Tuesday, January 26, 2010

nine at the nova

It was a quiet day at the office on Oz Day eve, so I knocked off a bit early and strolled up Russell St in the late afternoon sunshine to Lygon St and the Nova cinema.

I'd forgotten that Monday was cheap ticket day at the Nova, so in a 'good news/bad news' thing, I bought a ticket to see 'Nine' for only $8 (compared to $17 had I opted to go to the Hoyts in the city!), but found that I was sharing a fairly packed theatre by the time that the movie started.

I'm not sure how to rate this film. It had some brilliant moments, but seemed to lack something. The stellar cast was spectacular! Who would have imagined a movie with such a multinational cast of brilliant performers: Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson and leading man Daniel Day-Lewis.

The music sequences were also spectacular, and it was a treat to see the performers in action. One of the problems with the movie, though was that it was overly-blessed with big production numbers. By the end, I almost had 'belt out overload'. I guess each of the stars wanted to make a mark with their main number, but the result was like the songs were competing with each other, rather than complementary.

At any rate, it was a enjoyable film, so I guess I'd give it a 3.5 star rating, and look forward to seeing it on blu ray again some time in the future.

it's got the jack!

I'm sorry, but I cannot bring myself to respect a national flag that's blemished by the flag of a foreign nation.

Every year about this time, the same backwards-looking redneck bogans look up from their barbies and navel-gazing and scream about how their ancestors fought and died under the current flag.

Our forebears also massacred the indigenous people of this country and stole their land, but we don't do that any more. They also mostly saw themselves as British subjects, rather than Australian - but we don't think that way any more (or do they???)

It's long past time for a change to that ugly, demeaning flag, to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we're a modern nation, no longer tied to our colonial past.

Myself, I don't think the flag needs major changes. I'd settle for the existing Southern Cross on blue, with the Jack excised from the corner. I'd also love the Eureka Southern Cross flag. And I wouldn't be averse to some variation of the Aboriginal flag (although I'm really partial to the Southern Cross and blue-and-white colours).

Whatever, I just wish we had our own flag; one that I could respect as a true reflection of my country, and not one that makes us look like subjects of a foreign nation.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

eine kleine nachtmarkt

One of my favourite things to do in Melbourne in Summer has to be the Queen Victoria night market on Wednesday evenings.

It was a pleasant 27-degree evening, so after work, I strolled down to Myer to look for a new pair of shoes (unsuccessfully). By the time I finished there, it was around 5:30, so I decided to walk up Lonsdale St to Queen St, and then down to the market. It wasn't yet 6 when I got there, but the place was already buzzing.

I checked out all the food stalls, to strike out the ones serving gluten-filled food, and then selected a delicious prawn and calamari jambalaya for dinner, washed down with a refreshing (but WAY over-priced - $8!!) sangria. Then it was time wander around the stalls, with a hot, fairtrade latte in hand.

After an hour, I'd seen everything, and headed back down the road, arriving at the bus stop just in time for the #220 to collect me and get me safely home by 7:30. If only every Wednesday evening could be so agreeable!

drink, drive, murderer

Steven Johnstone's girlfriend might get some comfort from describing him as 'a beautiful soul' (the Age, 20 Jan), but the rest of us should remember him as a drunk driver who murdered four teenagers by driving and speeding with a blood alcohol level of .19.

No sympathy for drink-driving criminals whose actions kill, maim and put others at such terrible risk. May he rot in hell.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

faithless and proud!

The recent publicity about 'new atheism' really fascinates me. I'll come right out and say it now: I'm an atheist, and I probably always have been. I can't remember a time when I ever really really believed in any gods... the closest I ever came to faith was a belief in Santa Claus when I was young. (And that ended badly!)

I don't know how I came to be an atheist.

My father came from a family torn by religious conflict. His father, son of a strict (and venomous :-) Catholic family, incurred the wrath of that family by marrying my grandmother. She was also a devout Christian - just not of the Catholic variety. So out of the goodness of their dear little god-fearing hearts, and no doubt in accordance with their understanding of their bible, they saw it as their duty to ostracise my grandmother and try to end the marriage by basically acting as though she didn't exist. For most of her life. Nice.

She tried not to take it personally; he drowned his sorrows.

My mother's family was nominally CofE, but aside from a half-hearted attempt to get me to go to Sunday school for a few weeks when I was little, but not that impressionable, religion never really raised its ugly head in my childhood home.

I attended government schools, thereby avoiding indoctrination in early education, and as my mind tends naturally towards logic, I guess I just never learned to believe in faith.

It was only when I started Uni that I first became aware of how entrenched religion was in those around me. I began to realise that many of my friends, whom I had believed to be beings of reason and logic like myself, actually professed to being catholic or jewish or buddhist. And they weren't embarrassed to admit it in public.

I found myself in such a minority that I eventually declined to discuss religion at all, not wanting to offer myself as a constant target for conversion by the 'missionaries'.

So over the years, I've kept quiet hold of my atheism, never waivering from my lack of faith, and not worrying that I was in such a minority.

But I *LOVE* that there's now a recognised movement of atheists, ready to stand up and challenge the blind faithful, and not be prepared to listen to their dogma and pretend it makes sense.

Atheists rule!

Thursday, January 7, 2010

0 of 7

So picking up the thread from earlier... I tried installing Windows 7 the evening that I got it home. I inserted the install disk; it played; it installed a stack of temp files, and it then provided me with a list of existing applications on my desktop pc that it didn't like. It told me that I either had to disable or uninstall them, in order for the upgrade to proceed.

I exited the install. I disabled iTunes, I uninstalled an old photo editing application, I didn't have Norton's 2007 installed, so I couldn't remove it, and I switched off my anti-virus app.

I restarted the Win 7 install. It installed a stack of temp files, and it again provided me with the list of applications on my desktop pc that it didn't like. It told me that I either had to disable or uninstall them, in order for the upgrade to proceed.

Only trouble was, I had complied with all of its demands, except for removing the non-existent Norton's, and it didn't recognise the changes.

So I did it all again. And this time, for good measure, I rebooted the pc.

Then I ran the Win 7 upgrade install again. And I got the same result...

All this had taken me about 45 minutes so far, and I hadn't even begun to get the upgrade done.

I decided that I would have to try harder to remove Norton's. I scanned the harddisk, I searched the harddisk. I scoured the web. I found two separate programs that were designed to remove Nortons (even though I was quite sure that I had never installed it on this machine!) I downloaded and ran both of them. Still Win 7 insisted that Norton's was there.

By this time, it was getting late, and my patience was as exhausted as I was, so removed the disk and went to bed.

Next evening, I started again, and confirmed the same situation.

In desperation, I decided to search the registry for any signs of rogue Norton's files. Again no luck.

At the end of evening 2, I tapped the mat and decided that I would just by-pass this step and proceed to install anyway.

I loaded the disk again on evening 3, and proceed to the same result.

This time, I decided to just click 'ok' and keep going. How naive can you get?? Of course, Microsoft doesn't give up that easily! Unless I could convince it that the problems it was detecting were not real, it would not let me proceed; no way no how!

At the end of evening 3, I finally realised that I would be unable to upgrade my Vista to Win 7. My only option would be to do it as a new install, thus losing all of my existing settings, data etc from my pc. Thanks, heaps, Microsoft! There goes my Christmas Eve!

it's disturbing

Saw my first film for the new year today - a romantic comedy called "It's Complicated".

The story didn't sound too promising, but with a cast featuring both Meryl (I feel that we can be on first name terms by now, having seen so many of her films recently) and Alec Baldwin, plus Steve Martin, I had to give it a try.

It wasn't too bad, but I have to say, it was the least of the movies that Meryl has made in the past 18 months or so... not a patch on Mamma Mia, Doubt or Julie & Julia. Comedy isn't Meryl's strong suit. She seemed larger than life in this ordinary suburban divorcee role - more like Meryl playing a part, than the actual character that she was meant to be. Alec Baldwin was terrific though, and provided many of the laughs.

But to be fair to the cast and the story, something in the movie caught my eye early on, constantly distracting me and taking me 'out of the moment'.

It was Steve Martin's FACE! OMG! It looks as though he's survived a bad accident. That is the WORST case of plastic surgery trauma that I have EVER seen on screen. A man of his age whose face has NO lines whatsoever! In one scene, he grinned from ear-to-ear, and you'd swear he'd just been attacked with Joker venom! It was ghastly! There was no way that you could imagine that Meryl would be more interested in a man with the head of a store dummy than in Alec! I wanted to avert my eyes every time he appeared on the screen.

There's no doubt about it - Steve Martin's face ruined any chance I had of really enjoying this movie. Despite that, it did have some amusing moments, so it wasn't a total waste of time... but if I were him, I'd just sue the surgeons and never worry about working again.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

MS conspiracy theory 7.0 and a slow new year

Whatever was I thinking? All set for a relaxing Christmas Eve, when I snap-decided to upgrade my desktop pc to Windows 7!

I bought this machine at a time when only Vista was available, not long after it superseded XP, but before XP started to become available again, as people revolted against Vista.

To tell the truth, Vista had not been the problem for me that it seemed to have been for the vocal... umm... majority? so I had been in no great rush to upgrade to W7 when it was released.

Except for one thing.

Since around June or July, my computer has had a constant case of 'update-itis'. Until then, I'd get 3 or 4 notices from Microsoft every month that I had updates to install, and I'd restart my machine, and they'd download and install.

But around 6 months ago, the updates started to come more often. Daily, in fact. And since I'm on a relatively low monthly download limit, I couldn't 'afford' to download them all the time.

Now Vista was cunningly set up to save time and electricity by being able to go into sleep mode when the computer was not in use, BUT, if there was an upgrade to download, it would automatically do so if you selected to put the pc to sleep (instead of turning it completely off). By late July, I was forced to either turn my pc completely off, or leave it constantly on, all the time, because I constantly had upgrades waiting - one 'critical' one of which would download, but fail to install *every time*!

Finally, I decided that the only way to fix this issue would be to upgrade my way out of it, so I made the fateful decision (ok, on the spur of the moment during a late Christmas shopping expedition at Myers) to buy the Windows 7 upgrade.

I can't say that I wasn't warned of what I was in for, though.

As I purchased the box, the sales assistant asked me if I had ever installed a Windows upgrade before. When I told him that I had, he advised me to ***call a friend to help before I tried installing Windows 7***!!!!!

OMG... what had I done???