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June 04: Went to Bloom in the Phoenix Park; same problem as I had last year - there's not a clear demarcation between "food you can eat right now because you are hungry" and "food to buy and bring home", leading to an amount of confused wandering followed by opting for the same thing we had last year (pulled pork, admittedly very, very nice).

Becoming Jane was a good enough movie, but I didn't much like that they basically attributed the opening line of Pride and Prejudice to one of her male friends. If you're going to make a movie about an independently-minded successful woman, why undermine it in this way? Anyway, that aside, it's a bit of fun, and we did enjoy it.
June 01: Apparently I've watched over a thousand movies since I started this diary (August 2000), although it looks like I didn't seriously start taking notes until late 2002ish.
May 27: I read "All The Light We Cannot See" recently, and The Book Thief is in a similar sort of space as Werner Pfennig from that book. The narration by Death is a bit gimmicky, particularly since it's mostly a voiceover at the start and another at the end, and perhaps it's a facet of the book (which I haven't read) that the movie team couldn't figure out how to otherwise translate to the screen but felt it was an essential element. I dunno, I think it could have been left out without impact on the work as a whole. It's a good movie, however, and worth seeing.
May 21: Python on Mac comes with a module for reading and writing extended attributes, key to the TimeMachine hackery I've been engaged in and certainly makes the various stunts I've been doing in bash unnecessary. Just need to port all this code over...
May 14: Noting for the record: Dad completes his 8th decade and celebrates by climbing a mountain.

My achievement for the day: setting up VPN access to my home network. Not as impressive in any dimension, even if it did take a bit of fiddling around.
May 10: TimeMachine hackery: finished adding attributes to a large collection of "fake" backups. Then discovered I had the attribute format wrong. D'oh. Oh well, it was getting to the point where I needed to stop trying to do this in shell script anyway.

Hmm, actually, it still works - I renamed the backup "root directory" to "Server HD" - to match the server the backup lives on - and TimeMachine is now happy to browse the files for me. Sweet!
May 08: There was actual sunshine today. Like, real, warm, solar radiation.
May 06: For a movie starring David Bowie, The Hunger gives him a relatively short amount of screen time and for most of it he's in prosthetic aging make-up. The movie itself is loosely a horror - a vampire story - and belongs in the category of Not Actually A Bad Movie. The coda is clearly a tacked-on piece that doesn't quite fit with the lore of the movie established immediately preceeding it; this is confirmed (in as much as industry gossip cut-and-pasted from trade magazines by volunteers is a confirmation) by the IMDb trivia for the movie stating that the production company wanted to leave the way open for a sequel. Anyway, ignore that bit, the rest of it has pretty solid internal logic.
May 01: The Tourist is totally a bubblegum movie, but it's actually a bit of fun. Certainly not the disaster you'd expect if you went by the IMDb trivia page. Nobody does anything terribly fancy, and there's a twist that you could probably guess at but is reasonably well-concealed. Me and her were picking at the movie-geography of Venice, mind you.
April 29: Green Zone is a fairly decent thriller, as you'd expect from post-Bourne Matt Damon; not a whole lot else to say about it - there are no surprises in this movie, except that they apparently didn't have the budget or schedule to pay for Brendan Gleeson to come back for the finale reshoots. Worth a look.