January 2005 Archives
I take no responsibility for what my brain does while I'm asleep. So I offer this purely for interest's sake and not as something to critique. Another dream joke (see this entry) was waiting for me on my desk this morning.
I love the feeling of grass beneath the soles of my feet. So I filled my shoes with grass seed and damp compost.
I think I'll be updating my IMDb Checklist fairly frequently, though I won't normally crow about every update on the front page. But here's an exception.
Since last week I've watched a couple more movies from the list: The Green Mile and The Big Lebowski now appear with that crappy white-flecked two-state-transparency green tick GIF over them, indicating some measure of early progress in my film-ticking endeavours. Unfortunately, while they're both in the top 250, neither of them is in the top 100, so I'm really no closer to achieving my specific goal. Bah! (If you're a registered IMDb voter, please vote movies I've seen up into the top 1001.)
I've replaced nearly every one of the missing or obviously incorrect images used for the films. So gone are the bizarrely incongruent pictures of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) for the movie Laura (1944) and Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars (2004) for Rebecca (1940), amongst others. Which is a bit of a shame, because I've actually seen the incorrect two. Some of the images could probably still be improved upon, but at least now they're all there and I think they're also all correct -- unless I've overlooked something.
I mention on the checklist page that I'm not linking to the source code I used to do the list generation. However, if anybody's really interested in seeing my abysmal code, I don't mind sharing it with them on request. There'll be no usage restrictions or anything -- I'm just interested to know who's got it and whether they're making use of it.
Oh, and while I'm posting I might as well remark that I've added a couple more Xbox games to my collection.
1 Not a serious request.
New things:
- Atom! The site was missing an Atom feed? Oops.
- Linked to personal profiles on some interesting web services. Audioscrobbler tracks what music I'm listening to. Bloglines shares my subscribed feeds. 43 Things I already talked about.
- Offsite links on the sidebar -- 5 at random from a long list. My solution to the problem of linking to everyone who links to me whilst keeping the sidebar a sane length. Regenerated at template rebuild (i.e. when new entries are posted, also comments).
Gotta go!
I made some changes across the site tonight, mostly aimed at halting the tide of spammy comments which -- despite not getting any further than my moderation queue, and therefore serving no purpose whatsoever to those who spawn them -- still end up taking up more of my attention than I'd like. To this end, I've done something long overdue, which is to close off comments and trackbacks on a load of old entries (only the quiet ones). I don't think this will bother anybody, but it gives the spambots about 300 fewer points to target.
On a related note, let me know if you start getting 403 Forbidden messages, won't you? There's a small chance I've screwed up a regexp...
One of my goals/resolutions/43 things (see here for background) is to watch the top 100 movies in the IMDb's user ratings chart. A couple of days ago I printed up a list of the top 100 that I could put on my pinboard, crossing off a title at a time with a marker pen.
But as it stared me in the face, I felt a sense of growing shame. What kind of self-respecting computer geek -- or even ex-computer-geek -- uses a pen and paper to track something so structured? So I came up with something better. A visual checklist. It has stats, it looks cool, it exercised my atrophied coding muscles, and perhaps most importantly it exposes my movie hermit nature to the entire world for ridicule. Look, he hasn't even seen Jaws! What an idiot!
I know that a few of the thumbnails in the 101-250 range are incorrect or missing. (That's what happens when you let a computer do a man's job.) I'll fix those up later, but I've already done the important part -- the top 100. Those are the ones I resolved to watch. The others are included as a bonus.
I'll be updating this list periodically. Hopefully with the help of LoveFilm, I'll make significant progress towards this goal by the end of the year.
I've just brought my list of Xbox games up to date with 3 new box covers.
I'm not sure if I'm alone in doing this, but very occasionally I'll dream something that I'll think is so cool that I will scramble out of bed, find a piece of paper, and write it down, to ensure that it isn't forgotten.
Of course, it's not until the cold light of the morning that you get to see whether it was actually any good, or whether it was only good when you were evaluating it with the peculiar rules of half-asleep dream logic.
Yesterday morning I found a piece of paper on my desk with a quote on it. I could just barely recall writing it. Presumably, someone said this line in my dream, and I thought it was funny enough to get out of bed in the early hours and transcribe.
I'll let you be the judge.
"Ever since I was a kid, right up until recently, I thought that a common alternate name for polar bears was 'soap goats'."
And so we arrive again at that point in the calendar where peer pressure dictates that we make some token effort to identify attributes of ourselves that, in an ideal world, would receive more attention -- with an eye towards improvement, or possibly even eradication -- and state that, henceforth, we will make a deliberate endeavour to address these concerns. To make a set of resolutions, if you will, for the new year.
The set of resolutions that I made last year proved too much for my feeble willpower, and I didn't truly manage to carry out a single one of them. I'm not going to do a post-mortem -- it's too depressing -- but if you wish, you can get much the same effect by reading my six-month progress report. Nothing has really changed since then, except that the one resolution that was going well in July has since fallen by the wayside. Failure-tastic!
The task of assembling a new list of resolutions for this year was something I haven't been looking forward to, and so I've been putting it off for the last couple of days. But this evening, while I was playing with a new social networking site that's just gone live, I realised that my list of resolutions was literally right in front of me.
The site in question is 43 Things, and it's based around the premise of recording -- and sharing -- a list of your goals. On the assumption that public goals and friendly advice might help you to complete your objectives, this seems like a good idea. Goals vary from the functional ("full HD backup") to the ambitious ("write a book and have it published") to the abstract ("be happy"). Users can leave comments on goals with questions, thoughts, or advice, and you can see which comments have been left by someone who has actually completed that goal.
I've only been using it for a few days, but I think it might be quite useful. There's the fact that thinking about objectives -- as this site encourages you to do -- gives you a better idea of what you might want to pursue next. There's the hope that exposing your todo list to an active community will be a good motivator. And there's the possibility that getting involved in this community will open doors that lead to things you want to do. Genuine case study: Toby wants to learn about different kinds of mushroom, so listed this as a goal. An hour later there were tentative arrangements for a field trip with a mushroom hunting expert!
This site has already done me a favour by helping me to create my list of new year resolutions without me even realising it. And so, instead of posting them here, I can politely direct you towards my 43 Things profile. They're not all new year resolutions -- some are much more long-term than that -- but they are the Things I Want To Do Or Be, and that's close enough. I'll try to keep the list updated, and if you want to keep an eye on me and give me some peer pressure, I won't complain. And if your curiosity has been engaged, you could sign up for 43 Things -- maybe we have some goals in common.
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