Calgary, like probably every city, hosted a Harry Potter release bash downtown last night. The Downtown Association converted a block of the outdoor mall into a reasonable approximation of Diagon Alley, which is awesome.

Even the misanthropic jerks who wear their ignorance or disinterest of Harry Potter like some kind of friggin merit badge have to admit: they don't do this shit for The Wheel of Time books.



It was crazily packed, but fortunately I'm my own camera boom. Neil and Teri were going to join us with their kids, but they couldn't make it through the crowd and had to abort.

( More pictures. Entirely safe to click and spoiler-free! Except for Harry Potter being dead in the last one. )

This morning, we buy two of the books. We'd just have gotten one, but Lisa's got first crack at it and I couldn't very well go to Comic-con without being at least most of the way through it, because it will be discussed. And then I'd have to break a foot off.

And check out my new celestial warhorse! Bad ass.

Last week Kyle introduced me to Rifftrax, the current project of Mystery Science Theater 3000 alumnus Mike Nelson. As with most of his projects, the aim of Rifftrax is to encourage cretins of every stripe to whisper jokes to each other during movies.

Yeah, I do that.

The other aim of Rifftrax is to improve on MST3K by making fun of movies that people would actually want to watch--and in fact already own. Simply buy and download the commentary MP3, and play it and your movie at the same time. Which neatly evades the copyright issues that keep MST3K from wide release.

And by god they had me at "you can wear your camping ascot" in the free sample of Star Trek V. Unfortunately I do not actually own Star Trek V. But I own Matrix, Fellowship of the Ring, X-Men, and, for some reason, Daredevil. So of course I bought all those.

I'm not made of stone.

darkjazon alerted kyohazard that we made yesterday's Calgary Sun, and now, as part of the Great Tubes Of The Interwob, I'm telling you.

Behaving in silly ways on the local media reminds me of the good ol' days. (sniff.)

"Really good turnout," Paul Dini said to me, as he signed the cover of my Batman Animated Series season one set. "Calgary's been starving for a decent con," I told him. "You don't have one?" he said. "We do," I said, "but it thinks it's a literary convention, and it's been running itself into the ground for ten years."

( Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, year one )

A few weeks ago I took The Visual QuickPro Guide to Panther Server out from the library. I'd have gotten the Tiger Server Guide instead, but unfortunately it does not yet exist.

Ordinarily I learn computery things by just monkeying with them, but I've been going through the manual page by page, section by section. Tiger Server's administration may be graphical, but it isn't intuitive. At least, it isn't to me.

This weekend I got to the end of the book.

Updated mikeintosh.net DNS to point to my own IP: accomplished.

Updated fernish.com to also point at my own IP: done.

Mail server set up and running: done. E-mail addresses for Lisa and I plus catch-all admin account: working fine.

Web server running: yep.

Redirect for incoming fernish.com requests to Lisa's home folder instead of mine: not there yet. I think both domains are still going to my user folder. I will have to work on that.

Installed Gallery: miserable, miserable failure.

Gallery is an open source image hosting thingie that's, well, pretty much just like LiveJournal's service, really. Maire used to run it on her server. It makes the creation and maintaining of art sites a lot easier.

Gallery 2.1.1 has a pretty, pretty web-based installer, which gets to the point at which it connects to the mySQL database, which it then refuses to do. One has to pre-create the database in Terminal, which I've done. But the web interface won't connect to it. I've reinstalled mySQL and PHP, both of which Tiger Server already comes with. It didn't help. It probably made things worse, since now I have two mySQL interfaces which don't really get along with each other. I beat my head against that brick wall for a few hours today.

I tried installing Gallery 1.5 instead. It requires image editing software: either NetPBM or ImageMagick. The version of NetPBM that Gallery helpfully provides is missing one of the components that Gallery specifically needs. The newer version requires UNIXey compiler things. ImageMagick also wants a C compiler, which all systems should have and I apparently don't. I only beat my head against that wall for one hour, until Lisa made me stop.

This command-line stuff is so alien to my Mac experience. Does anyone have any advice? arcadiax especially?

London Drugs dropped their price on the Master Replica lightsabers to $99. I tried, but I'm not made of stone.

And I just happen to have a nerdy outfit to go with it.

Of course, I see that they have this one now. Jerks.

( More Pictures )In other nerd news, I bought Lisa these. Drawn as she is to bead stores, she foolishly promised to game if I bought her pretty shiny dice; she didn't think I'd actually do it. She was mistaken.

GOOD NEWS: Doctor Who has been picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel and will air in the U.S. in March.

BAD NEWS: The Region 1 DVD release has been pushed back to July. It appears that we will have to wait for our DVDs until the damn Yankees catch up.

Kyle and I are on the Serenity DVD!

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kyohazard/47811.html



How's THAT for a special feature?

Now that I spend a fair portion of my workday driving to and fro, talking to subcontractors and whatnot, I bought myself an early Christmas present--a Bluetooth cellphone headset.

Lisa calls it Uhura. Or she's calling me Uhura when I wear it. I'm not sure.

The best part of it is that I can sing Waterloo in traffic, as I am in fact doing now. Oh, he's talking on his ear thingie, people think. They are wrong.

The second best part is that when I AM talking on it as I walk around, people think I'm having a psychotic break. They're generally wrong there too, unless I'm having one of ten percent of the calls that sounds like staticky crap, in which case not.

I posted this from the car. I think I have a widget PROBLEM.

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/newsitem.cfm?NewsID=4331

We've been looking at the possibility of Canada receiving a set of the 2005 Doctor Who series for awhile now, and it's finally paid off. The BBC posted a press release talking about their sales successes in Canada, and there's a mention of a Canadian season one set scheduled for February 14, 2006.

There aren't any plans to release the set in the US at this time, since no US broadcaster has picked up the rights to air the series. The good news is that Canada and the US are both region 1, so you'll have no problem picking it up if you live South of the border.

We'll have more information when it becomes available. Canadians will be able to watch the second season of the series on CBC, as well as a Christmas special, hosted exclusive by Billie Piper (companion "Rose Tyler"), which will air on Boxing Day (12/26).

Read the BBC press release.

Two Saturdays ago, Jason told us that a liquidation place had liquidated a knifery store and was selling replica Lord of the Rings things at low, low prices. He had already bought a Saruman staff, and wanted to go back for more things. So Lisa and James and Kyle and I went to test our willpower.

The first visit I behaved pretty well: I only picked up a sword cane. I've been enviously eyeing canadianknight's sword cane since ever, so when I saw one for around $30, heck, I was all over it!

	Stabby stabby!

I felt sorry for Kyle. They had both the Macleod claymore and the ivory katana from Highlander for a very reasonable price. About $100 for the pair, I think. Poor, poor Kyle--he didn't want to spend that kind of cash, and both James and I offered to lend it to him. In the end he bowed to the inevitable and bought them himself.

( It began with a bloody S! )

http://www.superherohype.com/news/batmannews.php?id=3580

Awesome.

"Man, I hope we're not the only people there," we thought. And then we ran into some others at the Chinook train station, who said that they'd been worried about the same thing, and we were all relieved. And when we got to Olympic Plaza, we found a sizable group waiting. And then others staggered up, until eventually there had to be at least 500 of us.

It was amazing. I hadn't been to a real scare-the-mundanes event since the Astra--and the Astra on its best days was never on this scale. As we approached the Victoria Park train station, there were easily over a hundred zombies ahead of us--and we were near the front. Looking back, we still stretched down the length of 17th Ave.

We gooped up restaurant windows and flailed at passing cars and drooled fake blood all over everything and had a crazily great time. Chinook Centre mall security feared us, and after the second wave they barred any more zombies from getting into the mall.

Afterwards we went to Vampire, still zombied up. The house we were playing at is very close to my parents', and I wrestled with the temptation to lead James, Justin and Kyle there to goop up my folks' front door. Sadly, I successfully resisted it.

( Pictures )

The rest of my pictures can be seen here. Lisa's gallery is here.

My new G5 arrived at work yesterday. I put it on top of my desk instead of underneath it because it pulls in a lot of air and is very big. And it's also very pretty. It's a dual 2 GHz with 2 gigs of RAM. Its name is Rex.

I bought my G4 (which is named Rover*) from my boss. Right now it's sitting on the living room floor, installing I'm not sure what. After diddling with its insides trying to set up the 60 and 80 GB drives, I finally established that the kernel panics I get at launch are because of my Panther CD. My Jaguar CD doesn't panic, but it just sits there and spins. My iBook's install CDs, which shouldn't work in the G4 at all, are installing happily--but I can't remember which OS it came with.

The ultimate goal is to create a webserver out of it. I've found PHP and mySQL installers, but the actual real monkeying with the server will have to wait until after the move. For right now I only need to get the OS and Timbuktu installed so that I can give the old monitor back to Michael.

*When I started work at Newdog, the Power Mac 7200 that was there was already named Fido. So I named the G4 Rover when I got it, and when I installed a second 80 GB drive in it last Christmas I named that Spot. Plenty of dog names to go!

Who wants to adopt a hamster?

( The Home )

( Widgetry )

Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs. That's bad.

Pirates of Silicon Valley is released on DVD. That's good!

The Frogurt is also cursed.

Two things that should never have happened have now taken place.

One: I now own a video game console.

Two: Something made by Microsoft is in my house.

Hooker? We Didn't Even Know Her!

On Thursday night, we had just left the Wendy's near Horton Plaza, and were heading north to the hotel, when an attractive (but not unreasonably so) woman asked Kyle and Justin if she could walk with us. So as not to get shanked, she said. She walked next to Justin and Kyle in the front, and Michael walked in the middle, and Lisa and I were last because Lisa has the shortest legs.

She didn't talk that much, but it's hard to talk as much as Michael. At one point she let us know "oh no, they don't shoot WHITE people," which horrified our Canadian ears, because it implied that not only do they shoot non-white people, but that they do it because nobody cares. Calgary was horrified last summer when a purse snatcher menaced downtown, because he rode a BIKE and someone might get run over and HURT.

She didn't seem to be on her way to anywhere in particular. When we turned west we asked if that was far enough for her, and where she was going. "To where people are," she said diffidently. And we went our separate ways from there.

"I think she was a hooker," Lisa said to me later.

"A hooker? Nooooo," I said, surprised. "Why?"

"Her behaviour was weird. First, a girl on her own downtown at night is weird. It makes sense for her to want to walk with a group for safety--but to approach a group of GUYS? Weird. And a girl finding herself in a strange group of people would have hung next to the OTHER girl, for safety, but she didn't even look at me. She walked next to Justin."

"That does seem weird," I said, "you would have appeared to be the least threat. Well, either you or the obvious flaming homosexual. But wouldn't a hooker have made an overture to Justin?"

"I didn't say she was a good hooker. Maybe she was waiting for him to invite her. In case he was a cop or something."

"Huh. Well, better not tell him," I said. "He'll be very disappointed."

The guys told him at some point, so on Monday as we were waiting in the airline line, they argued about it. "It's like we're in a Friends episode!" I whispered to Kyle and, giggling, he videoed some of it.

There was also this comic book convention thingie that went on.

( Canadiana )

( Photos )

Lisa and I were facing each other on the train on Sunday afternoon.

Over my right shoulder, through the train window, she could see someone walking up the platform. Wow, look at that hair, she thought. And the collar! Man.

He passed into my field of view, and she expected me to make a similar observation, except out loud. I didn't. "Oh! Hey, it's D---!" I said.

I expected her to ask "where?" She didn't. "You know him?" she cried.

"Sure."

"I saw him walking up. I didn't think you'd know him!" she said. She indicated two punk kids who'd gotten onto our car. "Do you know them?"

I craned around. "No. But I bet they LARP. Hey, I have my dice in my pencil box. I'll just roll my D20 across the floor here and--"

"Please don't."

In other nerdly pursuits, Batman Begins begins today. I firmly expect it to be awesome, as it has much to make up for. Even if it isn't, this weekend I bought this costume, which is now being worn by one of my childhood GUND bears, as I have difficulty resisting stupid crap with Batman on it. (I came home from last year's Comic-Con with a Batman stuffie too.)