More uninteresting crap… Now from England!

Greenbean just tore into a can of Turducken cat food.

It was either that, or the can of California Roll.

Still smells like cat food though.

A few years ago, it was Friendster… now in the last two weeks, I’ve got a dozen new connections on LinkedIn and Facebook (I think/hope my friends have enough good taste to have skipped the myspace phase.)

I mostly play along. In the years since I created my profile I really haven’t reaped any value from Friendster (I’m not looking to “hook up” which I’d guess was 99% of the value.) I suppose the added event planning aspects of Facebook might actually be useful, we’ll see. It’s sadly obvious that I’m a bit older than their real target demographic. It’s not going to reach critical mass among my curmudgeonly friends. At least we had pointy lawn darts and realistic toy guns.

I’m not sure what is causing me to be so wary lately. Every time I think of something I’d like to post, I can think of at least one reason why I shouldn’t.

Can’t post about work, because people from work will read it, probably not to my advantage.
Can’t post about family, who knows who will read it, probably not to my advantage.
Can’t post about my political/religions views, who knows who will read it, probably not to my advantage.
Can’t post about any shenanigans I might be up to, yada, yada…

Going password protected is just a pain in the ass. I only read blogs via my RSS reader (Google Reader) and won’t put up with reading password protected blogs.

So… call me if you want to hear the good stuff.

Chris had a good idea for presenting his relation with the AFI Top 100, so I’ll copy it: seen it, tried to see it, haven’t:

1. “Citizen Kane,” 1941.
2. “The Godfather,” 1972.
3. “Casablanca,” 1942.
4. “Raging Bull,” 1980.
5. “Singin’ in the Rain,” 1952. (saw many parts of this, but not the entire thing)
6. “Gone With the Wind,” 1939. (Forced to watch in school while making a rug out of yarn. Yarn was more fun.)
7. “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1962.
8. “Schindler’s List,” 1993.
9. “Vertigo,” 1958.
10. “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939. (Have not seen. Will never see.)
11. “City Lights,” 1931.
12. “The Searchers,” 1956.
13. “Star Wars,” 1977.
14. “Psycho,” 1960.
15. “2001: A Space Odyssey,” 1968.
16. “Sunset Blvd.”, 1950.
17. “The Graduate,” 1967. (an older female ex-coworker’s favorite movie… She told me Mrs. Robinson was her role model. Hrrm.)
18. “The General,” 1927.
19. “On the Waterfront,” 1954. (downloaded, have yet to watch.)
20. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1946.
21. “Chinatown,” 1974.
22. “Some Like It Hot,” 1959.
23. “The Grapes of Wrath,” 1940.
24. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” 1982. (meh^2)
25. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” 1962.
26. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” 1939.
27. “High Noon,” 1952.
28. “All About Eve,” 1950. (I assume this isn’t a vintage porno… the name sure seems like it though)
29. “Double Indemnity,” 1944.
30. “Apocalypse Now,” 1979. (Deb and I have watched this 50+ times. Our favorite movie.)
31. “The Maltese Falcon,” 1941.
32. “The Godfather Part II,” 1974. (should be higher than the first)
33. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” 1975.
34. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” 1937.
35. “Annie Hall,” 1977.
36. “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” 1957.
37. “The Best Years of Our Lives,” 1946.
38. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” 1948.
39. “Dr. Strangelove,” 1964. (Slim Pickens second best movie role)
40. “The Sound of Music,” 1965. (Stupid Catholic school… forced to watch like A Clockwork Orange.)
41. “King Kong,” 1933.
42. “Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967.
43. “Midnight Cowboy,” 1969.
44. “The Philadelphia Story,” 1940.
45. “Shane,” 1953.
46. “It Happened One Night,” 1934.
47. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1951.
48. “Rear Window,” 1954.
49. “Intolerance,” 1916.
50. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” 2001.
51. “West Side Story,” 1961. (another Catholic school forced watching… on Video Disc)
52. “Taxi Driver,” 1976.
53. “The Deer Hunter,” 1978. (Filmed in Pittsburgh, except deer hunting scene filmed in Washington state. Why?)
54. “M-A-S-H,” 1970.
55. “North by Northwest,” 1959.
56. “Jaws,” 1975.
57. “Rocky,” 1976.
58. “The Gold Rush,” 1925.
59. “Nashville,” 1975.
60. “Duck Soup,” 1933.
61. “Sullivan’s Travels,” 1941.
62. “American Graffiti,” 1973.
63. “Cabaret,” 1972.
64. “Network,” 1976.
65. “The African Queen,” 1951.
66. “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” 1981.
67. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, 1966.
68. “Unforgiven,” 1992.
69. “Tootsie,” 1982.
70. “A Clockwork Orange,” 1971. (a weird movie to watch with your mom… especially after proclaiming “I love this movie”)
71. “Saving Private Ryan,” 1998. (also: Shaving Ryan’s Privates)
72. “The Shawshank Redemption,” 1994.
73. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 1969.
74. “The Silence of the Lambs,” 1991.
75. “In the Heat of the Night,” 1967.
76. “Forrest Gump,” 1994.
77. “All the President’s Men,” 1976.
78. “Modern Times,” 1936.
79. “The Wild Bunch,” 1969.
80. “The Apartment, 1960.
81. “Spartacus,” 1960. (“do you like movies about gladiators?”)
82. “Sunrise,” 1927.
83. “Titanic,” 1997. (how is this here? x 2)
84. “Easy Rider,” 1969.
85. “A Night at the Opera,” 1935.
86. “Platoon,” 1986.
87. “12 Angry Men,” 1957.
88. “Bringing Up Baby,” 1938.
89. “The Sixth Sense,” 1999.
90. “Swing Time,” 1936.
91. “Sophie’s Choice,” 1982.
92. “Goodfellas,” 1990.
93. “The French Connection,” 1971.
94. “Pulp Fiction,” 1994.
95. “The Last Picture Show,” 1971. (Dad’s favorite. Possibly unrelated… Cybill Shepherd naked.)
96. “Do the Right Thing,” 1989.
97. “Blade Runner,” 1982.
98. “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” 1942.
99. “Toy Story,” 1995.
100. “Ben-Hur,” 1959.

Score: 61 (one better than you, Chris)

Last week before we left for Athens we decided to try a different local restaurant.  We went to On the Thames, a place appropriately enough on the Thames in Bourne End at the recently redeveloped marina.  They have an interesting menu.  I had the Roast Wildebeest Steak, Sweet Potato Dauphinois with Kangaroo Sausages… two new species to add to my personal carnivore scoreboard.

Mini review:  A very tasty and enjoyable night out.  If it ever stopped raining their deck would make a great place to have a meal and watch the river flow by.

anything with AC.

It’s 95F+ and full sun.

Oh, and we still stupidly ignored the heat only to find the Acropolis closed due to strike.

Flight was only marginally delayed.  Hotel is very nice and comfortable.  Two glasses of wine and some fruit brought to the room after we checked in was a nice touch.  Free internet too!

We could see the Acropolis on the hill as we approached our hotel…  expect a crappy camera phone picture soon.   We’ll get some quality pictures tomorrow when we have time to explore.

Now for some souvlaki…

A few months ago, Textdrive was killing my lighttpd processes daily, thereby also killing my Typo powered blog too. At the time I didn’t want to move hosts, so I moved my blog to WordPress. Exporting my content from Typo was non-trivial (Textdrive also helpfully kept killing my export attempts after about 10 seconds for using too much CPU… sigh) and I was busy so it got sidelined.

Last night I decided to give it another go. In Rube Goldberg fashion I used a long chain of dubious techniques to get my stuff imported. I used a Mysql dump of my Typo blog as a starting point. I grep’d the relevant lines, tweaked the SQL, and imported it into SQL Server. Looking at WP’s built-in import capabilities it looked like LiveJournal had the easiest format to mimic, although it was XML. SQL Server’s FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS was handy… a simple query spat out a file close enough to LJ’s format. A quick once-over with some regexes to convert embeded \n’s into real carriage returns, and it was ready for import. 437 posts imported. Exciting!

Hopefully, this will be the last time I need to do this for a while.

It took me a while to figure out why my feeds were not updating.  I use Feedburner to manage my feeds.  It was not picking up any of my new posts even after trying to manually resync the feeds.   On a hunch I changed my feed source from mark.denovich.com to mark.denovich.org and “voila!”  Feedburner must still be caching the dns info for my .com address.

Deb is a much better travel blogger than I.   I encourage you to check out her site.