Waffle

When I was a kid, it was a family tradition to go see a Disney animated feature every Christmas vacation. Yesterday, after 25 years, my parents, Aggie and me restored that tradition, complete with ice cream after the showing. The feature this year was The Princess and the Frog, which Aggie and I were a bit skeptical about when we saw the early trailers, but we both warmed to the idea over the past few months. It just so happened that we wanted to go to the movies and had to pick one that my parents could follow without subtitles, so as with last year's Tales of Despereaux, we picked an all-ages feature. And we loved it. It is not up there with the very best of the Disney features, but it had the strengths of the ones that I remember from when I was growing up, and kept the weaker aspects, such as the sentimentality and the trite moralism, to a minimum. It had fast-paced humour, action and engaging characters. Most of all, it had a very strong villain in Facilier, the Shadow Man.
Overall, the characterisation is done in broad strokes, but those strokes are well-placed: Facilier is thoroughly evil, powerful and scary, but it was clear what he wants (to control New Orleans) and why he wants it (he is in debt to the spirits that gave him his powers and is going for broke). He is also armed with a strong understanding of human nature and the weaknesses of those he manipulates. Plus, he is well-designed for maximum scaryness. Likewise, debutante character Charlotte LaBouff is convincingly portrayed as greedy and spoiled (not to mention dumber than a bag of hammers), yet kind-hearted.

The racial politics of New Orleans in the 1920s are mostly danced around, but they are not avoided entirely. It helps to know a bit about New Orleans, but adult viewers won't have much difficulty filling in the blanks there.

Visually, the movie is a treat, with the stylized dream sequences that look like posters and postcards from the era being especially beautiful. But what lifted the movie to a higher level for me was the music. I immediately recognized Randy Newman's writing style in the first notes of the title sequence (indeed I mistakenly thought it was him singing when it was in fact Dr. John) and knew that the combination of Newman's writing and the setting meant I was in for something special. As in Ragtime nearly 30 years ago, Newman nailed it. At every moment, the music fit the rhythm and pace of the movie, the lyrics expressed the action and the humour in a natural, effective way, and the melodies and arrangements sounded simultaneously like the speaking voices of the character and the writing voice of Randy Newman. I never rated his singer/songwriter work all that highly, but Newman's score made the case for what a great songwriter he is. Indeed, at many times it seemed like the music drove the action and the plot instead of merely accompanying and supporting it. I bought the soundtrack record the next morning, something I almost never do.

As I said, The Princess and the Frog isn't up there with movies like Snow White, but it is a very good movie and a feast for the eyes and ears. Go see it and listen to it. If you're going with a small child, you may want to hold its hand during some of the Facilier scenes, and you WILL want to have ice cream afterwards to cap it off.

... the Julie sections in Julie and Julia are much better than critics have given them credit for. Granted, Meryl Streep acts the pants off of everyone else, but the sequences set in modern times were actually very cute and engaging.

I tried. Honestly, I tried. I tried to approach Eoin Colfer's Hitchhiker sequel ...And Another Thing with an open mind and a willingness to enjoy it on its own terms. I even believe I was successful at it. The problem is that there just isn't that much to enjoy on its own terms. The book is somewhat better plotted than Douglas Adams' original works, but it isn't all that funny, it lacks the edge the originals had and it relies too much on namechecking characters from the original works and on punning. One to avoid, on the whole.

Expansion: What Douglas Adams did was much harder than it looked. Adam was primarily a writer of screen and radio plays, and he brought to the original works (radio plays and books alike) a great ear for dialogue and sound, and a good eye for observations. He was not super strong at plot or characterisation, especially for female characters, but he created memorable characters in Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, and good enough plots in the later, underrated Hitchhikers' books.
Eoin Colfer does not, unfortunately, have Adams's ear, and where Adams managed to come up with odd-sounding names for his alien characters that worked as humour and stayed funny on re-reading, Colfer's funny names all fall flat. There is hardly any memorable dialogue in ...And Another Thing.

The worst problem, however, is one that affects many postmortem recreations of popular media. A good example of this is the recent Muppets clips posted on YouTube, though they are not as badly affected by it as Colfer's sequel is. Instead of creating new gags, the new Muppets clips too often piggyback the old ones, so you get the Swedish Chef and other non-verbal characters singing a song, and the humour depends on it being those old, familiar characters being trotted out one more time. What they actually do isn't funny all by itself, but it gets the laugh because it's the Swedish Chef, Beaker, even the Mah Nah Mah Nah creatures are taken out for another outing. The Muppets, at least, still add enough variation on those old riffs to be worth watching; Colfer's habit of mentioning Eccentrica Gallumbits at every opportunity gets tiresome pretty quickly.

Quietly and without fanfare, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan's hiatus has been interrupted twice by updates in the past two weeks. I'm still officially on hiatus but the productivity machine has been grinding and stuttering into motion lately. I expect that there'll be more regular updates in December, knock on wood.

Life in BF, middle Tennessee has been very good indeed and in fact I've had so little to whine about that I haven't blogged for a whole month. I'm sure that will change too, eventually.

Reader Kitchenbutterfly asks:

Why have you burst my bubble? I've been living in paradise, claiming the MAC and all things APPLE to be the next best thing to sliced bread, or at least windows! And I know about buying computers in a hurry.

Well here's the thing: I loved my first iBook. I never had any serious problems with it. But it was getting old, it was a G4 and there were certain things it couldn't do that would come in handy for my long-distance work. Like run Windows in some form or another. So for Christmas, Aggie, who is sweet and loving and obviously completely crazy, gave me a new MacBook. I immediately started messing around with both Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop to figure out which setup would work best for me (there is a third option, VMWare Fusion, which I haven't tried and right now don't have the heart to). It is now turning out to be the answer that neither work well enough for real work, and both are harmful to the safety of my Mac hardware and my data.

The Boot Camp arrangement did not survive the first five weeks of long-distance work over the summer. The final week was spent doing whatever I could to get work done on one of Aggie's computers. Since one of them did not want to work with the Logoport online translation client, and the other did not want to let me install SDLX*), this took a lot of moving back and forth between computers. Then I took my bricked Macbook home to Groningen to see what I could do about it.

Meanwhile, some changes in our company's VPN software allowed that to work with a Parallels virtual machine, which it hadn't done before. Wonderful! I could run Windows in the VM, keep all my data safe on my Mac folders, and access my Mac software while working in Windows.

Well, I could, right until I upgraded to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Parallels 4 is supposed to work with it and the company even has a nifty new upgrade to make it work even better. It was while checking my Parallels VM while preparing to upgrade to that nifty new upgrade the day before leaving for the US that my MacBook became seriously bricked again.

I took the bricked MacBook with me to Tennessee to see what I could do. Three thirty-mile drives to Murfreesboro later, we had a diagnose of OS corruption, which the repair guy said actually happened quite often. They offered to wipe and reinstall for a mere $130, I said no, we'll do it ourselves, thanks, and we took the bricked box home, wiped it, reinstalled it, and restored it to its state of October 13, 2009 using the magic of Time Machine. Time Machine is excellent, but I'm finding myself using it a little too often.

I went to work using the Virtual machine and all was right with the world. I spent the Sunday before I was due to get back to work installing my software on the VM, and it was good. On Monday, I went to work, and all was good. What I didn't realise was that the reason all was good was that Parallels was unable to download its nifty new update over our slow internet connection (see previous post). But at the end of the first working day, it had somehow snagged all 110 or so MB of it and prompted me to install it. Foolishly, I did. The installation ended with an error (something about a required file missing - even though this was an automated download that should have got everything) and my VM no longer worked well. Using Time Machine, I tried to restore the software to its last version, which worked, but restoring the actual VM file (an 8 GB monstrosity) turned out to be harder. This is probably because the VM had been running whenever the Time Machine back-ups were made, so what ended up in the back-up was not a workable file to boot the VM from. After repeated attempts, running Parallels caused the Mac to hang again.
So now I'm restoring it again to the state it was in on October 13, 2009. After that, I will turn off all update functionality in Parallels, reinstall the software I need and hope for the best until the new PC arrives here (working on Aggie's machines has become problematic for other reasons that I don't want to go into as this post is already quite long and nerdy).

And that is the tale of my MacBook woes. Some of my woes are clearly the result of human error (upgrading anything that works is risky and with the Parallels upgrade, there was already a known risk factor), but I'm beginning to think that the main human error here is wanting to run Windows on a Mac in the first place. I get a lot of joy from using that machine (and I do mean actual pleasure in using it as opposed to merely finding that work goes smoothly and the computer isn't an active obstacle) whenever I use Mac software on it, whether commercial and actively developed for the Mac, or open source and ported to the Mac. I get nothing but grief and a great deal of learned helplessness from working with Windows on the same Mac. So the lesson here is that Macs should be used to run Mac software; score one for the Cult of Mac, I guess.

I'm stuck with Parallels for a few more days. When the new PC arrives, it will be gone, and good riddance.

*) Incidentally, if you love well designed software, translation software will open your life to forms of horror beyond the imagining of mortal men. If translation software can be said to be designed at all, it is designed based on the interests of anyone but translators. SDLX Suite, at least until its most recent version released this year, was not designed at all - it was a Frankensteinian patchwork of previously unrelated programs that the SDL company had bought over the years, that had no single interface vision and which only worked together through filters and a gigantic super-interface for project management and bundling. I have heard that the new release is better integrated, but its backward compatibility is nonexistent. This is relevant here because the installer alone is half a gigabyte and requires several steps of pre-installation taking several minutes before it even begins to try to install any of the component programs.

Reader Branko asks: "Reinder, how is life in the new fatherland? Have they internets there?"
Well I don't know about the rest of the USA (it'll be a while before it's really my new fatherland as I won't even be getting my fiancé visa until early next year) but here in rural middle Tennessee, life is pretty good except that the answer to the question about the internets is "yeah, kinda sorta". We're way out in the boonies and that means that what internets we get come with conditions that the civilised world has long since forgotten about*): data limits, bandwidth throttling, overage charges and dropped connections when the weather is bad or the moon is in the house of Jupiter. To be able to do my long-distance work at all, I need to switch between two internet connections, both of which we pay through the nose for. We've got Aggie's satellite dish connection that throttles you to slow modem speeds once you've reached the daily data limit of about 500 MB - an SDLX translation memory file for one of our larger clients will get you halfway there. The satellite service also limits the number of separate connections that can be made and if I'm sharing it with one of Aggie's sons playing World of Warcraft, it gets pretty slow.
The other connection is the cellular internet connection that I pay more for than I do for high-speed bandwidth and cable combined back in Groningen. It too has a data limit, which is even more draconian at 5 GB a month, but at least I have it all to myself and it never actually artificially lowers the speed. Out here, the reception is pretty poor though and rare is the day that it shows more than two bars out of four. The closest thing to a credible competitor that Verizon has here, AT&T, is not reachable at all and the only time I can read messages on my AT&T cell phone is when we drive out to Manchester or Tullahoma.

This is the biggest obstacle I am facing to working long-distance: the connectivity simply isn't good enough to push around the files I am working with. There is some prospect for improvement as there are still a lot of houses being built in the neighborhood and the demand for broadband will eventualy be there. Still, it's a pity that all the Federal stimulus money seems to have gone to repaving the roads that were already there instead of building new infrastructure such as broadband cables.

Anyway, I hope that this explains why posting here may be even slower than usual: on working days, I am being throttled and on weekends and vacations, there's things to do in meatspace that after a week of dealing with this sort of thing, I'd much rather be doing.

*) Belgians take note: you are not living in the civilised world, and unlike the people out here in the boonies who simply don't have the infrastructure, you have yourself to blame for tolerating the limitations your ISP's impose. A few well-aimed bricks through the right windows will help you shed your data shackles.

With 36 hours to go before my next flight to Tennessee, the Macbook dies. That means that
a) I get to buy a new hard drive for my Macbook just to have access to my files (music including my vinyl album rips, scans - the paper originals for many of which I have recently thrown out) minus the ones added since I last ran Time Machine;

b) I get to take all my installation materials to Amsterdam and install them at the address where I am sleeping over so I can catch my plane in the morning. If that doesn't work, I get to take a bricked laptop to Tennessee and try again while I'm there;

c) because Apple can't be relied upon to make hardware that survives even a short period of intensive use, instead of doing it all through Parallels Fusion on the Macbook, we get to buy a Dell box in a hurry for the long-distance work I will be doing. We do not get time to think about what precisely we want - we get to order quickly and hope it's up and running before my . Just like with the current desktop at home in Groningen, and the studio machine before that, and the studio machine before that. Other people sometimes get to ponder their aging systems and say "Gee honey, maybe we should save up a bit of cash so we can replace this old box." I have not been in a position to do that for five or so years. I get to replace dead machines in a mad rush to meet the next deadline;

d) I get to stay up late to complete the preparations for my trip that I was working on at the time the laptop gave up. Obviously I don't get to do the ones that involve installing software on the laptop, but I did lose 90 minutes just trying to diagnose the problem (see: opaque operating systems and why they're a bad idea even if they're pretty);

e) I get to lose all the money I saved through 5 weeks of stepping up the frugality. Isn't it wonderful to be me?

Well at least I'll be seeing Aggie again in two days. So it's not all misery.

29:37... 3/4 minute slower than last year. Then again, almost everyone in my team was considerably slower than last year, by a similar margin. Perhaps it was the damp, chilly weather, perhaps it was that everyone was dressed for even damper, chillier weather. Whatever the cause, it's a bit of a dampener on a great running season for me.

This year, I did 5 competitions in total, including one in May that I forgot to write up. Or if I did, it got lost in the blog's categorisation. That was a 7K in Groningen, the Nacht van Groningen and my time there was nothing to write home about: 32:40.7 net. I had to bail out of a competition in Manchester, Tennessee because Aggie's cat, Pyewacket, had to be taken to an emergency vet in Murfreesboro, and I couldn't get to the starting line on my own steam. I hope I have better luck this fall.

In all I trained less this year but compensated in competitive miles. That's more expensive to do but I do enjoy it a lot. Before this year's 4 Mijl, I was getting a little fed up with running, which may be another part of the reason I didn't do all that well. But I still got a big buzz out of taking part and in a month or so, I'll get the itch to do it again. For now though, it's time for a break.

This week's groceries bill: €5.66. I only bought half a loaf of bread, a litre of milk, some bananas and a kilogram of tangerines.
It's gonna be an unusual sort of week though. I'm leaving for the United States (staying in Amsterdam overnight) on Friday, and the odds are I'll be doing stuff in preparation leaving little time to cook. At the same time, I do want to empty out the pantry some more, and that played a big part in my decision to buy very little. By Thursday, I'll probably be eating lentils for breakfast and canned food for dinner (keeps stuff to clean that last day to a minimum) and then on Friday and Saturday I'll eat mostly on the go, spending more on food and drink on those two days than I have in a month.

After that, ultra-frugal eating will go out of the window as I'm not going to inflict it on Aggie and her boys... but for me doing this the past few weeks has not felt like deprivation at all. I haven't missed more expensive food and have in fact enjoyed getting creative with what I had in the pantry and with the smaller amounts of food I bought at the € 15 limit. And with those tax bills coming in, and the cost of travel, plus the urgent need to save up for a wedding, emigration and a chance to get off the salaryman treadmill at an early age, it's very much a good thing that I can live for a month and a half of that little money (even though I did fall off the wagon a bit last week - but even then I merely went from being ultra-frugal to being frugal).

The one thing I didn't get rid of was the occasional craving for salty snacks. Apart from that, I adjusted well to snacking a lot less and not eating meat unless someone else paid for it. I think I ate a whole lot healthier as a result of simply being more mindful of what I bought and brought into the house. Like I mentioned last week, I lost quite a bit of weight as well, in combination with my increased running schedule. In fact, I lost so much that I began to worry about it and am now making myself eat a little more.

I'd do it again. Maybe I should have done it from the moment I came back from the US and saved a little more money that way.

A friend of mine recommended a Mac program called Sound Sponge for automatically marking and cleaning out clicks and other problems from recordings taken from vinyl records.. but the only program called Sound Sponge (or technically, Sponge, but it's located at soundsponge.org) is a small tool for converting audio file formats and is not what I'm looking for. I think my friend mixed them up and I'll ask him, but just in case he doesn't remember, does anyone else know what he might have been thinking of?