Blog: Archive for July, 2002

I skipped out of work a bit early (I'm going in on Sunday) to see The Powerpuff Girls Movie with M, which was as fun as I'd hoped and expected. Although Roger Ebert hated it because he apparently (1) thought it was aimed at two-year-olds, and (2) was afraid it would remind the aforementioned two-year-olds of the “tragic events of September 11”; and Richard Roeper revealed some deep psychological problems by suggesting that the Professor had some perverse desires for his created daughters, the film itself held up quite well.

As seems to be standard practice these days, The Powerpuff Girls Movie tells the story of the origin of the Powerpuff Girls (and of Mojo Jojo). We've seen some of it before on the show, but this version gives us a lot more information about the events preceding their creation (who knew Townsville could even be so awful?), but also tells us about the events immediately afterwards (some of which you could understand the PPG wanting to gloss over...).

In the process, the film makes innumerable filmic references—King Kong (Mojo carrying the girls up the side of a skyscraper) is obvious; less obvious, perhaps, is Tron (the girls zipping through the city streets, making right-angle turns); and getting downright obscure is Baraka (the white primate boiling the water in the reservoir). Definitely one for watching again and again on DVD....

It's not a kids' film, though, at least not for kids younger than 12 or so. For one thing, the film is rated PG, perhaps to protect small children from being reminded of the “horrors of 9/11” (as if that made any significant impact on kids who didn't lose a relative in the attack). The little kids in the audience at our showing grew bored about halfway in, and began wandering around, abusing the furniture, and whining.

This is also the first animated film or show I've ever seen that acknowledged every one of the Korean animators who brought it to life. If I didn't hate the word “kudos”, I'd offer them to the film's producers (although it may be that rules for films require much more disclosure than for television shows, anyway).

If you're smart, hip, and in the loop, you probably already watch The Powerpuff Girls on TV. Go see the film. You won't be disappointed. And question Ebert & Roeper's sanity.

In to work to detach the Promise UltraTrak array subsystem from the main server. That went well.

Unfortunately, the array doesn't seem to want to play well with others, as it's been spewing SCSI errors while I tried to create the filesystem. At the moment, I'm beating on it by writing zeroes across the entire array.

I had an insight into why kids never want to finish the dregs of a cereal box. I poured out a bowl of Crunchberries, and the bowl was almost completely “berries”, with hardly any “crunch”. When I pulled the bag out of the box, I found that vibration during shipment had caused almost all of the berries to rise to the top. I poured my bowl back into the bag, closed it up, held it upside down, and shook the bag until the cereal was more evenly distributed.

Meanwhile, at work, I discovered that the current Red Hat Rawhide kernel actually does fix the IDE problems with my Dull. Alas, in order to get the video card to drive the monitor properly, I have to rebuild the driver for each new kernel, which is made all the more annoying by the fact that I have to rebuild the kernel from a source RPM because Rawhide kernels are compiled with a different compiler (presumably gcc-3.x). So the machine is grinding away on that.

The sad thing is that it actually built a kernel from upstream source in about 5 minutes last night, but building from the source RPM applies a huge number of patches and builds several different versions of the kernel, so it takes a lot longer. While it's going, I'm having fun remembering what it was like when I started messing with Unix, typing on a text-based terminal window.

I could have rebooted and used one of the older kernels that I could run X with, but I think the gain in speed from working IDE DMA is probably more useful. Besides, it's kind of fun!

Beat my 2441 day uptime!
[When I restart my machine, it comes up thinking that it's 1934. Resetting the date causes some parts of the system to believe that almost seventy years have gone by in a flash.

The real uptime is only

 17:10:19 up 15 min,  5 users,  load average: 1.47, 1.90, 1.33

]