t do your initial sync over wireless if you don’t have 802.11n hardware. Wired ethernet is your friend by orders of magnitude.
2. Its case serves as its heat sink, which is to say it gets hot like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t set it on top of your DVD player or other hardware (unless you want to cook your gear), and make sure that it gets plenty of airflow. Honestly, I used oven mitts to bring it upstairs to wire it into my switch to finish the initial sync. Yikes!

Beware of the YouTube integration; Liz and I must have spent an hour tonight watching videos of cats doing stupidly cute things. It is a powerful and addictive time-sink.

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Finally, I’m happy to report that the first of two freebie poster-size prints from Shutterfly arrived today and it looks great. I picked up a 50mm prime lens for my Canon (Digital Rebel XT) recently, and the folks at Amazon threw in a coupon for one free 11×14 and 16×20 print. The 16×20 (which I expect sometime Saturday or Monday) will probably end up framed and in our dining room, next to some other wine-related art, and the 11×14 (which showed up today) will probably find a home in our living room. I’m really quite tickled–I’ve never printed any of my work larger than 5×7 before–but I fear that I could start going poor making prints of my better photos. Oh well; Liz said I should find a hobby….

apple, appletv, clepy, concerts, culture, harry-potter, lord-of-the-rings, music, photos, python, shindig

I’ve been, in a bloggish sense, a bit backed up of late, due to rampant schedule craziness. It’s time I do something about that. So… Here come lots of random and largely unrelated things that I’ve been meaning to post! (Oh, how lucky you are!)

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After I managed to almost ruin a sweater last week, we finally got fed up with the door closer on the screen door in the garage and its wanton spree of greasy terror. You will be pleased to know, should you ever have the opportunity to avail yourself of this door, that we have purchased and installed a replacement closer, and you shall travel safely across that threshold without fear of horrible black marks on your back. Huzzah!

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It’s now officially winter in the Pirnat household–tonight we prepared the first gigantic pot of chili, guaranteed to warm your spirits (as well as various other parts that come into contact with it). The fun part is that it’s a bit different every time; this batch has a deep, round, smoky heat that I find reminiscent of barbeque, but without the sweetness. Of course it needs a day or two to really mature correctly, so we’ll see how it develops.

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Walk the Line… We intended to see the new Harry Potter but ended up at the Cash biopic instead when Potter was sold out. Walk the Line was perfectly serviceable, and a fine film, just nothing that really blew me away. It seemed to lack some of the cinematic expressiveness of films like Shine or Ray (the latter of which really blew me away). I was quite impressed with the vocal performances (who knew that Phoenix and Witherspoon could convince me that they were just lip-syncing to the originals?), but I was bothered by the story structure, which seemed to imply that Johnny Cash’s life was over, done, and of no more interest after June finally relents and agrees to marriage, which seemed like a bit of a cop-out to me. And I would have really liked his cover of “In My Life” over the end credits, but I can’t have everything.

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire… Entirely too many shows were sold out, so I it took a couple days before I got around to it, and at that point I found myself largely disappointed. Sure, it’s pretty, and it’s spooky and dark, and there are some really great bits… But it seems to have fallen back into the too-literal feel of the Chris Columbus Potter films. Also, it’s about time that Harry got a full three hours (or more) or got serialized into multiple parts ala Kill Bill, because the amount of discarded material is really starting to detract from the filmed stories. In this case, the film might as well have been …and the Triwizard Tournament, because just about everything else during the school year is just plain gone.

Miscellaneous other gripes… The confrontation with Voldemort was completely and totally devoid of tension or scariness; and Voldy really comes across as a poorly-costumed wuss in bad makeup; he’s just silly, and not even remotely terrifying. Cedric Diggory’s death? Nowhere as effective as the book, since we didn’t spend nearly enough time getting to know him. I never would have expected a girl named Cho Chang to have such a thick Scottish accent; I’m not sure what I had imagined, but it wasn’t her. There wasn’t nearly enough done to establish the budding sexual tension between Ron and Hermione. I didn’t remember the British retro-punk band at the Yule Ball, but it has been a few years since I read the book. Dumbledore’s performance seemed to be all loud and shouty, merely a phoned-in cariacture. Oh, and excuse me, but there was nowhere near enough Snape.

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I’ve been ripping a huge pile of CD’s that have been building up on my desk for a couple of months, mostly stuff that I either haven’t listened to in forever, or that I never gave enough of a proper listen in the first place. It’s really a treat to rediscover a lot of this stuff! Some of the real winners have been:

• My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult – A Girl Doesn’t Get Killed by a Make-Believe Lover… ‘Cuz it’s Hot
• Juno Reactor – Bible of Dreams
• Warren Zevon – Mr. Bad Example
• Various Alan Parsons albums
• Vangelis – Oceanic

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CSS geeks might enjoy learning how to create bar graphs with CSS. Now I just need stuff to graph!

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And remember, kids, if you’re giving it up, you’re going steady with Hitler!

art, css, food, harry-potter, house, life, links, movies, music, weekends

Sunday, 7/24:

Slept in a bit. Read more of HPatHBP while Liz went out for a run. Delicious lunch at Jean Pierre’s with Josh, his dad, my folks, and Liz. Weather looked a bit off, so we put our hiking plans on hold. Liz napped while I finished Half-Blood Prince. Set off for the belated hike around 5:45 PM. Liz, Dad, and I got respectably far up Animas Mountain then realized that with the sun setting, we should loop back down and head home before we got ourselves into trouble. Managed to get some (hopefully) great photos along the way. Picked up a few items at the grocery store on our way back. Liz cooked up a tasty dinner from the farm market ingredients, which we served with a bottle of the Vivac Barbera. Had a nice bit of discussion, then off to bed to rest up for the next adventure…

books, family, food, friends, harry-potter, liz, vacation, wine

Saturday, 7/23:

Slept in a bit. Finished the Frank Herbert biography. Started Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Drove out to Holly’s place in the afternoon for the reunion BBQ; got a good bit of rain and lightning on the way out that threatened to make the event strictly indoors, but it cleared shortly after our arrival. Continued good times chatting with old classmates. Holly’s dad took us on a tour of his slaughterhouse; surprisingly clean and very interesting. Reassuring to see that in this age of assembly-line mass-market meat, there are people like her dad that are spending quality professional time on the disassembly of cows. Watched games of “Dongball” and “Rope and Buckets” played by folks of various levels of drunkenness. Delicious food. Stayed until about 9:30, then drove back into town with Josh Taylor in search of munchies and booze; these needs were met in many terribly wrong ways by the Orehouse, apparently one of the very few Durango establishments that doesn’t close its kitchen at 9:45.

books, food, friends, harry-potter, nostalgia, vacation, weather

Two bottles of not-so-tasty wine on Friday night eventually led to one that was happy, which ended up paired with grilled brats and Return of the King.

Slept in far past our originally planned time, then discovered that our lack of hot water on Friday morning was not a fluke, as the shower would only briefly flirt with being mildly tepid before producing nothing but ice water. Showered very, very quickly. It turns out that some of the collection of random wires which the electrician did not attach to the new electrical box were the circuit for the water heater. Whoops! So I think he and our general contractor will be having a little conversation at some point soon…

Dealing with the water took up much of the afternoon. Liz had a bit of a nap, then we were off to the pseudo-going-away festivities (I say “pseudo” because it was a fairly laid-back affair of casual conversation and good times that never really even touched on ayb2’s departure). The meal was tasty, and a good time was had by all–save, of course, for Ronald Reagan and Smarty Jones, who appear to have both had a jolly rotten day.

Zipped on down to the theatres at Valley View for Harry Potter, which was much better than the first two films. Lots of subplots and details got dropped in order to service the taut main storyline, but I was okay with most of the omissions. The end credit sequence was also quite fun and worth paying attention to. I’m very glad to see the films improve as the books did (though the second one is still my least favorite, in either medium).

Hung out at Champp’s after the movie for a bit to nosh and have a drink and chatter some more. Saw the end of the hockey game. Whee, hockey. Realized that I’m really going to miss Angie, but that I’m still overflowing with happiness for her. Whee, life.

The photos from Thursday’s Food Forum outing to Carrie Cerino’s are now online; mad props to Joel for his excellent work, and for allowing me to host them for him.

Hmf. It is way, way too late for me to be awake if I am serious about doing some work on Sunday. I wonder if I’m really that serious. Hmf. Perhaps mildly. I’ll have to see how I feel after some much-deserved sleeeeeeeeeeep.

current-events, food, friends, harry-potter, house, kitchen, liz, lord-of-the-rings, movies, weekends, wine