-
Today we went to a relatively new bookstore in one of the most upscale neighborhoods of the city (e.g. where the really rich Beautiful People(tm) live...). The bookstore is very nice and it has a cafeteria attached to it. The cafeteria was packed with people, and the books section was nearly empty. We had lunch there over a very pleasant conversation and then got a few books. It is sad to see a bookstore in such a state, with no customers except for the restaurant part. Still, we had a good time.
-
We watched Waking the Dead in the evening. It is reasonably good, but it would have been better if it had taken more time to explore the relationship between the couple as well as the girl's activities in Chile.
-
Yesterday our band played in the ENEP Acatlán, one of the UNAM campuses in the city. It was a reasonably good concert, not as good as the last one in Plaza Loreto, but still good. The audience was a bit tired by the end — maybe that's what you get at the end of a schoolday.
-
Today in the morning we overslept badly. The we re-set the board for the plants, this time with the proper pressure hook dowels and round thingies to keep the screws from slipping. Hopefully it will not fall down this time.
-
Bread with melted cheese on it is a good breakfast. Mmmmm.
-
The board that holds our heavier set of house plants fell to the floor yesterday — the dowels we used for the screws did not have hook-like teeth in them and so they eventually slipped. All the plant pots broke and at least one plant is dead as its stalk broke in half :( We went to buy new plant pots today in the morning. Re-drilling that particular wall is not going to be fun.
-
Today is a beautiful autumn day, with a bright sun and a clear sky and cool, slightly breezy air. I love it when the weather is fresh and nice like this.
-
We went to watch Signs today. Mel Gibson is as adorable as always. I love the slow pace of the film and how it takes its time to build up the tension.
-
Gyorgy Sandor was scheduled to play the three piano concertos by Bartók during this OFUNAM season, but he will not be able to play because of health problems. This is sad news. They will be playing Bruckner instead.
-
Replaced the GPC intersector in OpenOffice.org with the libart intersector. It is not obvious at all how to add header files to the OO.o build.
-
I finally got around to scanning[1] some of the slides
from last year's trip to Ottawa.
[1] Scanning - using a fussy digital camera with a macro lens over a cheap light table, in a darkened room so that the living room's lights will not reflect on your "I'm too cool to shoot negs" slides. What an Idiot(tm) I was, thinking that squinting through a loupe was more fun than looking at a big, nice print. Oh, but the colors *are* beautiful in the originals.
-
We had a long weekend because of Independence Day. On Saturday we stayed home and watched movies, Vertigo and Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas. On Sunday we went to Coyoacán for breakfast in the morning, then shopped around for a bit, and I got a pretty cool jester's hat. In the evening I went to visit my dad and taught him how to use his own Rollei 35 in daylight without the malfunctioning light meter, and then went to Oralia's mother's house, where they were celebrating Adriana's birthday and where we had some absolutely fantastic Pozole and pambazos. Finally, yesterday we stayed home, watched some of Tora! Tora! Tora! but stopped halfway through it to take a nap. I went to band rehearsal in the evening and then back home to sleep. I couldn't sleep well because my the left side of my neck hurt a lot and I had the loud and perfectly rehearsed voice of a certain stupid TV announcer stuck in my head.
-
A saxophone player in Coyoacán.
-
Someone mailed me about a really old script-fu script I had written for the GIMP back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. He was asking about how to do some enhancements to it, which would amount to changing three lines of code. So I did that and script-fu gave me an error about passing too few arguments to a function. To which function, it didn't tell me.
– "Doctor, it hurts."
– "Where?"
– "Doctor, it really hurts."This was pretty disappointing. Still, hacking Scheme even for ten minutes made me feel good in a certain way. (Eventually I figured it out after some careful reading of the code, as usual.)
Back in the GIMP days I wrote a one or two scripts to automate my special effects tutorials. Some others were to automatically create simple web graphics. The one of which I'm proudest is the Weave script, which I wrote to "prove" that the Alien Skin plugins were a bunch of expensive baloney that would be simulated with a few lines of code — they still have a prettier user interface than my script and are productized, of course, but at that time I didn't know why that may be important. But the most interesting one was a script to create pie charts. I wrote that one as a personal exercise to fiddle with Scheme and lists and creating pie slices by intersecting a circular selection with a polygonal one — and computing that polygon was the interesting bit. Script-fu couldn't cope with that script, as the call stack became too deep in some situations, even when it was only about 10 function calls down from the toplevel. It died when generating the polygons to intersect with the circles.
I learned a lot of geometry in those days which lead to many sorts of interesting graphics hacks. It was a fun time.
-
Released gdk-pixbuf 0.19.0 "Schmeek". Now I have to figure out how to merge the GIF loader from HEAD into the 1.4 module, as it changed quite a lot.
-
Building OpenOffice is certainly painful. Way too painful for its own good. Hopefully we'll be able to get to the "./configure && make && make install" sanity point.
-
We have tickets for the Rush concert in October! Woooooo!
-
I have a fragment of a Morrisey song stuck in my head.
-
Oralia called Josefina, one of our neighbors from when we lived in Coyoacán, a nice woman who is the wife of a German guy, and they chatted for a bit. Apparently Josefina has been giving English lessons to our previous landlady's daughter, a fabulously ill-behaved and mean little girl. She charged $100 pesos for the first class, and the landlady complained that it was too much (it is a bit under 10 dollars...). When Josefina asked if the landlady had looked for someone else to teach her daughter, she said that although we had once offered to help her daughter with her schoolwork, she decided not to take our help because she thought I looked like a pervert.
This totally makes my day.
-
Banged my head for a while on #88499, which is really unpleasant to debug. No success.
-
Installed ccache, gcc 3.0.4, jdk 1.3.1. My machine may be overheating or something, as building gcc crashed the (old) compiler several times.
-
In the evening we went to watch One Hour Photo. It is pretty good, and Robin Williams seems to be playing very good roles these days. The theater was nearly empty.
-
Fixed the last post-installation nits in my new machine. Amazingly I didn't have to fiddle with the configuration at all; Red Hat did a good job with 7.3 — no extraneous daemons or anything. Installed the extra packages that I needed and copied my home directory over from my laptop.
-
Oralia made breaded salmon and a huge pot of delicious minestrone soup for lunch. Mmmmmm. I think this may get to be my favorite after her onion soup.
-
Breakfast in Coyoacán, as usual. Afterwards, we went to the supermarket and also to get a printer, a very nice HP Laserjet 1200. This baby is pretty cool and a total snap to set up.
-
We fooled around for a bit with the oil paint and canvases that we got the other day. What an insanely fun mess.
-
In the evening we went to watch Heaven, Tom Tykwer's new movie. From the beginning to almost the end it is very good. When the two characters become almost twins in their dress and appearance, you can really see they love each other. But the ending is a bit of a letdown.
-
Woke up early for a 9:00 AM conference call. Ugh.
-
Got a fat box delivered for working on OpenOffice. 2 GHz Athlon, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HDD, yada yada. Installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 on it.
-
We watched Road to Perdition last night. It is very good. Also, some of the murder photographs are actual pictures by Weegee — interesting.
-
Shaver makes me blush.
-
Band rehearsal tonight. It was good but a bit tedious.
When we went out of the rehearsal house, there was a small black cat that had been run over on the pavement. Its right eyeball had popped out of the socket and its mouth was open, fangs out, as it lay in a small puddle of blood. It made me very sad.
-
Last night I tried to draw a spiral staircase in proper perspective and failed miserably. I used to be able to do this — really need to practice again.
-
Went by the bookstore in the Centro Cultural Universitario and found a very nice book of Lewis Carroll's photographs of children and his letters to them. This should be interesting.
Afterwards, we went to the once-good American Book Store to get the Oxford Anthology of English Literature for Oralia. These days they have reorganized the library to sell textbooks — you stand in a queue waiting for your turn, then you tell a grumpy guy what you want, and he looks it up for you. You cannot even browse the shelves comfortably. It is sad to see a good bookstore turn into a complete waste.
-
The XChat sources are much better than gaim's. This is good.
-
We watched Sexy Beast while having lunch. It's not bad at all and Ben Kingsley's performance is awesome, but some scenes do linger for a bit too long at times.
-
Big crowds go to the small town of San Andrés Mixquic
every November 2nd for the Day of the Dead celebrations.
-
A man sets up the final details of a huge fireworks castillo during Candlemass day in the
town of Chalmita.
-
Finally got off my ass and changed our car's license plates for the new ones that got issued. The old sticker in the window will be a bitch to clean out, though.
-
In the morning we took Oralia's mother to Coyoacán for tacos de barbacoa. That place just gets better every time.
On our way through the park we saw a platform with a flutist and a cellist — it turns out Horacio Franco and Víctor Flores were going to play their Del Medioevo al Danzón suites, so we stayed for the show. It was a wonderful surprise, and the performance was great.