Memo to Mr. Moore: Intellectual laziness, even when disguised as art, is just as shallow.

I don’t care how much of a jerk Warren Lieberfarb may be. I’d still like to shake his hand. Because of him, I have a large library of my favorite films in an easily-totable format, which can accompany me on business trips (by plain, train or automobile) or play on most of my computer systems. He drove an entire sector of technology to the public, and for once the technology was affordable for Joe Schmo and profitable for all the vendors in the supply chain. Warren, my hat’s off to you, sir. I know you got a raw deal but I’m sure you’ll land on your feet. Thanks for the best cinematic education I could hope for outside of NYU or USC.

I’ve decided to pursue the new Red Hat Certified Architect course track. I’m going to my first class at the end of July, and hopefully I’ll be able to complete the courses by next spring. Between work, family, and the band, I can’t go away too often, so I have to time the course right.

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p>In other news, Saturday night I finished the initial version of The Elements of Style: Fedora Documentation Project Edition. I am not making HTML available yet because I don’t want to have to support the Web site hits. But you can pick up the XML source here, which can be built against the Fedora Project’s documentation distribution. To pick that part up, visit the FDP site and follow the download directions. Extract my tarball into the fedora-docs/ folder and run make to generate the HTML manual. Enjoy!

I had a really great Fathers Day yesterday. My wife (and purportedly the kids) got me a new DVD (The Right Stuff), a little book about things a father should teach his son, and a new wallet. We also had a great cookout on Saturday, when some friends came down from northern Virginia to hang out and eat some seared animal flesh. Everyone enjoyed themselves immensely — I think — except for the traffic coming down. Sorry, Rich and Kate!

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p>Plus, I got to see my mom and her husband, and their new Harley. They stopped by on Saturday afternoon to show it off to us. It’s an Ultra Classic Electro-Glide, which is basically one of the really nice touring bikes. Theirs is black, and it’s pretty kick-ass. And yes, it does make a really loud VROOOM.

Life imitating art imitating art? A new movie arrives with the incendiary and buzzworthy title The Hunting of the President that is purporting to give us “the real story” behind a supposed widespread right-wing conspiracy to pull off a coup d’etat to unseat former President Bill Clinton. Of course, with most Americans these days getting what they consider “real” information from Hollywood, which is tied in with our morbid fascination with celebrities, I’m sure this movie will be on liberals’ must-see list, and conservatives’ hit list. The producers include none other than Harry Thomason, a long-time Clinton confidante whose ties to that administration are well-documented, so I’m sure we can look forward to a completely unbiased and absolutely truthful presentation of the facts. And, um, in other news, I won the PowerBall lottery.

Thursday, July 1 is the International Red Hat Meetup Day. Anyone else going?

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Leah and I had a good show on Saturday at the Celebrate Fairfax festival. I think next year Ethan will be old enough to possibly enjoy going (or at least he’ll be OK with his schedule being interrupted), and Evie would probably really enjoy it.

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p>Also this weekend I got the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, from which I wasted an inordinate amount of time viewing documentaries this weekend. I didn’t even touch the photo and artwork galleries, nor the actual films themselves. I am looking forward, however, to seeing the reassembled preliminary cut of Alien³, which is the half-hour longer version originally screened for Fox executives a good half-year before the movie was released. I think that film is the one most unfairly maligned, especially given the fact that David Fincher basically rescued the production from utter failure and the meddling of “too many chefs” (read: Fox executives).

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p>Enormously informative and a good value for the money considering it contains nine DVD’s. Certainly it’s the most exhaustively feature-packed set I’ve ever seen to date.

I was SUPER-HAPPY to hear back from my old friend and fellow soldier of rock Danny Blitz. Danny’s been through some tough times recently, but as all powerfully positive people do, he’s bouncing back with a vengeance. Danny was a really formative influence in my musical and personal life, and kept me from sinking into a lazy and cynical liberal philosophical morass at a critical time in my life. Visit his site, check out his heavy-duty RAWK POWER, and keep him in your thoughts and prayers so he can keep making a speedy full recovery.