Posts on grahams' - Posts from a man trying to live less online

The Movies I Saw in 2025

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 05:00:00 +0000

There was great film in 2025, but I’m not certain if we’ll remember it as a great year for cinema. All of the societal and business sturm und drang seems to be coming to a head, and nobody seems to know what comes next. Certainly the studios don’t, as they keep trying the same thing over and over again and failing to meet with much success. We’ve seen this in the film industry before, and while I hold out hope of a 70’s style “New Hollywood” renaissance, I’m also not holding my breath.

You’d think with the theatrical and box office success of films like SINNERS and WEAPONS, the studios would take the hint and focus on original ideas. But instead they seem to be doubling down on sequels, remakes, and streaming blandness. THE LIFE OF CHUCK was wonderful and deserved much more attention. And COME SEE ME IN THE GOOD LIGHT is finally available for everyone to see.

I really hope we continue having original movies succeed over the crap, and that the studios finally realize they are barking up the wrong tree.

Oh, and since I posted last year I completely overhauled my movie tracking charts. They no longer appear here inline, but they are far more powerful and the list itself easier to read. No more reviews buried in tooltips (except on mobile, but there’s a little icon you can tap to see them).

You can find the charts for 2025 here. Once you are there you can use the filter controls at the top to slice and dice the data as you see fit.

(If you are interested in the technical guts of these graphs, you can find the source code here)

Moving from Wordpress to Hugo

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 12:20:00 -0400

Back in the last millennium, my website was pretty basic, as most were. To be honest, I don’t even really remember what was there beyond some links to projects and other sites. In June 2000, I joined LiveJournal and began a decade or so of being clinically online and posting. In the back half of the ’00s, I started to get more of a life and posted less frequently. By 2010, after 10 years, I decided LJ was quickly becoming an abandoned alleyway on the internet and moved to self-hosted Wordpress.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, and as I met needs for additional sites (the film club and radio show as examples), I continued to turn to Wordpress as the tool of choice. But in the past few years, it seems like a massive amount of software to support a handful of sites that get nearly no (legitimate) traffic and are updated, at most, once a week.

Replacing Wordpress with a statically generated site had been on my radar for awhile now. The complexity of Wordpress, combined with keeping it updated, maintaining a database, redis, etc, all was massive overkill, with little upside. And since I was laid off a few weeks ago and have some newfound time on my hands (hire me!), it seemed like the time had finally arrived.

I decided on using Hugo to statically generate these sites. I can’t say that I engaged in a thorough amount of due diligence before choosing it, but it seemed popular and I’m not looking for something niche.

I poked around for migration tools and settled on wp2hugo. For several of my blogs, it just worked. But, for example, the radio show blog was using Mixcloud embeds, so I had to hack on wp2hugo to make sure it was extracting the Mixcloud links and sticking a hugo shortcode for them into the posts.

Another blog I had used PowerPress podcast plugin for Wordpress… This was trickier to figure out, since the set of people that use Wordpress, use PowerPress, and want to migrate to Hugo can’t be that wide. Unsurprisingly, wp2hugo didn’t support it at all, and I really dreaded hacking support into wp2hugo for something I would only need once. Did I mention I don’t really know Go at all?

I decided to be like all the cool kids and use Cursor to see if their coding agent could help me get closer to the finish line. I opened the wp2hugo repo in Cursor, and my first idea was to ask it “where is wordpress postmeta handled”. It “went away” for awhile and came back with a nice report for me.

WordPress Postmeta Handling in wp2hugo

WordPress postmeta is primarily handled in the src/wp2hugo/internal/wpparser/wp_parser_setup.go file. Here’s how it works:

1. Main Postmeta Processing Functions

The codebase currently handles postmeta through two specific functions:

getFootnotes() function (lines 640-680):
func getFootnotes(item *rss.Item) []Footnote {
	if len(item.Extensions["wp"]["postmeta"]) == 0 {
		return nil
	}
[…]

I then fed it the Wordpress XML for a single post, and it reported “What’s Missing for Your Use Case: Your podcast posts contain important metadata that would be valuable to preserve”. Correct, robot!

Looking at your WordPress export XML, I can see that your blog posts contain several postmeta entries that are currently not handled by wp2hugo. Let me analyze what’s in your export and what’s currently supported:

Your WordPress Postmeta Entries

Your export contains these postmeta keys:

_g_feedback_shortcode_419e419ecf775a20ef20956a5c1fbb37cc16376a - Contact form shortcode

_g_feedback_shortcode_atts_419e419ecf775a20ef20956a5c1fbb37cc16376a - Contact form attributes (PHP serialized array)

[…]

Recommendation

Since your posts are podcast episodes with important audio metadata, you might want to:

Fork wp2hugo and add podcast metadata support

Create a custom Hugo shortcode to handle podcast episodes

Use Hugo’s data files to store podcast metadata separately

Consider using a Hugo podcast theme that’s designed for this content type

The current wp2hugo implementation would miss all your podcast-specific metadata, which would be a significant loss for a podcast site.

[…]

I then asked “can you implement this?”. The agent went off for awhile, making changes, and to my astonishment when I came back from fixing a drink a few minutes later, it was done, and it actually worked! It kind of “made up” the output format, adding a bunch of frontmatter to the hugo posts, but being that

There doesn’t seem to be a “standard” for podcasts in hugo
I didn’t actually specify output at all in my 4 word request to the agent

I was definitely impressed. Every piece of metadata I needed was parsed and put into the Hugo markdown files, I just needed to do a bit of refining on the output formatting. I did some of that the old fashioned way, and others I engaged the agent for, but this was all home stretch stuff as I could look at the git diffs and quickly figure out what I needed to do to massage the output.

I know that there remains all kinds of controversy around LLMs, but being able to solve this one-time need in less than an hour without knowing wp2hugo nor Go much at all was pretty nifty. There is not a doubt in my mind I could have solved this problem, but having a robot intern I could turn to do it for me was also real nice. And there is no reality it would have taken an hour if I was reading the source code and the golang manual myself.

I do want to learn Go, as it seems like a nice, useful language that is turning up in more places, but I also wanted to solve this immediate problem without consuming several days in the endeavor.

Once all that was handled, I had to figure out how I wanted to deploy the sites, and since I already have my own Gitea server, I decided to host the repos for the blog sources there and then use Gitea Actions to publish them. Gitea Actions are mostly compatible with Github actions, so I was able to leverage my existing knowledge there…

I put this migration off for the better part of a year, and all it took was unemployment to knock it out in a few days…

The Movies I Saw in 2024

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 05:00:47 +0000

2024 sucked in so many different ways. On the other hand, it was a really good year for movies, especially non-franchise films! THE SUBSTANCE blew my doors off, STRANGE DARLING was excellent, and the experimental ENO doc was wild.

This was the first year since pre-Quarantine that I broke 140 features, and I’m fairly certain that is because there was simply more interesting things to see.

In 2023, I saw 77 films in a theatre and this year I saw 71. While that’s down a bit, I also wasn’t able to attend IFFBoston’s Fall Focus so it makes sense.

I continue to watch more new (to me) films year-over-year. I think I’m finding less reason to fall back on comfort movies. I’m not expecting this to hold in 2025.

You can find the charts for 2024 here. Once you are there you can use the filter controls at the top to slice and dice the data as you see fit.

(If you are interested in the technical guts of these graphs, you can find the source code here)

The Movies I Saw in 2023

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 05:01:00 +0000

It was a good year for movies…. I’m not sure if the excitement of Barbenheimer will be reproduced again, or have any longer-lasting effects on the theater-going public, but I saw a bunch of really good movies (and there are some very well-regarded ones I haven’t had the chance to see yet!)

The Movies I Saw in 2022

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 15:03:59 +0000

2022 was the year we pretended to return to normal. I saw a relatively “normal” number of movies to my pre-pandemic state, and quite a bit more of them in the theatre compared to 2021. But we remained on the anxious edge of outbreak. I think I expected a clearer line as to when reengaging with civilization would safe, but in retrospect that was naive.

The Movies I Saw in 2021

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 05:00:00 +0000

I think we all hoped 2021 would improve upon 2020, and to a certain degree it did, but not to the level I think we all hoped.

I did see more movies in 2021 versus 2020, my feature count ticked way up to 121 from 97. This is still behind my normal pace from the before times, but I was able to muster more attention this year. 121 seems like a pretty solid number despite the rare theatre experience this year. Hopefully IFFBoston’s spring festival and the film club can return to something more normal in 2022.

The Movies I Saw in 2020

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:19:49 +0000

I mean, what is there to say about 2020. It was a real shit year.

When the quarantimes began, I thought I would end up watching a ton of movies, but the opposite occurred. I’m not sure if it was general anxiety/malaise, the lack of the film club/iff forcing functions, or something else, but it just wasn’t happening. The pace seems to be picking up in 2021, but we’ll see how it goes. If I’m able to go to a theatre safely/comfortably in the near future that will certainly change things.

RCN and iMessage Business Chat

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:11:58 +0000

There was no way this was going to work.

A few years back I cancelled my RCN Cable TV service in favor of Youtube TV. I realized that since all I really was keeping cable around for at this point was to watch Baseball, I could save a ton of money by switching to Youtube TV while also upgrading my RCN Internet service to “Gigabit” (not actually Gigabit. Also has complete garbage 25Mbps upstream which is indefensible). At the time I was paying about \$165/mo to RCN for 330Mbps Internet and Cable TV. Youtube TV was \$40/mo, and also allowed me to ‘pause’ service for months at a time (aka the Baseball off-season) with a click. RCN “Gigabit” service was around \$100/mo. So not only would my in-season monthly rate be lower (~\$140/mo), but i’d save even more in the off-season.

But, every few months, Youtube TV would raise their prices, with the most recent hike bringing the cost up to \$65/mo. The final straw, however, was that they dropped NESN in this off-season. Now my hand was forced. After the season ended I cancelled Youtube TV with the plan of reaching back out to RCN.

Since baseball was quiet and I was not in a rush, every once in awhile I’d call the RCN support number to get a quote, but the wait times were over 30m each time I tried, so I’d hang up. Yesterday, however, I wondered to myself if they had some kind of chat support. They did, I clicked it, and it turns out their chat support was Apple Messages Business Chat. This was both surprising, as I’ve never seen this work with anyone outside of Apple, and exciting because the usual chat support experience was terrible. But this would more or less work like any other text messaging.

That said, there was no way this was going to work.

But I tried anyway. I got a text telling me the wait was going to be about 15m, and confirming I wanted to wait. I clicked yes and went about my way. About 15m later I was told I was 5th in the queue and it would be a bit longer; I confirmed I wanted to wait and went back to dawdling.

After a total of about 20m I received my first actual message from the support rep. They first confirmed some account information, then asked me what I needed. I had already prepared my first message, where I tried to play Fast Food Chicken and try to answer every possible question in one blast:

I am interested in knowing how much it will cost per month to add Signature TV to my service, without modifying my current service. I do not want any cable boxes and instead just need a cablecard.

There was no way this was going to work.

But, to my surprise, the rep was mostly able to work off of that. They asked if I needed more than one CableCard, I replied that I needed a single, multi-stream CableCard, and they asked me to wait while they went away to figure everything out.

After a few minutes they came back with some numbers. My total bill would be roughly \$130/mo for the first 6 months, and then go up to roughly \$160/mo afterwards. This was acceptable, so I told them I’d like to sign up, but wanted to make sure they could simply mail me the CableCard as opposed to rolling a truck or requiring a pickup visit to the office, as I am trying to minimize contact with the outside world in the quarantimes.

They went away to check, and came back a minute or two later confirming that they could mail it on Monday. So I told them I wanted to move forward, we spent a few more minutes confirming shipping details and such. They did their usual pitch for their Service Agreement, but I was able to easily decline it (and the pitch is way less annoying over chat than it is over the telephone). But after that, I was done.

It worked.

The Movies I Saw in 2019

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 15:48:53 +0000

As has been the standard over the past few years, the number of features I saw in 2019 was a tick down, at 128 vs 132 in 2018. I had a particularly busy year in 2019, so this isn’t really a surprise for me.. I was on the road for nearly two of the twelve months this year, so I simply had less time for film.

The Movies I Saw in 2018

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 15:49:54 +0000

I totaled 151 movies this year, but ‘only’ 132 features which was a tick down from the past few years. To be honest, Corinna and I binged all of the Star Wars films (except for Rogue One) within a few days at the end of the year, so that definitely goosed the stats up.

The Movies I Saw in 2017

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 16:17:44 +0000

Last year I wondered if ~140 features a year was the ’new normal’, and it appears that is the case, as in 2017 I saw 147 features. That said, it felt like a really good year for cinema.

2016 Films in Review

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 03:48:43 +0000

Top Films of 2016 (in Alphabetical Order):

**Honorable Mention: **

Bottom 5 Films of 2016:

Most Disappointing:

Best Reissue:

Multiple Maniacs

Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking:

The Magnificient Seven

Best Movie I Finally Saw: Room **Best Director: ** The Daniels (Swiss Army Man)

**Best Ensemble: ** Don’t Think Twice

Best Original Screenplay: The Daniels for Swiss Army Man

Best Adapted Screenplay: Amy Jump for High-Rise

Best Cinematography: Chung-hoon Chung for The Handmaiden

Best Soundtrack: Swiss Army Man

Most Memorable Lines:

Swiss Army Man
Hank: If you don’t know Jurassic Park, you don’t know shit.
High-Rise
Laing: You know, Toby, when I was your age, I was always covered in something. Mud, jam, failure… My father never associated himself with anything dirty. Or real.Toby: My father’s up there.Laing: You mean, in heaven?Toby: Heaven isn’t real, stupid.
The Witch
Jonas, Mercy: [singing] Black Phillip, Black Phillip, a crown grows out his head. Black Phillip, Black Phillip, to nanny queen is wed. Jump to the fence post. Running in the stall. Black Phillip, Black Phillip, king of all.

The Movies I Saw in 2016

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 03:53:30 +0000

I saw even fewer feature films in 2016, but it was a rather busy year for me. My final total was 141, which was 7 fewer than 2015. The big thing I alluded to last year, that may depress this total, was buying a new house. That happened, so it’s possible that may explain the reduced number. Or, perhaps, I’ve settled into a new normal.

The Death of Print (or: My Adventures with the Boston Globe)

Sun, 20 Nov 2016 17:24:19 +0000

Update 20161122: Since writing the text below, I’ve been contacted by several staffers at the Globe via many channels. They not only assure me that my discrete issues have been addressed, but that they’ve had meetings to pick apart what went wrong based on the notes I wrote up below. Hopefully my experience will (ultimately) make things better in the future.

–

Setting the stage: I’ve been a digital subscriber to The Boston Globe for years now. Corinna decided she would like to try getting the Sunday edition in print. Here are the things I needed to do to accomplish this:

Log into my account on their website, to find there was no easy way to simply add ANY print subscription to my account. You’d think they’d want to make this braindead simple.
Call their phone line (1-888-MY-GLOBE) to find out they were only open until noon on the weekend.
Remember on Tuesday that I wanted to do this, and call the phone line again, waiting on hold for a few minutes to talk to a representative. I state that I want to add Sunday delivery to my existing digital account. I’m told the only way to accomplish this is to close out my existing subscription and add a new one. The existing subscription will be terminated as of Thursday, but my new subscription won’t be in effect until Sunday. So I’ll have no digital access for those few days. That seems ridiculous, but I accept it.
Wake up this morning, excited to fetch my paper, to find nothing. Try to attach my new account number to my bostonglobe.com login, but meet no success.
Call their support line, wait on hold for 5 minutes until a robot tells me i’m 22 in the queue. I hang up and run to their online chat.
After about 5 minutes a chat rep. appears, I explain my plight, and she straightens everything out. She tells me my subscription has no digital access, and would I like to add it? I told her that I was supposed to have digital access, that the rep on Tuesday told me I would have it as of Sunday, but apparently that rep messed something up. She schedules a redelivery before 2pm and gives me gratis digital access until my ‘repaired’ subscription kicks in on Tuesday and we end our chat. I have no idea why it takes them several days to activate a digital subscription.
Just before noon, I learn they have a Customer Service iPhone app. The sign-in screen asks for my name, email, phone # or acccount #, and house #. After lots of trial and error, i find that the address and phone number were out of date on my account. I can’t remember if the phone rep asked for updated information or not, but she clearly should have. As someone who’s never had print delivery, to assume that the address is correct on my account seems unwise.
I reenter chat (with 10 minutes to spare before they shut down at noon) and explain that the address is wrong on my account, and that is probably why I didn’t get a paper this morning. I give the rep my account number, which is attached to an address in Wellesley. I can’t tell you if the original phone rep transposed numbers or I did, but the whole time I was using the incorrect account number. So some person in Wellesley probably just had digital access added to their account. I give the rep my current info, and she updates my account, crediting me for today’s paper and suggesting that I will receive a paper at my ’new’ address starting next Sunday.
I log into the Globe site, attaching the new account number to my Globe login, and notice that while my billing address has been updated, my delivery address is still incorrect. There is no clear way for me to change this myself. My plan is to check back in a few days and see if it is fixed, otherwise I see another chat in my future.

It is maddening to me that this process was so painful.

Why can I not add a print subscription myself, online, without involving a customer service rep?
Why can I not update the address on my account myself?
Why wasn’t I able to add print delivery without losing my digital access for several days?
Why didn’t the phone rep verify my delivery address?
Why didn’t the chat rep, once I complained of a missing delivery, verify my delivery address?
Why is the process to attach my subscription to my bostonglobe.com login a manual process? Why can’t the customer service reps do it for me?

The Movies I Saw in 2015

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 03:31:33 +0000

I saw fewer films in 2015, but it was a rather busy year for me. My final total was 148, which was 11 fewer than 2014. There are some things conspiring that could depress the total in 2016, but we’ll have to wait and see if that ends up happening.

The Movies I Saw in 2014

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 16:08:26 +0000

I saw one more film in 2014 than 2013, but strangely, I apparently didn’t see any short film or, more likely, I didn’t record seeing them. With so much short-form video content available online it is difficult to figure out where to ‘draw the line’ in my recordkeeping.

2013 Films in Review

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 16:32:34 +0000

Top 15 Films of 2013 (in Alphabetical Order)
12 Years a Slave
American Hustle
Dallas Buyers’ Club
Gravity
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Nebraska
Philomena
Sightseers
Sound City
Spring Breakers
The Act of Killing
The Hunt
The Wolf of Wall Street
Upstream Color
Honorable Mention:
Dirty Wars
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
Pacific Rim
Tim’s Vermeer
Bottom 4 films of 2013:
Leviathan (2013)
August: Osage County
Prisoners
Sharknado
Best Remake/Reworking: Evil Dead (2013)
This wasn’t necessary, but it was fun and sufficiently different from the original
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: Oldboy (2013)
I didn’t actually see this.
Best Director: Martin Scorcese for The Wolf of Wall Street
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock in Gravity
Best Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave
Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong’o in 12 Years a Slave
Best Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street
Best Ensemble: American Hustle
Best Original Screenplay: Spike Jonze for Her
Best Adapted Screenplay: John Ridley and Solomon Northup for 12 Years a Slave
Best Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael for Nebraska
Best Soundtrack: William Butler and Owen Pallett for Her
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: Yet more remakes.
Biggest Disappointment: Elysium
Best Movie I Finally Saw: Searching for Sugar Man
Most Memorable Lines:
This Is The End
Jonah Hill: Dear God, it’s me, Jonah Hill… from Moneyball.
Spring Breakers
Everyone in the movie: SPRAAANNNNGGG BREAAAAAAKKKKK
The Wolf of Wall Street
Mark Hanna: (Insert Weird-ass Beat Boxing Here)
The Wolf of Wall Street
Jordan Belfort: On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my “back pain”, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.
Best Documentary (of all time?): The Act of Killing
Films I feel guilty for missing:
Blue is the Warmest Color
Fruitvale Station
Films I don’t feel guilty for missing:
Oldboy
G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Gangster Squad
A Good Day to Die Hard
Blue Jasmine
Before Midnight

The Movies I Saw in 2013

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 04:15:17 +0000

As regular readers know, I keep a list of all of the movies I see each year. Breaking a trend, I saw fewer features (146) than I had in the previous year (160). I don’t really have any insight into this other than a strong suspicion that ~160 isn’t terribly sustainable for me.

The Movies I Saw in 2012

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:22:50 +0000

As regular readers know, I keep a list of all of the movies I see each year. For the second year in a row I saw more feature films (160) than I had in the previous year (155), setting a new benchmark.

The Princess Bride at 25

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 03:07:32 +0000

The Princess Bride turns 25 today. Reading about this reminded me of a funny story from when I was a kid.

My father rented The Princess Bride and brought it home, announcing that he thought it would be fun to watch as a family. I protested, saying I didn’t want to watch a girls movie, and stayed in my bedroom. After about 25 minutes of hearing my family thoroughly enjoying the film, I sheepishly joined them in the living room.

I don’t remember if I watched the beginning of the movie immediately after the first viewing ended, or if it waited until later, but I definitely remember when I finally did see the beginning and being completely embarrassed yet amused at how my reaction to the title of the film paralleled the character of Fred Savage in the movie.

If it wasn’t such a perfect story I’d probably still find it embarrassing.

"Surviving IFFBoston" updated

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:27:07 +0000

I updated the post I wrote a few years ago entitled “Surviving IFFBoston” with some new tips and tweaks for 2012. You can check it out here.

2011 Films in Review

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:39:54 +0000

Here is my review of the films I which saw in 2011. In a change from the past few years, this does NOT include movies released in 2011 which I saw in 2012. Which is why The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn’t feature prominently on this list. I know that I am missing some great movies by adopting this strategy. Furthermore, movies that were on last year’s “Best Of” list should also be included on this year’s list (using the new rules) but I decided to omit them than recognize them twice.

While I wouldn’t say that 2011 was a bad year for movies, it wasn’t particularly special. Maybe I just chose poorly… Where in years past I would have to whittle down my list of ‘best’ films, this year it felt like work to simply come up with 10. It’s not that there is an abundance of lowlights, but there weren’t many highlights.

Top 10 Films of 2011 (in Alphabetical Order):
Another Earth
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey
El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Incendies
Last Days Here
Moneyball
On The Ice
Shame
Take Shelter
The Guard
Bottom 5 films of 2011 (in Alphabetical Order):
Bridesmaids
Hangover: Part II
Sucker Punch
Thor
Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon
Best Director: Constance Marks and Philip Shane for Being Elmo
Best Actress: Lubna Azabal in Incendies
Best Actor: Michael Fassbender in Shame
Best Supporting Actress: Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin in Incendies
Best Supporting Actor: Shea Whigham in Take Shelter
Best Inanimate Object: Robert in Rubber
Best Original Screenplay: Brit Marling and Mike Cahill for Another Earth
Best Adapted Screenplay: Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin for Moneyball
Best Cinematography: El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: Once again, 3D and Fake IMAX.
Most Memorable Lines:
Moneyball
Peter Brand: I wanted you to see these player evaluations that you asked me to do.
Billy Beane : I asked you to do three.
Peter Brand : Yeah.
Billy Beane : To evaluate three players.
Peter Brand : Yeah.
Billy Beane : How many you’d do?
Peter Brand : Forty-seven.
Billy Beane : Okay.
Peter Brand : Actually, fifty-one. I don’t know why I lied just then.
The Guard
Sergeant Gerry Boyle: Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, these men are armed and dangerous, and you being an FBI agent you’re more used to shooting at unarmed women and children…
FBI agent Wendell Everett : Oh, fuck you, Sergeant!
Rubber
Man in wheelchair: Excuse me, I hate to be a bother, but… the way I look at it, this scene makes no sense at all. Not that it was great to begin with, but at least I understood it. Now, this is just uh, totally confusing.
Best Documentary: Last Days Here
Guilty Pleasures:
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
Red State
Hobo with a Shotgun
Rubber
Films I feel guilty for missing:
50/50
My Week with Marilyn
Drive
Beginners
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Films I don’t feel guilty for missing:
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
The Help

The Great CD Re-Rip

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 22:17:23 +0000

Back around 2002, I sat down and began ripping all of my CDs to MP3. I worked on it during my downtime, on nights and weekends when nothing better was going on. It took me about a month to plow through several hundred discs, but I eventually finished. When I temporarily moved from Boston to NJ during my unemployment back in 2003, my CDs were boxed up for the move. They stayed that way. In fact, the boxes were in my parents basement until Corinna and I moved to our house in Watertown back in 2007. Since then they have remained in boxes in our basement.

For many years I continued to buy physical discs, immediately ripping them and placing them on a shelf or in a box. In the past year or two, I have effectively stopped buying CDs, instead opting to use download services such as iTunes, Bleep, Beatport and Amazon’s MP3 store (as well as directly from artists).

Back in 2002, MP3 files of 192Kbps seemed like a pretty reasonable compromise between audio quality and file size. But fast forwarding ten years, hearing the muted high and low end of those 192Kbps files, especially when I have several terabytes of storage in my house, was frustrating. I had thought about re-ripping all of my discs to a higher bit rate, but the task always seemed daunting. My collection of physical discs had ballooned to ~500 discs and it simply felt like it would take forever.

Back in September I was at the All Tomorrow’s Parties “I’ll Be Your Mirror” festival at Asbury Park with some friends. During some between-band chit-chat, I mentioned my regret of choosing 192Kbps and that I was considering finding a service that would re-rip all of them for me. DQ mentioned TaskRabbit, a service which pairs up people willing to do odd jobs (a.k.a. “Rabbits”) with people looking for help. This idea stuck in my head, and a few weekends ago when Corinna and I were doing some basement purging I decided that I would just do it. Some of my CDs were more than 20 years old, and waiting would only increase the chances of bit rot.

I posted my task on TaskRabbit, being as specific as possible. I decided to skip worrying about what the ‘right’ bitrate was and chose Apple Lossless format. A lossless codec cuts the file size in about half without losing any fidelity at all. I figured if I had 500 CDs each around 600MB, than the total size of the re-ripped CDs would be about 150GB, which really isn’t all that much these days. My existing music archive (with my old 192K rips in addition to any music I’ve bought digitally) totaled around 205GB at the time I started this project.

The hardest part of posting this task was trying to pick an upper cost. TaskRabbit asks you what your upper cost is, and then Rabbits bid on the task, TaskRabbit assigning you the one who came in lowest within some time constraints. I figured a reasonable price was \$300 plus a maximum of \$100 for expenses (I was asking the rabbit to not only rip my CDs, but also discard jewel cases and place them in sleeves that would be purchased by the rabbit).

In almost no time, TaskRabbit mailed me saying that a rabbit successfully bid on my job, and they came in at \$255 (+ expenses). I was thrilled, as not only was someone interested in the job, but the whole shebang was going to cost me about 50 cents a disc!

Adam, the rabbit who won the bid, scheduled a time to come by my house to pick up the CDs. He guessed he would be done in about 3 weeks, which seemed reasonable. He swung by on 12/17 to pick everything up and was very professional. After a day or two he sent me a sample ripped file to make sure I was happy with the rip, metadata and file naming. Everything looked great, and so he started up full-steam.

A few days later I was on the train down to NJ for the holidays and wouldn’t be back until New Year’s Eve. While I was off relaxing with my family, Adam was keeping me posted with status updates or questions every few days. He asked what to do with the few live bootlegs that were in my collection. I told him to just set them aside and that I would handle them myself (since no metadata was available for them on CDDB). Soon after I returned to Boston, I heard from Adam that he was almost done and we scheduled a time on 1/8 for him to drop off the finished product. I was thrilled that it only took him 3 weeks, and when he arrived I saw that he took excellent care of everything, and seemingly had no trouble with my pretty specific requirements.

I decided it would be a good idea to do a bit of an inventory, to make sure no discs/rips slipped through the cracks. In doing so I found a 20 or so CDs that I couldn’t find rips for (even though they were organized and put into sleeves). I talked with Adam and he wasn’t sure what happened, but he offered to swing by and pick them up (even though I had already closed out the task and paid him).

Overall, this was a great experience. I now have all of my CDs ripped in a lossless format, and my CDs are organized and taking up much less space than they were before. Surprisingly, only one track on one CD wouldn’t rip due to damage. I guess I take pretty good care of my things. My new music collection is approximately 345GB. Furthermore, using TaskRabbit successfully on a huge task such as this one gives me confidence to use the service in the future for more odd jobs around the house.

Right now I’m trying to find a more permanent storage solution for my CDs, most of which are in sleeves but some of which are still in their original cases. I tried Snap-N-Store cases but they were pretty lousy. The compartments for discs weren’t wide enough, even for my discs with sleeves. I’m currently in the market for a solution to this problem, so if you have any ideas please let me know. I’m looking for something with a lid to keep the dust out.

Random Album Mixes

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:38:23 +0000

I have a big post coming up in the next week or so about the re-ripping of all 500 or so of my CDs, but I wanted to share something i found in the process. Back towards the end of my college career I took two trips to the Hooray Area. One was a business trip to NASA Ames’ Research for a team meeting on SOFIA. The other was for a job interview at Be, Inc.

At the time, I owned an early MP3 player which was a portable CD player which could read data CDs filled with MP3s (in addition to old-fashioned CDs). I created two Album-Mix CDs for these trips, and I thought that some of you might get a kick out of the contents…

NASA Lovin’ (embarrassingly, this was actually the title of the mix)

Be Interview

The Movies I Saw in 2011

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:02:10 +0000

As regular readers know, I keep a list of all of the movies I see each year. I saw more movies this year (160) than each of the past two (147).. I did include a handful of shorts on the list this year, though. This was also the first year I kept track of the date on which I saw each movie, which will allow me to see trends in years moving forward.

Remembering James Izzo

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 18:01:14 +0000

My friend, James Izzo, took a nap yesterday from which he did not wake up. I met James at Hopatcong Middle School where we bonded early on via our love of computers. James was one of the few people I knew who also had an Amiga, and we would share software and knowledge regularly. As we grew into young adults and started discovering film and music, our friendship grew stronger.

James and I (along with other friends, of course) exhausted the local video store’s supply of horror films. Once we ran out of those we moved on to more “indie” and “foreign” films. If it wasn’t for my friendship with James there would have been no Fucked Up Movie Night. If it wasn’t for my friendship with James I don’t think I would have become involved with the Sunday Night Film Club. If it wasn’t for my friendship with James I doubt my interest in independent cinema would have been piqued enough to go full-degen at the Independent Film Festival of Boston every year.

James became an electronic musician, starting the band Thread as well as side projects such as The Boy Without Hands. He worked with musicians such as Neotropic and Jarboe. But before all of that James and I discovered electronic music together. My love for artists (electronic and otherwise) such as The Magnetic Fields, Coil, Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, Autechre and Squarepusher were all kindled in one way or another in his basement in Hopatcong. Some of those artists I discovered, some he discovered, but we were always very excited to share a ’new find’ with each other.

Over the past decade I had grown distant from James for a number of reasons. We remained in contact, but it became much more infrequent. The impact of our friendship on my life, however, is immeasurable. I learned to think critically about film and music through discussing it with James. I learned to explore new artists with James. I learned to dig deeper with James. My world just got a little smaller…

Labeling Insanity in the Fenway Bleachers

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 05:11:13 +0000

The way rows are labeled at Fenway Park makes no sense. Every game I attend in the bleachers, the first few innings are constantly interrupted by people who either mis-read the row number when they sat down and now need to move when the proper occupants arrive, or by people who think they are working their way down to their seat and find people sitting in them, only to find that they are in the wrong row.

This is always caused by the way the rows are labeled. Look at the picture below. As you can see, the side of the chair on the aisle is labeled “13”, but when people see the other “13” on the step riser, which is far more visible as you are walking up the aisle, they assume that the “13” refers to the level above it.

A much better way to label the rows is below:

As you can see, it is very clear which row is which. This would eliminate so much confusion and reduce the number of interruptions for bleacher fans. Please fix this.

2010 Films in Review

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:05:33 +0000

Even later than last year!

Top 10 Films of 2010 (in Alphabetical Order):
The Fighter
Inception
Jackass 3D
Kick-ass
The King’s Speech
Micmacs
Perrier’s Bounty
The Social Network
True Grit
Winter’s Bone
Bottom 6 films of 2010:
Clash of the Titans
The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Predators
Salt
Splice
Best Remake/Reworking: The Crazies
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Best Director: Christopher Nolan for Inception
Best Actress: Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit
Best Actor: Colin Firth in The King’s Speech
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo in The Fighter
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale n The Fighter
Honorable mention for John Hawkes in Winter’s Bone
Best Ensemble: Jackass 3D
Best Original Screenplay: Inception
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
Best Cinematography: Inception
Best Soundtrack: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Best Score: Inception
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: Second Year for both 3D and Fake IMAX
Most Memorable Lines:
Hot Tub Time Machine
Lou: Here’s a question. Was it morally wrong for me to exploit my knowledge of the future for personal financial gain? Perhaps. Here’s another question. Do I give a fuck?
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Stacey Pilgrim: I mean, did you really see a future with this girl?
Scott Pilgrim: Like… with jetpacks?
Kick-Ass
Big Daddy: Good job. I’m so proud of you, baby doll. Are you okay?
Hit Girl: Mhmm… but getting shot, Daddy… it hurt a lot more than when you did it.
Big Daddy: That’s because I used low velocity rounds, child… he… he…
Hit Girl: You’re the kindest Daddy in the whole world.
Big Daddy: No, I just… I love you…
Hit Girl: I love you, too, Daddy… I love you, too, Daddy. Sleep tight.
Jackass 3D
Steve-O: How many stings do you think we can take?
Manny Puig: I think it takes about 100 to kill a man.
Dave England: Are you serious? Did you just make that number up? There’s 50,000 bees and it takes 100 to kill a man?
Manny Puig: I think it takes 100.
Loomis Fall: Then what are we doing here?
Manny Puig: Making a hit movie.
Best Documentary: Exit Through the Gift Shop** **
Guilty Pleasures:
MacGruber
Tron: Legacy
Films I feel guilty for missing:
OSS 117: Lost in Rio
Films I don’t feel guilty for missing:
Edge of Darkness
Repo Men
Babies
Robin Hood
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The Movies I Saw in 2010

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:52:54 +0000

Here’s the list of movies I saw in 2010… I saw 147 movies this year, exactly as many as the year before. As I have done the past few years, my “Best of 2010” list will probably come closer to the Academy Awards, so I have the opportunity to see some of the well-regarded films of the year that I missed.

Thanksgiving Comes First!

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:23:20 +0000

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“559” caption=“This isn’t the “War Against Christmas”, it is the “War Against Christmas Overload”. Thanksgiving Comes First!”] [/caption]

My Backup Strategy

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:23:27 +0000

I recently read an article entitled Mac Software for Advanced OS X Users over at AppStorm, and one of the tools it tipped me off to was SMARTReporter. SMART stands for “Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology”, and it is a monitoring technology built into most hard disks. SMARTReporter asks the drive for it’s status every once in awhile, and if there is trouble, it alerts you. This seemed like a good idea, so I installed it. Just a few weeks later, SMARTReporter began notifying me that OS X was reporting I/O Errors with the drive. Soon after the first few warnings the computer started hanging. I quickly attached one of my external backup drives, and while it took some time, I was able to update the backup to include any files that had changed since my last backup.

I took the computer to the Apple Store and while they were ready to replace the drive under warranty immediately, I had a non-standard drive. When I ordered my Macbook I chose the 7200RPM disk, which isn’t typically carried in the physical Apple Stores. They ordered the disk, and the next day they called me back to say it had arrived and to schedule a time to bring the machine in to have it replaced. They replaced the drive in about 20 minutes, and when I got home I hooked up that aforementioned backup drive and had my computer restored to normal in no time.

Now this entire ordeal was annoying, but I never truly got angry. The truth is that my fairly regimented backup strategy gave me the confidence to know that there was almost no chance of me losing any data. In fact, in the 24 hours between my visits to the Apple Store, I was able to continue to use my laptop by booting off of that Firewire Backup disk. I honestly didn’t expect the replacement to arrive in 24 hours, so I even went a bit overboard and MacGyver’ed a method of keeping my laptop portable while using the external disk.

In a few conversations I’ve had since all of this happened, some questions have come up about my backup methods, so I figured I would write them up here.

I love my MacBook Pro, but at the end of the day it is just a hunk of hardware that will go bad at some point. The data stored on that computer is much more valuable (to me) than the hardware itself. My computer contains email archives going back to the early 90s, photos going back even further, all of my music, documents, writing, code, and more. Preventing the loss of this data is worth a bit of hassle, but I promise you that my methodology is only a bit of hassle. In practice it isn’t anywhere near as painful as it seems. I start with the low-hanging fruit and then get into the more involved practices. The most important thing to take away from this is that no backup method is 100% reliable, so make sure you choose more than one way to backup your files.

The first line of my defense is Dropbox, which is where my “Documents” folder lives. Dropbox gives every user a free 2GB virtual disk that lives “in the cloud” (in other words, online). The Dropbox application which runs on your computer ensures that a copy of that virtual disk is also in a directory on your computer. If you add, modify or delete a file in the Dropbox folder on your computer, it will (almost) instantly be copied up to “the cloud”. If you are offline and modify files on your computer, the next time you are online it will copy any changes up. Furthermore, you can run Dropbox on multiple computers and it will keep all of them in sync. Want to get at your documents at work? Easy. This is one of those brain-dead simple tools that can be a lifesaver.
The next step is Apple-specific. Apple’s Time Machine is backup for everyone. It requires almost no configuration and can totally save your bacon. In a default configuration, you pick an external hard disk to use, and every time you connect it it will backup your computer automatically. If you leave that external hard disk connected all the time (as in the case of a desktop computer) then Time Machine will perform a backup every hour. One great side effect of this is that it keeps old versions of files it has backed up around, so if you accidentally deleted a file yesterday, or made a change which you want to “undo”, you can grab the file from last week’s backup. They have made the configuration so simple that the act of simply attaching an external disk to your computer is enough; Mac OS will ask you if you want to use it with Time Machine. If you are a 100% laptop user like me, you may want to invest in Apple’s Time Capsule, which is a network device which Time Machine can backup to over the network, freeing you from having to connect disks to your computer. As a bonus it is a Wireless-N router, so you can kill a few birds with one stone.
As if Time Machine and Dropbox got mashed together, BackBlaze [referral link] backs up your hard disk to that pesky “cloud”. The service costs \$50 a year, but for that you get a complete, off-site online backup of your computer. That first backup takes several days, but it just plugs along in the background and you will most likely not even notice it is working. Once it is all backed up, it will copy updated or changed files up to their servers on the fly to keep your backup current. Note the emphasized words back there, off-site. In the event of a real disaster (fire, flood, robbery or the like), any number of backups at your home might be destroyed. That is why paying for one of these services is worth it. BackBlaze has several competitors ( Carbonite and Mozy, among others), so take some time and figure out which one works best for you. Note that BackBlaze won’t back up any files bigger than 9GB. This is much bigger than only the largest video files, but it is good to note. (Update [20120331]: BackBlaze has removed the limitation on file size, though it is still restricted by default. You can easily change the default in the BackBlaze preferences panel)
One of the things that NONE of these previous methods will get you is a way to get RIGHT back on your feet after a hard disk crash. If you want that you are going to need to keep a live copy of your hard disk, and the best way to do that (on a Mac) is with Carbon Copy Cloner (which is “donation-ware”, meaning it is free but the developer could use your support). Get (another) external hard disk, particularly one that your computer can boot from (on most Mac’s this means a FireWire drive, but check to make sure). Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a clone of your computers hard disk onto this external disk. Once you’ve done this, try and boot your computer off of this external drive. If you were successful, your computer should boot and look exactly the same as it normally does (although the external drives are often much slower, so everything may take a bit longer). Repeat this ‘cloning’ on a regular basis so if the hard disk dies in your computer you have a quick way to get back on your feet. I have a calendar alarm every Saturday morning to remind me to connect my clone drive.
Advanced Tip: If you want to make life a bit easier on yourself, investigate CCC’s “Scheduled Tasks” functionality. You can cause a clone to happen automatically when you connect your external clone drive, and you can also cause it to only clone what has changed since your last clone (which should cause the clone to take much less time).
Extra Credit: Once you get a CCC workflow that works for you, you may wish to consider duplicating your efforts with a second clone drive, and keep that second clone drive off site. Keep it at your desk at work or even at a trusted friend’s house. I personally keep my second drive in a safe deposit box at my bank. So I am not going to the bank every week, I keep one clone drive at home, and I clone to it every Saturday. Then once a month or so, I go to the bank and swap the clone drives. This way I have a clone that is no more than a week old at home, and one that is no more than a month old off site.

That all looks complicated, but really only the 4th level requires any “manual” intervention. Once Dropbox, Time Machine and BackBlaze are all set up, they don’t really require any work on your part. And for those first three methods, the initial setup is really easy, even for the novice.

Please don’t let the apparent complexity of #4 scare you off easily, because having a clone to boot from can be a life-saver. Because of this cloned drive, when the hard disk in my Mac started to fail last week, I simply ran CCC to update the clone before the drive completely died, then I rebooted my machine off the clone and was back to the races. I then ran off of this backup until Apple got the replacement drive in, and when I got home from Apple I just used CCC to clone that external drive back onto the new disk from Apple. Given that it only took Apple 24 hours to receive the replacement drive, this might seem like a bit of overkill, but what if it had been a few days? Or a week? I added #4 to my regimen after my last drive failure, I was out of commission for a few days because I didn’t have a clone to boot from.

The key thing to remember, especially about methods 2-4, is that unless you configure them otherwise, they will backup every file on your system. Even files that you might not think are important will get backed up. To me, this is a key feature of good backup strategy. Unimportant files have a notorious way of becoming really important the moment after a hard disk crash. Any backup method which requires you to manually select or copy files yourself is doomed to failure.

Adventures in Interconnection

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:47:22 +0000

Back in February I ordered a pair of 15 foot 1/4" cables from Monoprice to use for the radio programme as well as recording my guitar. When I opened the box, the cables seemed a bit bulky, but I didn’t put much thought into them. I used them for several weeks, bunching up the slack underneath the coffee table. One night, after the radio show was over, Corinna and Rory started busting my balls about how long the cables were. I had to admit they did seem just a touch longer than 15’. So we busted out a tape measure and found that my 15’ cables were actually 50'.

Bank error in my favor? I’d normally agree, but being I really only needed the cables to run the few feet from my mixer to the living room amplifier, it was a little ridiculous. Embarrassed that I didn’t realize this right away, I quickly resolved turn the two cables into four. One pair of shorter patch cables (as I had originally ordered) and a long pair of extensions. I also realized that my original estimate of 15’ was actually too long, so I decided on 10’ and 40’ lengths for the cables.

Fast forward several months to me actually getting off my ass to do this work. A week or so ago I ordered all of the interconnects I actually needed, and a few days ago I measured and cut the cables to length, and began assembling them. Or at least I had planned to. It turned out that the insulation on the cable was too thick to fit through the jack housing. Furthermore, my soldering iron was a piece of shit. So I set everything aside until I could make a trip to the electronics shop.

This morning I made my pilgrimage “You-do-it” Electronics, home of everything a nerd needs for projects such as these. I picked up an alternate set of connectors, some sexy colored heat-shrink tubing to color code the cables and extensions, a nice Weller soldering iron, a new pair of dikes, and a bit of random stuff that has nothing to do with this project but which one is susceptible to buying at Nerd Mecca. Once I got home with the right gear and parts, building the cables was a piece of cake.

My weekend project is done, I’ve acquired some new tools, breathed in some lead… So far, so good!

grahams' completely normal radio programme goes public!

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:04:42 +0000

For a bit more than 2 years I’ve been doing a mostly-weekly streaming internet radio show called " grahams’ completely normal radio programme". Since I kept it private amongst a small group of friends, while you may have heard me mention it on occasion, you most likely haven’t listened to it. Starting this Monday at 10pm EDT, I’m taking the show public (and legit). You can find the details to tune in over at http://radio.dosburros.com/ (which will redirect you to LoudCity).

The format is a commercial-free mish-mash of music I’m into, which crosses quite a few genres. I’m live on mic, and have been known to have guests in-studio or over Skype. I try to briefly review movies I have seen with the film club. I have real equipment. I have run contests. I have world premiered music. I usually manage to keep technical screw-ups to a minimum. I even have a terrible auto-tuned theme song that will get stuck in your head.

As you may be thinking, having all of this going on for an audience of fewer than a dozen people started to seem a little ludicrous. So I decided to figure out a way to conform to the complicated streaming royalty system, and ultimately settled on using the LoudCity platform so I didn’t have to do any hard work. The only catch is that in order to be covered under their royalty agreements, I need to have all of the links to the stream hosted on their domain. Which is why the above link will redirect you from dosburros.com to their site.

Obviously the programme’s web presence is limited right now. I’ve been mulling this decision for a few months but the decision to actually pull the trigger and get it done happened while floating on the Party Barge Regency Edition this weekend. In addition to the (currently) terrible webpage, you can follow the show on Twitter at @radioprogramme.

The people who have been listening for the past few years have told me it’s a good show. I hope you’ll think so too. Tune in one of these upcoming Mondays and let me know what you think. At a minimum you’ll be able to make fun of me for such a colossal waste of time.

Review: iPad

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:46:53 +0000

We’ve had a few iPads at work since April, and one of them is presently assigned to me as I optimize our web viewer for the WiFi iPad and iPhone. While I’ve taken it home a few times to give it a whirl, our Memorial Day trip to Michigan was my first real serious time using it. I decided to bring it with me instead of my laptop, just to see what it was like using it regularly. My experience was very pleasant. Here are some random observations:

I was jack's online journal

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:17:24 +0000

Back on June 25th, 2000 I posted my first entry over at LiveJournal. 10 years, 2,778 entries, and 6,347 comments later I’ve decided that it is time to move on.

Realistically, between sites like twitter, flickr, and my bookmarks over at delicious I simply don’t end up posting to my LJ as much anymore. LJ used to really appeal to me due to the large community and the discussions it generated. But now it feels more like just another abandoned alleyway on the Internet. I suspect that most people who read my posts do so through RSS or Facebook anyway.

So i have moved everything over to my new blog at /. For the time being I will leave a cross-posting script set up to post my entries over there to LJ, but I don’t know how long that will last. I have disabled comments on my LJ, so if you want to discuss a posting of mine there will be a link at the bottom of each post to bring you back to my Wordpress blog.

The edges are still rough at the new place, and while most of the content and comments have imported successfully, there were a few problems (100 or so anonymous comments seem to have been assigned to the wrong posts), but so it goes… I have been manually going through and fixing these edge cases when I have the time. The look of the new blog will probably change quite a bit in the near future.

So there it is. Update your bookmarks, RSS readers, etc. This is a perfect time to also start ignoring me. I rarely have anything of value to say anyhow. :)

HOWTO: Surviving IFFBoston (Updated for 2016)

Wed, 05 May 2010 22:36:00 +0000

The Independent Film Festival of Boston is one of the reasons I love living in Boston. In my opinion, if you are a film fan and you live in Boston, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t go all-in on the festival. This year, despite seeing a personal-record 20 films in 8 days, I found myself much less wiped out than previous years. This is mostly due to to the all-volunteer staff and crew of the festival tweaking things year-after-year, improving things for everyone. Many festivals are run strictly for the industry but IFFBoston also tries to cater just as much to the filmgoer.

Aside from all of the things the staff does to make things run smoothly, there are many tips and tricks I’ve developed myself. I realize that sharing these after the 2010 festival isn’t very helpful, but I wanted to get these written down for next year. This is mostly to augment my own memory, but hopefully you can find something useful here.

If you’re going to be seeing a bunch of films, buy a pass. This year, the “Film” pass was \$180 ( Update 2016 The concepts of “passes” and “memberships” have been merged. Supporter Passes are \$350 this year, and now include a membership for year-round benefits. You can buy badges here). Even if you are seeing fewer than 18 films, you have to remember all of the fringe benefits of the pass:

Passholders get to enter the theater first, approximately 15 minutes before showtime. So you usually can sit wherever you’d like.
Sometimes you’ll hear buzz about a particular film while talking to other festival goers, and the pass gives you the flexibility to rejigger your schedule once the festival is going.
Along the same lines, even as well run as IFFBoston is, schedules can slip and Q&A sessions are sometimes too riveting to leave. Being able to decide to leave when you want to as opposed to what your tickets dictate is very nice.
Passes help support the festival.

Simply accept that not only will you not be able to see all the films in the festival, but you likely won’t even be able to see all of the ones you are interested in. This year, there were more than 60 films available, but the most any one person can see was 20, as there were sometimes 6 screens running simultaneously.
There are two ways to go about scheduling. You can either

Look at the list of films, going through them all and prioritizing films based on your interest. I did this in 2009, and while it worked, it was a little frustrating, as I would get hooked on the idea of seeing a film just to find out it conflicted with another film, or was logistically unrealistic (not enough time to get from the Somerville to the Brattle, for instance).
What I did in 2010, and which was much less frustrating, was to use the grid view of “Festival Genius”. Going day-by-day, look at the first time-slot and pick a set of movies which you are both interested in and which work logistically for that day. You’ll still certainly have some sticky scheduling, but I found it far less frustrating. ( Update 2014: RIP Festival Genius)

When developing your schedule, try to remember to leave slack for Q&A sessions, schedule slippage, and traveling between theatres or venues.
Also remember to leave a bit of slack for you to get a bite to eat! Most years I’ve found some natural gaps between movies which gave me enough time to grab a quick bite, but review your schedule and make sure you have at least 30 minutes for some fast food (or an hour for real food, which is what I try to do). Another strategy I’ve fallen into is to plan longer dinners (i.e. my yearly meal at Redbones) during days like Friday or Monday, where you can get the food in before the movies even start. Save up quicker blasts (Anna’s, Spike’s, etc) for the weekend marathons.
After discussing things with several other fest-degens, we all seem to agree that the magic number is 5. That is 5 films in one day, 6 is just too many. By the 6th film you will probably be tired, somewhat dreading going into it, and largely incoherent afterwards. This year the schedule bound Saturday to 5 films and I felt great afterwards. That said, if I can squeeze 6 into a day next year I probably would.
You’ll need to decide whether or not going to the parties is important to you. For me, I want to see as many movies as possible during the festival. Since many of the parties occur while movies are being shown, I almost never go to the parties.
Pack, pack, pack. I am a bit obsessive in this department (doctors may say in ALL departments), but I find that a well-stocked backpack makes a crowded day of movies much more bearable. Here are some of the things I stock in my backpack:
Reading Material: You’ll likely need less of it than you may think, but a good magazine or small book can be clutch if you have an hour or so between movies.
Granola/Clif Bars: As much as I love theater refreshments, sometimes you don’t have time to wait on line between films.
Water: Again, my love of refreshments aside, I try to bring one or two bottles of water on the long days.
F ace wipes: I love being able to freshen up when time doesn’t allow a quick trip to the bathroom.
Emergency Power: I tend to grind on my iPhone a lot during downtime between shows, so it never hurts to have a way to give it a boost if the battery starts getting low.
Medications: If you take any meds, don’t forget to bring them with you.
Layers: Late april weather is insane, so be sure to pack a sweatshirt or leave room in there to stash it later.
Small Umbrella: Most lines are outside. Don’t get wet.
Air-activated Handwarmers: I started bringing these this year, but didn’t need them. A few miserably cold Fenway trips this year convinced me to order a big box of these things. Might be good ’last resort’ on a strange cold snap or unexpected wait on line.
It’s not the end of the world, but this year I tried to remember to check my wallet before leaving each day and reloading it if necessary. If you’re trying to squeeze in some concessions or a meal into a tight schedule it can be frustrating to need to find an ATM. If you want to buy merch (supports the festival!) or even a DVD or other swag from a filmmaker, plan accordingly.
Thank all the volunteers profusely. They are devoting tons of time to make the whole thing go off, so make sure they know they are appreciated. And don’t gripe at them if a schedule slips, or if you are waiting on line longer than you want to. None of them are getting paid, and i don’t believe any of them are crowd control professionals. Also, often many of the delays are somewhat out of their hands. Imagine a local filmmaker with 100+ friends and family in the crowd, and all of them wanting to glad-hand him after the Q&A session.

That isn’t a complete list, and it is pretty random, but it should do for now…

2009 Films in Review

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 23:35:00 +0000

Better late than never, right?

Top 10 Films of 2009 (in Alphabetical Order):
Avatar
District 9
In The Loop
Inglourious Basterds
It Might Get Loud
Star Trek
The Escapist
The Hurt Locker
Where The Wild Things Are
World’s Greatest Dad
Bottom 4 films of 2009:
For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism
Pontypool
Terminator Salvation
The Burning Plain
Best Remake/Reworking: Star Trek
Most Unnecessary Remake/Reworking: Friday the 13th (2009)
Best Director: James Cameron in Avatar (Not the best movie of the year, but the direction was clearly tops)
Best Actress: Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia
Best Actor: Robin Williams in World’s Greatest Dad
Best Supporting Actress: Mimi Kennedy in In The Loop
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
Best Ensemble: In The Loop
Best Original Screenplay: The Hurt Locker
Best Adapted Screenplay: In The Loop
Best Cinematography: Avatar
Best Soundtrack: Star Trek
Most Alarming Cinematic Trend: 3D and Fake IMAX.
Most Memorable Lines:
In The Loop
Malcolm Turner - Fuckity-bye-bye then
Malcolm Turner - Y’know, I’ve come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you. You are a real boring fuck. Sorry, sorry, I knowyou disapprove of swearing so I’ll sort that out. You are a boring F, star, star, CUNT!
World’s Greatest Dad
Kyle: Bruce Hornsby’s a fag.
Lance Clayton: He’s got kids Kyle.
Kyle: You have a kid. And you’re a fag.
Star Trek
McCoy: Yeah. Well, I got nowhere else to go, the ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I got left is my bones.
Best Documentary: It Might Get Loud - I now own a guitar and am taking lessons.** **
Films I feel guilty for missing:
An Education
Up in the Air
A Single Man
A Prophet
Films I don’t feel guilty for missing:
The Blind Side
The Last Station
Nine
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Google comes thru for Red Sox Nation!

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:29:00 +0000

As I had earlier reported, Google Maps had a pretty egregious error with how it had labeled Yawkey Way. I am happy to report that this is now corrected.

The Movies I Saw in 2009

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the list of movies I saw in 2009… I saw 147 movies this year, which is just about where I was the year before. I think the number of films I can see in a year given all of my other interests and responsibilities is right in the neighborhood of 150. I haven’t really sat down and thought about my “best of” list yet, as I usually take January to try and catch up on acclaimed movies I missed, but my gut tells me it was a pretty good year for movies.

My latest contribution to Red Sox Nation

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:17:00 +0000

I was using Google Maps the other day when I noticed something strange. Yawkey Way was mislabeled. It is my understanding (as it was before my time living in Boston) that Jersey Street used to run from Boylston Street to Brookline Avenue, past Fenway Park. In 1976, the stretch of Jersey that ran along Fenway Park (between Van Ness Street and Brookline Avenue) was renamed Yawkey Way, in honor of former club owner Tom Yawkey. But in the Google Map, these two streets are flipped over Van Ness, as seen in the photo here. I contacted GoogleMaps with this problem. This morning they let me know that I was correct and that the map will be corrected within a month. I’ll post again when the fix is made.

Now if only Google could go back and correct Tom Yawkey…

Update: Google has corrected this issue.

Crate dates matter.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:45:00 +0000

Turns out, eggs DO expire! I had always been under the impression that eggs don’t expire, and boy did I have that notion dismissed fully and clearly.

Last Saturday, coco_b mentioned that she would like to use some elderly bananas we had around for some banana bread. So I whipped some up from a recipe we had gotten from our friend Audra. I quickly dismissed the expiration date from some time in September on the egg crate and baked the bread. Corinna ate quite a bit of it but I only had one slice. A few hours later I started feeling ill, and an hour after that I started experiencing a very sharp 10-15 second pain in my lower abdomen every 1-5 minutes. This continued all night, completely eliminating any chances of sleep. I had hoped that by morning this would pass and we could stick to our plans of meeting up with at Six Flags.

I “woke” up feeling just as terrible as I had the night before, so Corinna called Tom and told him we wouldn’t be meeting him. I sat around the house in pain all day, pretty miserable. Tom came to stay at our place after he spent the day at the park, and we just chatted it up for a few hours before bedtime. He half-joked that he could take me to the hospital in the morning if I needed it. After another painful, sleepless night, I almost took him up on his offer.. I called my GP who was unavailable, and decided to go to the ER. It occurred to me that if he drove me to the hospital it would completely eradicate any chance he would have to visit Boston during the day. So I called a cab at 8am and went to the ER, and Corinna met me there around noon. After lots of waiting, some X-Rays and CT Scans, and continuing pain, it was determined that I had an inflammation of my ileum. The ER doctor speculated that it might be Crohn’s disease or IBS, but he deferred to the GI doctor I’d be seeing once I was admitted. After a full day in the emergency room, much of it on a stretcher in a hall, I was admitted in the late evening.

I went up to the 7th floor and put in a room, and like my stay a year or two prior for my appendicitis, I had a beautiful view of the Charles river. It took awhile for a doctor to come and see me, and a bit longer for the nurse to finally bring something for my pain. Each individual spike of pain probably ranked 6 out of 10, but after feeling it every few minutes for 2+ sleepless days, it was really starting to break me down. The GI doctor I talked to said that he thought I was probably suffering a bacterial or viral infection, likely caused by bad food. He said he had no reason to suspect Crohn’s or IBS given my history (or lack thereof). He said they would run some tests and keep me overnight. He also put me on a clear liquid diet, which meant I was able to eat for the first time in 2 days (even if it was broth and jello).

I woke up feeling better, and more importantly, pain-free, and after lunch they advanced my diet to BRAT (Bananas, Rice, Applesauce and Toast) before discharging me. Well, the pain returned after a few hours and they kept me another night. Fortunately, I woke up without pain again (although still tender) and they once again advanced my diet to BRAT at lunch, and this time I tolerated it just fine. The doctors determined that I had a viral infection of my Ileum, and that it likely came from food, although they said it was also possible it had come through one of your usual viral vectors (handshakes, etc). It would take a few days to clear up and some continued pain was to be expected while it did. Finally after 2.5 days in the hospital, I went home with Corinna on Wednesday evening.

When I was first discharged I thought there was no way I was going to make the yearly Halloween Party up near Ithaca. But after feeling solid on Thursday and waking up and feeling pretty well on Friday, we decided to give it a shot. And I’m glad I did.. While it was odd not really being able to eat or drink anything at the party (We brought ginger ale and chicken soup for me), it was fantastic getting to see all my friends. I even did an epic live edition of my radio show/podcast featuring live music.

Back to work today and slowly advancing my diet to normal food… Still not quite feeling 100%, but getting close. This would have been much more awful and difficult if not for Corinna.

Quicksilver meet the holy wars...

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:10:00 +0000

Was just chatting with Howard, who has literally written the book on Quicksilver, and was trying to figure out why he finds so much more utility out of Quicksilver’s keyboard triggers than I do… I find myself using the “Command Mode” in most of my interactions with Quicksilver, but Howard makes extensive use of keyboard triggers. We were chatting back and forth about this, and I struck upon a minor epiphany:

Quicksilver’s command mode is somewhat analogous to the command mode in my editor of choice, Vi. Keyboard triggers, however, are much more like the meta-keystrokes of the Emacs editor, which is Howard’s favorite editor. My brain is happy to deal with the notion of different modes for different contexts, where as the Emacs user is much more comfortable remembering a multitude of various keyboard combinations to get their work done.

It’s pretty cool that Quicksilver is this flexible, and in fact it one-ups both of the editors by allowing you to seamlessly choose whichever method appeals to you on a task-by-task basis, and furthermore it’s not mutually exclusive. I do use a few triggers for some common searches (like IMDb, Wikipedia, etc) but setting up those triggers doesn’t prevent me from executing those searches in command mode. And in this way, allowing you to choose the solution to a problem from a whole menu of methods (commands, keyboard triggers, mouse triggers, gestures, etc), Quicksilver is also analogous to a combatant in another holy war, Perl. Perl provides many different ways to express oneself, and generally grants the programmer flexibility in expression.

Another way that Quicksilver is like Perl is that it is very tolerant of ambiguities and tries to resolve them as best as it can. Type “adress book” into the command window of Quicksilver and there’s a good chance that even though “address” is misspelled Address Book will at least be among the top choices of Nouns/Subjects. Quicksilver’s stated purpose is to allow the user to “Act Without Doing”. While that motto is a little too metaphysical for me, I think that philosophy is what drove this tolerance programmed into QS.

Myself and many other programmers are frustrated by Perl’s anything-goes philosophy, claiming that by being so permissive it makes reading the Perl code of someone who has a different style than you (or even reading your own code fro a few years ago) a difficult challenge at times. If I were to try to continue to stretch this analogy, I would say that the Quicksilver version of this gripe is that, as a user, you end up growing so dependent on your specific usage patterns that if you work on a machine with QS configured differently, not installed at all, or science-forbid, a windows box, it can be rather frustrating. You constantly attempt to invoke Quicksilver and fail, or even worse, learn that your carefully selected keyboard triggers vary drastically from your friends.

I have grown to really love Quicksilver, and I urge all Mac users to give it a swing! They’ve done a great job of pushing most of the really geeky features under the surface a bit, and it tends to be as complicated as you choose. I used it for a few years in straight command mode and found it to be super empowering, but over the past year or so (mostly due to prodding from Howard), I have found myself slowly expanding my horizons, and playing with more and more features of this amazingly deep tool. Not all of the features I play with stick, but when one does, it suddenly feels like your old method of doing something was so antiquated. For more information:

Update: Here is Howard’s take on this subject.