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Lately I have had a streak of bad luck with Sony products - both my laptop and my DVD burner broke this month. The LCD on my laptop started to act up but fortunately I had purchased an extended service plan (something I don’t typically do) when I bought the machine so the parts and labor for repairs are covered. I’m glad Heather talked me into purchasing it since the replacement LCD would ended up costing more that the money I would have saved on the service plan. I took it in to get serviced a few weeks ago and hope to have it back any day.

I was kind of bummed about my DVD burner since one day it simply stopped working and refused to read / write any type of CD media. It wasn’t terribly expensive (unlike the laptop) but I was still bummed as I had only bought it back in January. It definately was a mechanical problem so there wan’t much hope in using it for anything other than a doorstop. Since I didn’t have the reciept I figured I was out of luck in trying to take advantage of the 1 year warantey. I called Sony anyway and was plesently suprised to find that they would let me RMA it since it had been manufactured less than 12 months ago. All I had to do was pay to ship the defective unit back and they would replace it with a new one.

The replacement arrived on Friday and instead of sending me one like I had before they “upgraded” me to a dual layer model. Kickass!

Here is an updated mini-HOWTO on configuring Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme to work with WordPress when installed in a nested (non root) directory structure. My prior HOWTO seemed to help some people so I thought I’d take the time to update it to reflect the current release (1.2.4a) of Kubrick. Fortunately, Michael has made a number of improvements since I wrote the original HOWTO so configuring it is much simpler.

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Last weekend I took Heather to see the Bourne Supremacy. I was excited to see it as I thought the prior film was a good modern spy / thriller with an interesting premise and set of characters.

Unfortunately for this go around the good qualities of the first film seem to be lost. The acting seemed wooden and since the main characters were established in the prior film there is no real development of them. I thought the plot was downright dull. It seemed more like the poorly conceived idea for a 1 hour TV show than that of a movie (let alone a movie based on a novel). I thought it was odd that about half way through the movie the clear antagonist dies and we are left with 45 minutes to an hour of essentially frivolous plot needing to be wrapped up. Much like my complaint about the second installment of the Lord of the Rings a good portion of this movie simply was characters wandering around on screen - unfortunately this film lacked both the production values and interesting scenery of Lord of the Rings. The constant jerky cinematography didn’t help either. I found about 10 or 15 minutes into the film I simply stopped caring and was eager for it to end.

I really wanted to enjoy this film but I found it a resounding failure on pretty much all accounts turning the experience into a two hour exercise in boredom. Strangely the reviews I read prior to seeing the movie were largely positive so maybe I’m in the minority here.

It is always amusing to browse through my web logs and look at the various queries that people enter into search engines that ultimately lead them to my site. Often I stop and wonder both about the individual who is in search of them and also by what bizarre circumstance did my site happen to end up in the search results.

You can sample some of the more amusing queries here.

While wandering the Beaverton Powell’s Books this weekend Heather came across a copy of the late Dr. McNelly’s Dune Encyclopedia sitting on the shelf. I have been wanting to get a copy of this book for quite some time but given the small initial print run and the Herbert Limited Partnership’s desire to not see it republished I have found it elusive. Powell’s has a single copy in their rare book room but I couldn’t bring myself to pay $200 dollars they are asking for it. The few copies I have seen for sale online have ranged from upwards of $75. I was able to snag that copy for only $50 which while not cheap was a great deal.

As a standalone work it is quite interesting fleshing out a number of events and peoples touched on in the Dune series. It also serves as an interesting contrast to the “official” series of prequels being written by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

Weeks like this made me wish we had central air in our house. It has been unseasonably warm this week so Heather and I have been spending our evenings at our local Starbucks which happens to have great air conditioning. While the hot weather sucks it has provided a chance to sit down and do some reading. Right now I’m reading William Gibson’s Count Zero.

Here is my first stab at a mini-HOWTO on configuring Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme to work with WordPress when installed in a nested (non root) directory structure. As Michael mentions in the readme included with Kubrick it is pretty easy; however, a few people had emailed me asking that I document how I was able to get it to work on my own site.

The detailed instructions follow below. Please note that they reflect the 1.2.2d release of Kubrick and to the best of my knowledge they are correct / accurate. Your experience may vary so back up your original files before starting and good luck! Thanks again Michael for making such a cool theme available.
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Last night I went ahead and applied Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick theme for WordPress. I have desired a more polished and professional look for my site, however, I lack the artistic flair and CSS-fu to make a change. Thank you Michael for sharing your design!

I am still working out some minor kinks with it as it was originally designed to run from the root of a site and not from a nested directory. Feel free to drop me an email if you notice anything that is still terribly broken.

I came across a port of Frozen Bubble for Nokia’s Series 60 based smartphones. It works great on my Nokia 3650. Kickass! Now if I could only find a Bomberman clone.

I finally got around to unloading our digital camera and posted the various photos Heather and I took while visiting Portland’s Japanese Garden back on our anniversary. I love living in a city like Portland where there are so many interesting places like this to visit.

The photos can be found here. The earlier set can be found here.