The Boston Metro, a free Monday-Friday paper, gave a plug to the Sunday Night Film Club last friday. They even used a dorky picture of me that I link to in the newsletter to help people find me. It’s nice to have my picture in a section of the paper that isn’t the police blotter.
snfc
“CANCEL THIS, DID NOT WANT IT”
Why are people so god-damned stupid? Someone decided they wanted to unsubscribe from the film club weekly newsletter mailing list. This list is opt-in, so this person managed to subscribe themselves, but apparently clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of EVERY LIST MESSAGE was too complicated and they just sent a message to the list (which bounced). Don’t worry, you lazy bastard, I just volunteer my time running this club, but I’ll do your work for you.
Friday’s Metro
lazyweb code review
I’m writing a tool in python that will automate the posting of the weekly newsletters for the film club. Currently, I manually post to LiveJournal, Craigslist, the SNFC webpage, and the mailing list. I had a tool a long time ago but it broke for various reasons.
Anyway, I want to have a directory of .py containing classes, and call a method [execute()] on each of them. This way I can just create a new subclass, pop it in that directory, and it will be picked up automatically. This is what I came up with, somehow I feel it’s crude and there is a better way to do it (ignore bad var names pls):
plugins = glob.glob("plugins/*.py")
for x in plugins:
pathName = x.replace(".py","")
className = x.replace(".py","").replace("plugins/","")
foo = __import__(pathName,globals(), locals(), [''])
bar = getattr(foo,className)
obj = bar()
obj.execute(nl)
This code looks for all of the .py files in the dir, imports them, gets the class from the imported module, and instantiates them. Finally, it calls the execute() method. Any suggestions?
Bulleted Quasi-Unrelated Information
- Last Sunday I caught Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story with the film club. It’s a Paintball Mockumentary starring Rob Corddry from the Daily Show. Funny, but you don’t need to see it in a theatre, and you won’t be rolling around on the floor paralyzed from laughter.
- For whatever reason the past few weeks I decided to catch up with the rest of the world and watch 24. I had watched about half of the first season about a year ago when I was laid up with my leg. I enjoyed the episodes I watched then, but somehow got distracted and never finished it. Well, last weekend I picked up that torch and blew through like 12 episodes of the first season, and moved directly into the second season, which I finished a few nights ago. The show is way over the top, but it’s fun, and eliminating the week-to-week suspense by waiting several years to start the series makes it less frustrating. My dad watches the show, so I’ve seen a few episodes of the third season, from when I was living at home again, but I had no idea what was going on when I was watching it… I watched the first episode of the third season directly after the last episode of the second, which was good, because they left a serious cliffhanger going on there that would have driven me crazy.
- My new phone is pretty nice so far, but there are a few things that frustrate me. A few of you have asked for a review, I’ll get to that in a week or two, or something.
MovieOS is Universal
The Wall Street Journal is running an article on portrayals of computing and the Internet in film. I had plenty of discussions at CSH about the lame treatment of these topics by Hollywood. We even had a term to refer to the mystical graphical operating systems used in these films: MovieOS. Well, last night, I learned that these gripes are not limited to computer nerds.
- “No real rare book dealer would smoke around his collection!”
- “Look at this guy, he’s supposedly the worlds most reputable rare book dealer but his books are piled up next to a live fireplace!”
- “Come on! Nobody would store a book with it’s spine facing UP! ALL THE PAGES WOULD FALL OUT!”
I was telling this story to
Slithr
After work yesterday I met up with a few of the film club regulars to see “Slither” at the Boston Common theatre. It was great to see that Hollywood still knows how to make a great somewhat humorous but still scary horror film (not a self-referential irony-fest like the spawn of Scream). I don’t think this movie was flawed at all, to be honest. Even a little credit cookie for the really patient..
I’m about halfway done with fixing my journal entries to point to Flickr instead of Gallery. Found a few photos that I could have sworn I had uploaded but couldn’t find in my Flickr photos… Hopefully that was just a brain fart on my part and not some kind of dataloss in either the upload client or Flickr’s back end.
Portrait
Oh yeah, my birthday.. thanks to all the well-wishers and gift-givers.. I got a bunch of great books, music, and DVDs this year. For my birthday present, Corinna took me out to dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club. I am not usually a fan of getting dressed up to eat, but it’s nice on occasion, and this was totally worth it. The food was completely delicious, the service was mind-blowing, and the bread pudding was unbelievable.
Tonight we are catching the Beastie Boys’ concert film, “Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That”, with the film club, which will hopefully be a blast
Take me back, Journal, I’m sorry!
I’ve neglected the hell out of my journal lately… Some of that is because nothing is going on… But I have also just been lax, I will try to be better, but… no promises… :)
My sister,
We caught “Why We Fight” last night, and while it was quite “preaching to the choir-y”, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The discussion after the movie was a bit heated, though, as it tends to get after these political films…
I think I’m finally getting over this cold… I’ve felt good for the past few days, although I am still a little congested, I can at least think, etc. I had my sister bring up a bunch of old CDs because I recently realized that there was a big hole in my email archive from when I was using BeOS. So I got BeOS running on an older machine and restored my old email from backup. I had to go through some hoops to get the BeMail format mail into something Mail.app under OSX could import, but once I figured it out it was a no brainer. It’s amazing what 5 years can do for your knowledge of an OS, it took me quite awhile to get my bearings in BeOS again… I had a little nostalgia, but it is definitely pretty dated by today’s standards.
Festivus and Kong
Sunday I caught King Kong (2005) with the film club. It was better than I had expected, and while there was one glaring plot point (the “kid” on the ship) that was left hanging by the end of the film, it was pretty tight overall (which is surprising given the 3 hour runtime).. There were obviously points of the film that were slower than others, but they all seemed in place (except for the aforementioned subplot, which should have either been trimmed altogether or at least followed through).
I am getting antsy for the holidays, counting the days until I get to drive home and enjoy 11 days off!