Seth · Kills

I just went to see Thank You for Smoking. It was really good. It's the best kind of totally evil, make you feel sympathetic for the bad guy, kind of film. When you read personal ads and the person is like, “I'm totally open minded and open to new ideas and especially new experiences!!!” what this really means, is that you can take them to an Ethiopian restaurant without them trying to order a PB&J. What I wish it meant, is that you could take this person out to a movie about a really cunning tobacco lobbyist, who meanwhile is trying to be a good role-model for his son, and they won't make horrible faces at you in the dark. You should all see it, and we'll compare notes later.

Some other movies I want to see soon are:

• Hard Candy
• American Dreamz
• Some Italian or French thriller about blackmail that I can't remember the name of. I saw a review of it, but I can't remember the name at all now. Can anybody help? Probably not. Nobody else I know goes out of their way to watch foreign or independent films.

There was another one that I saw a preview for today, but I've lost it.

Over the weekend I watched this South Korean movie Oldboy, and let me tell you, it was fucking amazing. I recommend that none of you ever watch it. I don't know a single one of my friends, with the narrow possibility of an exception for delonix who would tolerate seeing the whole thing through. This movie is brutal on both the senses and the sensibilities. It has an IMDb rating of 8.3/10 stars, putting it at a ranking of #112 overall, although this is most certainly skewed by the low number of votes.

Even after abusing myself with years of rotten.com patronage (Note: do not follow link), there were still several visuals in this film that, amplified by the context, formed a lasting impression of the holy shit this is fucked up variety.

Here's a IMDb comment for it which I hope is a joke, but is probably actually genuine, and a good example of inverse negative reviewing (emphasis mine):

(1/10 stars) “proof”

I watched this movie and am sad to say that I have wasted precious moments of my life doing so. A friend of mine , Dukefrukem, said it was good so I was all like cool. I rented it and now I won't be speaking to him again. I can make a movie better than this. How hard is it to get some fake blood and lame dialogue together and pay off a director to say he liked it at canne? A small note, Just because Quentin Tarentino says it's good does not make it so. The movie simply does not make any sense. I am betting the remake in 2006 will be better but somehow I am really doubting it. You cannot polish a turd no matter how hard you shine it...it is still a turd.

-Ruxor PS: Shout out to my homey Plage...What up foo!

What I think he's referring to as a “remake” is Chinjeolhan geumjassi, third in a revenge trilogy by the same director, with Boksuneun naui geot being the first, and Oldboy being the second.

I've already seen this episode of Sex in the City. I feel cheated.

All day at work I was acting out some kind of weird anger issues. I didn't really notice until we were coming back from lunch with the There people and Brett made some comment about it. That Brett, he's always making comments about things. I'm not really sure what's gotten into me. Here are some examples from throughout the day:

Upon arriving at AboveNet, Matt asked if I had a driver's license for the visitor badge. In retrospect, I believe what he was trying to ask was whether I had brought it with me, given that I was neither required to drive nor to purchase anything (lunch was put on the corporate card). But what I said instead was, “No, I've been driving illegally for the last 2 years.” This is in reference to when my last California driver's license expired, shortly after moving to Reno.

On the drive back, Brett and Matt started talking about the name change again. For a few weeks, we've been discussing changing company names, to enhance our corporate image. Everyone agrees that this is a good idea, but it's either too involved of a process, or nobody is actually willing to pull the trigger, because we haven't made the change yet. Brett asked me what I thought of the name change, which has to be the 20th time it's come up in informal conversation. Needless to say, I was incapable of a straight answer. I believe I said something along the lines of “I think we should tell all of our current customers to go screw themselves, and that their support contracts are voided.” Surely you can understand my frustration. Or not.

When we got back, yet another person reported extreme slowness while using our shopping cart system, prompting everyone to try debugging it, before quickly losing interest. After running ktrace on several instances of Interchange and watching the output of "show processlist" on the MySQL server, I determined that the new firewall, which had been installed last weekend, was blocking outbound HTTP connections from the webserver. This was preventing the shipping calculator from contacting one of UPS' CGI scripts. After updating the firewall rules, Matt said something like, “Jeeze, who's idea was it to block all outbound TCP from the DMZ?” As I rolled my chair back to my desk, I replied, in the most sardonic tone possible, ”Well, maybe you should ask Mr. come-in-over-the-weekend-and-break-the-network,” referring to Devon, since he had helped with the network redesign. This was slightly uncalled-for.

I've stopped using IM and IRC altogether, in the name of focus and commitment to my job and other personal projects. According to conventional wisdom, it's impossible to simply remove one addiction from your life without replacing it with another, equally consuming one. So, in this case I'm going to start blogging again, and sending a lot of SMSes.

I've gotten the name sethkills back, from when I first started this whole thing, and I think I'm going to do what several of my friends do, keeping my outside journal separate, as a means of disseminating computer-related information that might not be very relevant for my LJ friends.