"As a technically astute person, you have been identified by..." By ucblockhead in ucblockhead's Diary Mon Jun 04, 2001 at 12:04:26 PM EST Tags: (all tags)
	Domain changes. Moulin Rouge. Gross stuff.

Our NT domain changed today, which, because this is Windows, and not a coherent, modular operating system, means that we had to change our users on our local boxes. And because NT is not a coherent, modular operating system, you have to go through contortions to get your old desktop moved to the new domain. That admins are doing this for most of the people, but some of us got labled "technically astute". We got to do it ourselves, armed with a couple pages of e-mailed instructions. Unfortunately, what the admins aren't too clear on is that just because you are technically astute, doesn't mean you know the details of NT system administration. Yes, I'm technically astute enough to know what "Join the $Foo domain" means. But it would be nice if you could tell me what where in the fucking maze of settings the appropriate pushbutton was... Anyway, muddled through it. A word to the wise: never, ever use the "My Documents" folder for your documents. You see, that's under the "user profile", and if you copy that around, you copy all your documents. Not a problem if it is just some word files, but if you do what I did, and put yur 6 gigabyte local mp3 collection there, well, you've got issues. Especially since the "copy user profile" option obviously doesn't use copy. It took almost an hour and a half to copy mine! There's efficiency for ya. And this because people thing that "cp -a /home/Steve/* /home/NewSteve is too complex to deal with... We saw Moulin Rouge this weekend. My God, how'd that ever get made!? Not that I disliked it. Hell, we enjoyed it a lot. I'm just shocked and amazed that it managed to get made. Certainly not a movie like you've ever seen before. In many ways, it harkens back to older operas and musicals. The plot certainly does. Like an old opera, you mostly know the story going in. The only potential "surprise" is given away in the first scene and it all plays out in deliberate fashion. It is not about how the plot resolves, but how we get there. The plot itself is such the throwback, something brought to the forefront with the play within the play. The movie perpetually balances on the edge of being incredibly awful yet somehow manages to keep from falling over. The use of late-twentieth century covers sounds like it would be just hideous, yet it works amazingly well. The look of the film is incredible, moving between sepia tones and wild technicolor as required. The fast ultra-mtv cuts can be pummelling at times, but I loved the scene transitions. Instead of a normal wipe or cut, the camera pulls out of windows and soars across streets and into other rooms. It gives the whole movie a staged feel, as we see the space the characters operate in. Here's the Moulin Rouge, there's the hotel, here's the courtyard, and we see them all within relation to the others. Anyway, I loved this movie. Some people hated it. If you go, and don't like the first ten minutes, walk out, because you won't like it. For me, it was a welcomed antidote to the manufactured crap that is filling the screens these days. ("And on this slide, we see how we pull in the over 65 male demographic with the patriotism while we hope to do well with the 25-35 female demographic with the inclusion of the male lead. Moving on to the next slide, we see the expected boost from the historical aspects, which we hope will drive high school teachers to assign the movie as a project.") Gross-out alert:stop reading if you don't want to be grossed out. As I mentioned here before, about two months ago I made the mistake of running in shoes that were too small. No pain, but when I got them off, the big-toe nails on both feet were purple. I kept hoping they'd improve, but no go. Memorial day weekend, we went on a big hike, and when I got my shoes off, the one on the left had turned white. Hmmmm... That bodes ill. This weekend, it seemed loose. We went on an even bigger hike, nearly thirteen miles, and when I got my shoes off afterwords, the expected happened. It came off, with only very minimal encouragement. What struck me was how little pain or discomfort was involved, and that it was no where near as gross as I expected. I'd expected, well, gooey stuff, but underneath is just skin, only slightly tender. You don't really think about your toes, and don't really thinking of them as "feeling" anything under normal conditions, but just a slight change shows how much you do feel constantly. You see, the skin under there feels just like any other skin does. It isn't particularly tender, and it doesn't feel different, yet just the fact that this little patch of skin can feel where before it was blocked from feeling is quite distracting.

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