Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Tonight: Donnie Darko is my current number one movie. My take on Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. Oh, and the most disgusting example of human filth I’ve so far come across in my admittedly short life.

Dear Roberta Sparrow,

I have reached the end of your book and there are so many questions that I need to ask you. Sometimes I am afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I am afraid this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to.

For real - Donnie Darko is the best movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not quite perfect, but as far as cerebral sci-fi movies go it’s damned close. The plot, the dialogue, the 80’s setting, the soundtrack, everything hangs together so well I couldn’t have done a better job myself :-)

I’m currently reading Chasm City - a sequel to Revelation Space. I unfortunately haven’t found a copy of the first in the series (being stuck with the crappy bookstores in Toronto) but so far this is a really good read. I’m more used to hard science fiction, such as Egan, Baxter, Bear and so forth, but this is definitely a nice change. It’s always refreshing when an author focuses on plot over mathematical concepts.

Oh right, the example of filth. So my company moved offices over the weekend (just next door actually) and I was in a decent mood this morning (which is rare for a Monday). At about 10:30 in the AM I wander to the new bathroom on our floor of the building - to find that someone had certainly been there before me. Here it is: they shat on the floor, and smeared it around the bathroom. My god. And the worst part is all of the bathrooms require a key - from which I can deduce that the monster that did this wasn’t a random crazy from the street, but actually WORKS in the building.

Good night.

(also posted to k5)

So I went and saw it last night on an IMAX screen, and it was great. I felt it was probably 20 minutes too long, but no big deal. The imagery was mind-blowing; the computer system that Cruise interfaced with kicked so much ass it made me wanna crap my pants. And Snipes sure kills a lot of vampires.

So at work I was messing around with our primary website and was getting frustrated trying to decide whether to stick with a pure HTML with SSI site or go with something a little more towards a full blown content management system. Lo and behold, I grabbed Zope and started playing with it and I’m hooked. That is one sweet system, and writing embedded Python code for it is definitely sweet.

The only thing I find lacking about the system is decent documentation on the modules. It comes with bundles named Accelerated Caching, Cookie Crumbler, etc. and though they sound interesting I’ve not got the foggiest idea of what they do. That’s all.

(also posted to k5)