A great work of art captures an experience, a thought, a feeling... into an artifact that we can then refer to in conversation with one another... poems, songs, movies, books. If I mention a movie you have seen, it's much like coming across a purple link in your web browser... you know what it refers to without following the link.
Of course, producing art is harder than consuming it...
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. Gene Fowler
for reference: movies bookmarks, MoviesDanSaw, moviewatcher, Rio theater
31Oct2004: Another Sunday afternoon date thanks to the folks at church who organized childcare. Mary and I saw Ladder 49. Heavy duty. A great story full of good guys.
We squeezed in the 11am show, thanks to yahoo driving directions from church to Dickinson Eastglen 16.
21Oct2004 Bad Graceland CD
I listened to Graceland a zillion times... while working on HyperSchool (on UTMac), I just played it over and over. I think it was a cassette copy.
cleaning my office, again... trying and failing, for the Nth time, to rip this Graceland CD. Want that agent again...
How do MusicBrainz? cdids work? ah... /usr/share/doc/python2.3-musicbrainz/examples/cdid.py
4Sep2004 Cassette Archive
cleaning my office... indexing my cassettes in del.icio.us via musicbrainz. ToDo: start an agent grabbing digital copies based on this index. Hmm... musicbrainz doesn't seem to have release info, i.e. years, for many of these, and I'm having problems loggin in to fix that. I guess I'll scribble that down in the delicious extra field, along with UPACodes?.
ToDo: take a photo of the physical media, sign it , and get it notarized by a digital timestamping service ala that DRM workshop paper by... Mark M?
I have a hardcopy of my 1997-06-08 index; can't find softcopy; think it went bye-bye with a WinNT? partition a while ago. So... making notes on stuff that's not elsewhere in the web...
Moonshadow at senior retreat 1986
Fooling Yourself ... on the road to San Antonio w/Doug 1988
Roundabout at Sandstone with Leslie.
Longest Time at the party with my Dad's family on the east coast. Uncle John Petit?
U2 War. 1987 Andrew, roommate from UT Austin
13Aug2004: went to see I, Robot with Andy. Now Brennan wants to see it. Hmm... kids-in-mind rating makes me wonder...
6Aug2004: It's a great day to be in Kansas City! I took off work early to go to Oceans of Fun with the family. I got to body-surf and fling the boys around in the wave pool. We tried out the kyaks and I remembered the Vancouver TAG trip and did a little more splashing. Mary enjoyed relaxing in the sun. Kyle was nearly pooped and joined her while Justin and I went down a big waterslide. The burgers were horrible, after that we went to the wave pool again. We were a little surprised that the park closed at 6pm; we were the last ones out of the wave pool.
Mary had clipped a notice about Free Friday Night Flicks from the paper, so we made our way toward Crown Center, even though the 9:15pm start time was a couple hours away. The timing turned out to be just right: quite a few people were already there, setting up blankets and lawn chairs, by the time we got there. People were playing frisbee and hitting a volleyball around to pass the time; I had grabbed a tennis ball from the back of the car and Justin and I threw that around for a while. They even had popcorn and nachos at the concession stand. The movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, a little on the scary/violent side for our 8 and 9 year old boys (Kyle was asleep in Mary's arms by then) but it has remarkable staying power... wow... has it really been 23 years since it came out?
From where we sat, we not only had a nice view of the movie, but we could see the flame burning on the Liberty Memorial, the American Restaurant where Mary and I shared a dream-like meal a few years ago, and we could watch the stars come out.
On the way home, we got into a discussion of which parts of the movie were real and which were not... the ark is historical (BibleVerse:Numbers+10:33) though the fire coming out of it was kinda hollywood. They asked what Nazis were. While I was explaining, Brennan asked if Hitler was that guy who killed himself; I actually didn't know... WearableGizmo and Wikipedia to the rescue... yes, Hitler killed himself.
Somber stuff, but that's what movies are about, right? They entertain, but they also stimulate important conversations.
4Aug2004: After exchanging mail with my economist friend Mark, I recalled that a recent Wikipedia featured article was on economics, so I started poking around. Supply and demand made sense, so I got bold and went looking for the stuff John Nash was working on in A Beautiful Mind. Found it: Nash equilibrium. Nifty!
28Jul2004: I made a new songs-to-run-by playlist in iTunes yesterday, for use in the iPod. Hmm... how to export it to the web? I suppose the playlist data is in XML on the machine somewhere... hmm...
I'm often wondering what song a credit card charge from ITMS corresponds to, for my stuff:media quicken records.
24Jul2004: We rented Mona Lisa Smile. The depressing thing about that movie is how little things have changed since then. When we lived in the Boston area, we picked up quite a bit of "not our sort of people" vibe. In travels with samantha, philg writes "... one can't live 14 years in Boston without absorbing some of the prevailing contempt for those who live beyond reach of Harvard and MIT."
netflix definitely appeals to my geek sensitivities, and I do hate paying late fees, but we have an arrangement that's pretty close to a free lunch: The Discover cash back bonus counts double if you use it at blockbuster. So we get something like 10 rentals for $20, and the $20 was sorta free money to start with.
18July2004: Mary and I saw King Arthur on Sunday, thanks to Susan Harrison and the gang at church who provide stuff for the kids to do so the parents can have a date now and again. I enjoyed comparing this version of the story with the wikipedia article on King Arthur afterward. Wikipedia just continues to amaze me. perhaps merits an interwiki link
5May2004: Ushering for The Producers, a Kansas City Theater League production a the music hall.
Feb2004: on moments of clarity:
"Have you ever stood over a putt, Michael, and seen the line laid out as clearly as if it were drawn in chalk on the green?" - p147 Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield (ISBNCode 0380817446)
Like my 6-ball shot the other night.
14Feb2004: saw Miracle at Town Center 20. Such an adrenaline rush I had to see it again!
26Dec2003: really enjoyed Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin.
Dec2003: SOULSCORING from Mark S. (also: Sleepless nights by freefall, 1988... ThreeChordsAndTheTruth)
Dec2003: introduced myself to a true Texan, Kendall Clark. We discussed Hands on a Hardbody. He recommended an essay on Eastwood, focusing on Mystic River. Very worth reading.
Nov 2003: read Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (UPACode 07100100799273185 ISBN: 0380731851) on my trip to Japan. Good stuff, if a little on the gritty side. Enjoyed the details about Boston, having lived there for a few years. Declined to really identify with the father's loss of a child.
Sep 2002: Saw JFK again last night on cable. The Kennedy Assassination By John McAdams? © 1995-2002 debunks most of it to my satisfaction.
Aug 2002: blackhawk down web site is awesome. I finally saw the movie, then went googling to find out more about it, and spent another 90 minutes reading all about it. Wow!
July 2002: movie party... Dead Poets Society, Airplane, ...
July 2002: nifty! BookCrossing from chatting with danbri in #rdfig .
Snow Falling on Cedars ISBNCode 978067976402151200 . by by David Guterson October 1995. Finished it Nov 2002 (started it on my October trip to Bristol?). The writing got me into the characters; I had high hopes for the ending, but it just sorta petered out.
extreme book review in sep 2000 research notebook; thin air in Dec '96 personal notes.
Spring 2002: we're reading the Harry Potter books to the kids at bed time. Fun stuff. Gotta be careful to give the right message about witchcraft...
July 2002: saw "The Rookie" with the boys in MN. Great! Wanna see it again with Mary and Mom. That reminds me... I wanna see For Love of the Game
As a birthday present for Dan, Jack and Marilyn took him and Mary to see Sérgio and Odair Assad, guitar duo (2Feb2002). What they do seems plainly impossible.
Saw Lord of the Rings 7Jan2002 with Andy. Mary and I went to see it a while ago, but it was sold out. Thumbs up for moviewatcher where you can buy online ahead of time and be sure. The moviewatcher freebies are pretty good too.
This movie was good... maybe even great... but it didn't live
up to the hype. I remember thinking this part is
slow; could be edited out. I'm a big Tolkein fan...
read the Hobit and the trilogy... more than once, I think.
(couldn't get into the silmarilion, though. not that big
of a fan.) The dark riders were scarier in the
book than in the film.
15Mar2002: saw The Time Machine with Andy at Town Center 20. Better than I expected.
original works:
- A Young Man, 18 Apr 1989
- Which way to go, Jun 20 1992 (in Mac Originals/Music)
Hmm... after wrestling with HFSOnLinux, I restored my studio session files, but my copy of the app won't run. Aha! studio session is still out there, and it runs under Mac OS X! Hmm... how to get my data back? I can't seem to print to PDF in classic mode; I can make a 22khz sound sample, but that's not really what I want. Aha! the studio session file format is published:
This Document release Date: 11/8/93 (ver 1.0 of "SSS-form.txt") THE STUDIO SESSION SONG FILE FORMAT (Editor version 1.0) -------------------------------------------------------- Format created by: Steve Capps <capps@applelink.apple.com>, Mark Zimmer, Tom Hedges, Ed Bogas, Nick Borelli, Ty Roberts, and Neil Cormia of Bogas Software in 1986.
from the U.T. Austin days... Tequila Sunrise (1988)... Rod Stewart 27 Jul 1988. The Education of Little Tree
hmm... how to organize... MoviesDanSaw, MichaelCrichtonBooks... DansUnifyingPrinciples, ScriptureNotes
I recommend various books in association with amazon.com.
ToDo: reconstruct cassette metadata collection, linking songs with life experiences.
"National Treasure", Free Masons, Knights Templar --connolly, Tue, 28 Dec 2004 23:53:39 +0000 reply
First the Da Vinci Code, now National Treasure sends me into wikipedia to read about Free Masons, Knights Templar, and the Priory of Sion.
Too many VHS tapes? --connolly, Sun, 02 Jan 2005 08:18:51 +0000 reply
Before getting rid of some (via amazon marketplace, maybe?), I made
an index.
McMurtry?'s Berrybender Narratives --connolly, Tue, 01 Feb 2005 18:52:19 +0000 reply
In the Chicago airport, on the outbound leg of my November 2004 trip to Boston, I discovered a McMurtry? book I hadn't read: By Sorrow's River : The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3. I got Sin Killer for Christmas and read it on my January trip to Helsinki. English gentry meets the wild west. Fun!
FilmTrust? --connolly, Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:23:32 +0000 reply
FilmTrust is a project at UMD, one hop away from my research group. It seems to take a symbolic approach to a problem where statistical methods seem more promising to me, but let's see if it's fun and useful.
Hollywood on Hughes --connolly, Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:20:08 +0000 reply
saw "The Aviator" 5 Feb. New sitter, new theater. Howard Hughes
different than and LVP's Troublesome Twenty-Seven --connolly, Wed, 01 Jun 2005 15:35:03 +0000 reply
The "Troublesome Twenty-Seven" from
The Lively Art of Writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne is permanently etched into my brain ever since Ewing's writing class; sorta like the way syntax coloring rules are burned into text editors these days.
"The Last Juror", trying out bookcrossing --connolly, Thu, 02 Jun 2005 19:55:49 +0000 reply
I think DanBri? told me about BookCrossing a while back; I didn't get past the initial sign-up hurdle until today: I created a dan93 bookshelf and put
my copy of The Last Juror in there.
Verdict: tentative thumbs-down. It was a hassle to sign up; the first two screen-names I chose were already taken, and the form forgot my email address, country, and state each time I chose a new screen name. There's no option to keep your city or age unlisted, as far as I can see. And it's kinda slow and klunky. And the community feels too big for me to feel like a significant part of it. Not much value for the investment, so far.
books on tapes on cancer, Parkinson's disease --connolly, Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:08:15 +0000 reply
On the road to the CSAIL offsite and back, Mary and I listened to Lucky Man about/by Michael J. Fox and his Parkinson's disease diagnosis, and It's not about the bike, by/about Lance Armstrong, about his cancer diagnosis and recovery
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