Apparently Blogger’s been hacked, but my account appears not to have been compromised. It’s a shame that these losers don’t have better things to do than screw up people’s personal journals and musings. A decent hacker would work with the site to improve security; otherwise you’re just a clueless vandal who probably doesn’t understand how he got in to begin with.

Well, I guess life will be returning to “normal” in the DC area now that the law has caught up to those bastard shooters. I would like to point out that almost as despicable as these two piles of steaming feces are the people who sat in their cars and let minimum-wage gas station employees fill their tanks for them. “Obviously you don’t have anything to live for, look where you work!” The mind reels…

Forgot to post that Eleya and I saw an astoundingly bad movie the other night, the Kevin (“What’s happened to me?”) Costner dead-wife drama, Dragonfly. This movie was so laughingly bad starting from two minutes after the opening credits that we actually started giving it the MST3K treatment while watching it for the first time. We usually reserve that for films we’ve seen before. A hackneyed, cliche-ridden, too-precious screenplay, in addition to horrible, over-earnest performances from a group of really solid actors (other than Costner) provided an evening that was entertaining, but not in the way we had planned. It was easy to see why Universal didn’t put more publicity push behind this dud.

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p>Intercepted memo from CAA to L. Hunt, K. Bates: You’re too good for this dreck — set up mtg w/Fincher, Anderson, Scorsese, Spielberg, LaBute ASAP.

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p>Stay away from this one at all costs. Your sanity may depend on it. AHAHAHAHAHA….

Haven’t been keeping up here much… had to work over the weekend and left little time to goof around on the Web. In the meantime, the RH133 class went very well and I learned — well, a little bit, but it was good to hear how other people are putting Red Hat Linux to work for them. I expect to be able to hit a RH253 class early in the winter.

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p>Today I’m feeling pretty lousy. Eleya was sick the past couple of days and last night she was coughing most of the night, meaning she didn’t get much sleep, meaning I didn’t get much sleep either. So I think I’m going to try to bail out of work early today and get some rest.

I’m in RH133 this week away from the office. I’m boning up since so many things have changed substantially from two years ago when I got my RHCE for version 7.0.

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p>Eleya and I finished watching the third season of The Sopranos last night. Now what do we do until Season 4 is out on DVD? I suppose we could subscribe to HBO but that seems like needless spending of money when we don’t watch much on TV other than DVD’s. There’s very little broadcast on that station that our daughter can watch anyway.

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p>The Line 6 POD XT is set to arrive next month in stores, along with the Variax. Duh-ROOL.

I had a great time recording at my buddy Rich’s house today. We laid down four tracks of guitars including solos and acoustic for a demo we’re producing for our friend Jenny. I really had to struggle to get back into the guitar mindset after spending all my practice time on Stick for the last several months, but it worked out OK. And I have to tell you, my Taylor rocks with the Superlux mic. It was like I could hear all the nuances for the first time. The whole recording really benefits from the acoustic track, and let’s hear a big hallelujah for tube preamps, as well as Line 6.

Recording session tomorrow. I can hardly wait to put some of my new gear through its paces.

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p>There’s interesting information at bugzilla regarding a problem with gnome-pilot in Red Hat Linux 8.0, with regard to some conduit controls that are improperly hidden from the user. This makes it really hard for newbies to sync their PalmOS devices to Evolution. The packages at this link will fix it.

I’m really excited about the new Red Hat Linux 8.0. I’m now running it at work exclusively, with my Handspring Visor HotSync working via USB, in concert with the new Evolution PIM. It’s totally cool. I can even use AvantGo properly as well.

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p>Eleya and I saw The Straight Story this weekend, a rated-G David Lynch film (tell me that’s not intriguing) which is based on a true story about a fellow who rides his lawn mower across most of two states to reconcile with his estranged brother, who is convalescing from a stroke. It’s a marvelously understated and touching film, and functions also as a kind of ode to Midwestern mannerisms and the unfortunately dying art of kindness to strangers. See it right away; you’ll be glad you did.

My wife had what I think is a fascinating idea last night, as we saw a commercial for “Dr. Phil” or whatever that TV chat show psychologist guy is called. How about an amusement park (or at least an exhibit or tour) where people can get psychoanalyzed in a room with one-way mirrors, and then charging people to watch for 15 minutes at a time? Think about it — the same effect as what you get from self-help talk shows, but cutting out the boring parts, such as the commercials and the lengthy introductions. Now we can have all the vicarious, hypocritical fun we crave, while adding the mitigating factor of “going somewhere” and “doing something,” rather than enduring the internal stigma that we are just sitting around watching TV instead of being productive.

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p>And the best part is — think of the franchising opportunities!