Archives: January 2003
Friday, January 31, 2003
Sunday night I watched Strictly Ballroom. It'd been ages since I'd seen it, and I'd not yet watched our copy from the Red Curtain box set. I was in need of something slightly more uplifting than Baz's other two films, Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge. Both great movies, but not high on the happy ending stakes.
Strictly Ballroom is so camp, but it's such a great story and movie. I can relate to the ugly duckling theme a lot from my teenage years. It also makes me want to take up ballroom dancing again, even though it's portrayed so over the top and tacky in the movie. It's still fun to do, though I was never as in to it as some of the couples in the movie, or in the documentary about ballroom dancing that features as one of the extras on the dvd. Some people really need to lighten up about their hobbies ;)
I've been picking my way through various features over the rest of the week, some off the Red Curtain disc, and now from the R+J disc. Baz really packs his dvd's with extras. There's loads of behind the scenes stuff and interviews. Good stuff.
@ 12:51 PM EST
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Woohoo!
Finally a new layout for this journal site. It took me a while to figure out how I was going to implement it, but eventually I figured it out... and I'm quite pleased with it.
@ 04:49 PM EST
Saturday, January 25, 2003
Last Sunday we went to see Gangs of New York. If you have a chance to see it, you really have to do so, absolutely brilliant.
It's the latest film by Martin Scorcese, about the Five Points neighbourhood in New York set in the mid 1800s. Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz give some good performances, but Daniel Day-Lewis is absolutely fucking brilliant in his role as Bill Cutter. Such a shame that he missed out on the Golden Globe for this, I'm hoping Oscar is more forgiving. If you're stomach gets queasy from violence, this film is best not for you as it's fairly unflinching in that respect, showing the violence of daily life and life in the gang riddled Five Points in particular. There's some stunning cinematography and costuming at work here, and some wonderful direction. Well worth it.
The rest of the week has been moderately quiet. I've been piecing together more of the new journal layout... tomorrow I'll probably start trying to piece the Greymatter stuff into the layout, which should be interesting.
We didn't make it out to Digital Murder either as I'd hoped we would. PreZ came home early Friday afternoon not feeling well and spent most of Friday evening and Saturday asleep and dosed on Day- and NyQuil. Next one is Feb 1st... want want want to go!
Hero of the week is StarvingStudent from the GOTH.NET Forums... more details in this LJ entry. Some most excellent comments there, and an all round hilarious open letter to an uncivilised co-dormdweller.
Next week I need to chase up our new healthcare provider... they managed to give me a card that has my first name on it and PreZ's last name. All fine and dandy were it not for the fact that I never assumed his name after we got married, and he even filled out my last name on the application. Apparantly reading 'spouse' somewhere on the form made someone just automatically assume that it didn't matter what my own last name was and that they should give me my husband's last name. I wouldn't care about it if it wasn't for the fact that I know this will cause me problems when I show the damn thing when I go to an appointment or something, and I'm not about to run around with a copy of my marriage license on me. Hopefully they get this sorted out soon, because I need to make an appointment with the ob-gyn for a check up and a new prescription.
Upside though to this new healthcare provider... co-pays are less ($5 instead of $15) and no deductible (that was a good $400/500 per person with the last provider) and the full 100% is reimbursed (as opposed to 90% with the other one)... finally good healthcare where you don't get raped with medical bills even though you do have insurance.
@ 02:17 AM EST
Friday, January 17, 2003
One of PreZ's co-workers got fired today. Though at least this time it was incompetence on the part of the co-worker, not the company having problems like last time. His boss even reassured him of the fact that this was the case.
On a more amusing note they're looking at one of PreZ's ex-colleagues from 'Muse for a potential job. They like to go on personal recommendations, and as things aren't going that great over at 'Muse most people there that haven't already gotten laid off are looking for other oppertunities anyway... so PreZ might find himself working with one of his old colleagues again.
I'm kind of drawing a blank at the moment as to what I exactly want to do with the layout for this section. Ah well, a new day in the morning to give it some thought, hopefully with less distractions like hour and a half long phone calls from mothers...
Thanks to Waulok for the PHP/MySQL tutorial he quickly wrote up for me earlier today. See if some of it makes sense before I dive into that to learn and apply to GOTH.NET when I eventually get around to redoing that site.
@ 12:54 AM EST
Thursday, January 16, 2003
I finished the Projects, Gallery and Past Layout pages for the main SG site. So there's now actually more than one picture of me on the site *gasp*.
Which reminds me that I need to get my rolls of film developed sometime, along with harrass my brothers to develop theirs and also to scan pre-existing ones of themselves and the cat, Abby. And they need to take more pictures of the cat... she's rapidly heading towards 16 (May 15th) and though the thought makes my stomach clench, she's old and we'll never know how long she'll be on this mortal coil for. I think that sometimes my family back home thinks I'm odd for constantly nagging them to take pictures of the cat. It's hard not seeing her, as with most pets it's an unconditional love thing, there's never anything clouding the issues, no conflicting emotions such as you might have with relatives and human loved ones.
Also I think I must harrass Kit and/or Cherie sometime this week and see if they're up for going out to Digital Murder on Saturday. It's been AGES since we went out, and it would be interesting to go to Kreestof's Industrial night and see his band play.
@ 02:49 AM EST
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
I finished and uploaded the new layout for the main Silentgarden domain yesterday. It's themed to the current season and it's weather and suchlike.
I'm really really pleased with it, it's a completely CSS based layout. I need to run it through the XHTML and CSS validation to see if all the code is up to scratch. I don't expect many mistakes in it though, I watched the code fairly carefully. I know that the coloured scrollbars will give me a CSS validation error being IE proprietary code, but that's a graphic license I'm taking. It doesn't appear in browsers that don't support it and does no other harm.
There are still a few small things to do with it before it's completely done though, I need to finish the pages for the gallery, projects and past layouts. 2 of those being completely new additions to the pages I had on the site, the projects one being one I just want to change content wise.
And then of course the layout for this section.
@ 04:03 PM EST
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Never assume things will be simple.
I thought that would be the case with the new layout for Silentgarden. Not so.
Okay, it would be a lot easier if I wasn't fussy about making it validate in XHTML or even trying to do a layout that shuns tables and opts for CSS positioning instead. XHTML restricts frame targets to four options, none of which are what I need in a layout based on complex framesets. The layout should have been as this current journal layout is, but I've had to scratch it and rethink the whole thing.
So after spending a fair bit of Friday night working on the framesets layout I had to scratch that and start over. A pain. Especially as the CSS work is slightly more complex than the idiotically simple tutorials online allow for so it's slow going by learning things from what other people have done on their sites.
Saturday was a veg day, slept through most of the day after going to bed at about 6.30am and then spent the evening watching movies on tv mostly. I'm hoping to get more work done on the site tonight, I want the new layout up.
Mental Note: Set VCR to tape Pitch Black and remember to watch The Perfect Storm. I also have some Farscape eps to watch too (though that will be later this week or so, not tonight)... remainder of this season started on Friday wheee!
@ 05:37 PM EST
Friday, January 10, 2003
No Broadway show last Saturday. Cabaret doesn't do rush tickets, and Metamorphoses was sold out unforunately. We ended up having dinner at a steak house before braving the bitter cold back to Grand Central and heading home.
Home we ended up playing FreeCiv against each other, with the inclusion of Bekar logging onto the network from Melbourne. It would have been more entertaining had the AI player not been in the game, it was a massacre which started early, leaving my civilisation homeless first. We were banding together in an attempt to thwart the damn AI, to no avail.
Sunday late afternoon it started snowing, as if on cue to herald in my brothers' departure. I'm glad there was snow over this Christmas period though, last year was so warm that there was barely any. Extra bonus was that we actually had a snow storm *on* Christmas day... White Christmas as per request :)
Due to the fact that they had a late flight, 10pm, it was nice and quiet at Newark, no hectic terminals filled with people rushing home from holidays spent with relatives and friends. And then they were on a plane, and we were home again. The place was so quiet after housing 4 people in relatively close quarters for two weeks. The time flew by, and I definitely miss having them around or at least nearby.
To add to the quiet, Monday evening Kit came to pick up Chestnut the cat and the birds (Panic and Zen). Due to their new place being chaos still I ended up feeding Kit here ;) We also watched Priscilla, Queen of the Desert... though the intention had been to just show him a certain scene. More snow that evening, so we got to de-ice his car before he left. And then there were only two of us again in the house.
I've been trying to catch up with all the chores around the place, got rid of the Christmas tree and most of the decorations and such.
I finished the Minibeasts site for Majick yesterday, uploaded it and handed it over to Ally who will be taking care of the survey/forum things, as it's his server and he has access to that kind of thing. Currently I'm working on the layouts for my personal site. I have the images for the journal section and the main page, now comes the playing around with the layout part, though I imagine it will be relatively similar to the existing layout type, simple.
@ 01:44 PM EST
Friday, January 3, 2003
So my brothers' stay is almost drawing to a close. They have a flight out on Sunday evening. It's amazing how fast time really does fly.
We've had a lot of fun though... Christmas was a white one, with a snowstorm putting down at least 8 inches of the white stuff, so we couldn't have asked for a better one.
On a few occasions we've headed into NYC. We've taken them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, including the Hayden Planetarium and the Rose Center. Also we went to the Empire State Building, though we bailed when we saw the line going around the block. Yesterday we braved the freezing cold and went down to Wall Street and the Financial district, Battery Park from where we could see the Statue of Liberty and also past Ground Zero.
Because we had to see it, we took them to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, much swoony goodness with Aragorn and Legolas. Meow!
We've also watched a whole bunch of dvd's, so they've racked up the movie points since they've been here.
Hopefully tomorrow we'll be going to see a Broadway show, matinee. Then maybe tomorrow night we'll go out clubbing, we'll see.
Currently we're playing freeciv against each other on the LAN. Civilisation basically. It's fun :)
@ 09:13 PM EST