Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

18-24June2006 :: This Week

25June2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Springtime in a Small Town; beautiful Chinese film; the film work was poetic: long, lingering shots with periods of intense silence
• watched Magnolia; interesting contrast as it was long and manic; had some really good moments and some brilliant acting

Working 9-5

20June2006 [directLink] [personal]

Have just completed my 7th day of nine-to-five (well, 9-6 actually)… It really is awful. Was fortunate though: managed to knock off early a couple of times, had the public holiday last Monday, and got enough work done that I don’t need to go in tomorrow… Which is particularly lucky as four days straight was bad enough; I didn’t think I’d be able to handle a whole Monday to Friday week…

I’ve been working at Gruden, a web design and development company in the city who do an impressive range of work. I’ve just been a web grunt - coding some html templates that will later have ColdFusion plugged into them. Terribly easy work that I couldn’t do for too long without brain rot settling in, but one of few skills I have that people will actually pay me for… And a great place to work - great atmosphere, and I was really impressed at the quality of their work (too many “web designers” being rather clueless)! So hopefully there’ll be a bit more with them in future.

I love the idea of being able to take work on contract for a couple weeks, then spend a couple weeks working on my film projects… It’s now uni holidays (all seven weeks of them!) and I hope to spend the next month cutting a couple films out of all the footage I shot last year in Reims, in England, and on World Youth Day. I’ve also got to come up with some film concepts to work on next semester - The Journal of Paul Hunter has become a little too involved to shoot as a student film (and really, I’d like to see it done right), so I’ve either got to cut it down or come up with another idea that I can shoot. I’m probably taking another writing elective so will be able to develop a script properly; plus I have a development subject that will act as pre-production for my final film.

And… With tomorrow off I may have some more to post here; I haven’t even posted a media consumed this week entry because I barely watched or read anything!

The Author and The Logos

11June2006 [directLink] [myth]

I’ve just uploaded a piece I wrote for uni to ?myth=author_logos. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to title the piece; in the end I called it The Author and The Logos because those things kept coming up. I wrote it for Genre Study, a sort of reading-for-writers class. We’d been reading lots of fiction, debating whether there was such a thing as fiction, and discussing how it even worked in our post-modern present… So I wrote a strange little meta-fictional piece exploring those ideas. It’s very broken up; the sections are styled very differently; they refer back and forth; the idea in all that was to mimic online writing… Anyway, I explain all that a little better in the introduction.

Of course, the piece was trying to mimic online writing, while being constructed for print. I go on about that in the introduction too; but now that I’ve actually put it online I’m keeping the print-like elements. It’s all still inline instead of being broken and hyperlinked up, and I’ve kept footnotes instead of external hyperlinks… So now it’s an online piece mimicking an offline attempt to mimic online writing…

Towards the end of writing this piece, while struggling to come up with another bit of fiction, I got a visit from my future-Author-self, who crops up a couple of times in the piece. He gave me the whole end bit, and there are some interesting ideas in it. I’ve been playing around with ideas of The Logos for some time now, and it came together nicely when I wrote this. There are all sorts of ideas floating around about AIs, about the development of self-aware networks, &c; some of which I referred to back when I wrote about the Turing’s Cathedral article (which I mention, but without a lot of detail, in this piece). Anyway, what I came up with formed a nice balance: an image of this network we’re building being constructed as a resting place for The Logos (sort of like the Ark of the Covenant being an actual resting place for God way-back-when).

There’s more I want to go into on the Logos, particularly in relation to liturgical ritual and Communion (in short: Christ is the Logos (Word Made Flesh), His Sacrifice is the gift of the Logos to humanity, His Sacrifice occurs outside of time, Communion is partaking in that sacrifice, and actually Consuming the Logos, which is remarkably powerful and kind of daunting if you think about it too much). I just didn’t want to go into it in this piece as it was more about authorship, fiction, &c, and I’ve still gotta work out my thinking on this one…

4-10June2006 :: This Week

11June2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Answered by Fire (Parts I and II); first part focussed on the lead-up to referendum, much better than the second part which was more about the reactions of the (white) protagonists; funny to see them trying to wring out a happy ending, especially given current state of affairs in East Timor
• watched The Verdict (1984); extremely boring
• finished cutting That Imp of Earth and Industry for my experimental film class; will have a version online soon

On Switching, Part the First

09June2006 [directLink] [mac]

This is the first part of some bits I’m writing about migrating from Linux to Mac. Herein, I discuss my initial setup and the couple stumbles along the way. I’ve more to say about reasons for migration, about my current setup, about open source software, and about my experience cutting a video on Final Cut Studio. Later entries will all be posted to ?bits=mac, so they will be found somewhere central.

Got home a couple weeks ago to find these boxes just inside the door. The smaller box, containing Final Cut Studio, was about as heavy as the larger 17” iMac.

With uni the next morning and a bunch of work needing doing, I tried putting off unpacking… But couldn’t help myself.

I wasn’t able to simply switch over directly, so set the sleek new white box up next to my dying old laptop (which has been running on life support, necessarily plugged into an old external monitor and getting its network juice from the back of our windows desktop). Fortunately the iMac doesn’t need a lot of space.

Booted up and was pleasantly surprised by how easy the initial setup was. Annoyingly, I couldn’t get onto the wireless at first, so I had to wait till I’d logged in… The screen in the setup, for whatever reason (simplicity, I assume), only allowed me to enter a ‘WEP Password’, which wasn’t a lot of use as our network used a HEX key rather than a plain text password. Turns out throwing a ‘$’ in the front is enough to sort that, but I couldn’t learn that till I logged in and loaded up the network preferences…

Of course, the first thing I do whenever I log into a new computer is fiddle with the preferences to suit, so it was straight into System Pref’s. Again, very easy - set up the Mighty mouse to work as a right-clicker, the Finder to alphabetically sort icons (the single most annoying thing about OSX at uni!).

Then it was Software Update, had some 350MB of updates available, so installed those. Reboot necessary. (Interestingly, the next day there was another 100MB of updates available; I’m not sure if they were there before but it rebooted too soon, or if I just got lucky and some four new updates were released overnight.)

Then, and only then, I could start migrating settings and files from my laptop.

First up: email. Slight problem: my local mail server’s address just lives in /etc/hosts as I’ve not bothered to set up DNS. OK, Terminal > nano /etc/hosts… Working, but can’t write. Try ‘su’, can’t get the password… Strange. Some searching and I find that the root user needs to be activated in the NetInfo Manager (bonus points for security though). Done that, su, nano /etc/hosts… Add my local mail server, load up Mail.app and all working.

I later learn that as my local user is an administrator, I’m automatically in sudoers, and can just sudo to make any ‘root’ changes. I’m not entirely sure about the security of that (seems a little dodgy; I liked it better when I thought the computer was protecting me from myself), but I’m using it now and have disabled the root user again…

And on Mail.app: soon noticed a significant problem: my IMAP connection to my local server kept dying on me… It’d work for anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes, then die. Couldn’t figure it out for a while (restarting Mail tended to fix the problem); was starting to look around for alternative mail programs, but couldn’t find any that integrated with Spotlight so searched for solutions instead. Eventually discovered that Mail was opening an inordinate number of connections to my server, overloading courier, which would boot the connection. There is, unfortunately, no way to change this behaviour in Mail… But fortunately I control my IMAP server, so I was able to boost the ‘MAXPERIP’ setting in the courier config from ‘4’ to ‘20’. Mail still occasionally fails on me, but it’s far less often and occasionally restarting Mail isn’t a big problem. Apparently boosting this setting can cause significant slowdown to the server, but as I’m the only local user it hasn’t been problematic yet…

Having got email working I started bringing files across. Mostly worked without a hitch until KDE slipped up while moving some files onto a network share that was no longer mounted, sending them into the ether. I didn’t lose a great deal as I caught it fairly quickly, but lost a document I was writing about how great the migration was going, which was, well, ironic.

28May-3June2006 :: This Week

03June2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched The Family Stone; funny lite; very predictable
• watched Prime; light funny with some very understated humour; loved the ending (especially by comparison to the above)
• watched Best Man; strange, confusing, depressing, death; very almost my kind of movie
• watched X-Men 3; the story wasn’t great but was very entertaining; captured the spirit of X-Men really well, absolutely filled with references to other stories; I love that a whole world exists beyond the movie, and that they don’t feel the need to explain everything
• watched Patriot Games