I got all domestic and put up one of those bathroom rack thingies.

I realized to put it up straight I’d need a level. I don’t have one, and didn’t feel like going out to buy one, so I MacGyvered one from a glass cigar tube and some Styrofoam. Respect the bubble.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy microreview
(crossposted, with modifications) It’s a damn good film. It’s a very different thing from the book, but it is very respectful to the work and feels very much like Douglas’s handiwork.

For me, the Hitchhiker’s series carries a central theme of wide-eyed wonder about the utter enormity of the universe, and a warmhearted and innocent appreciation of the miraculousness of finding happiness despite the staggering odds against it. This movie absolutely knocked both of these points out of the park. There’s an extended sequence in the second half of the film that had my mouth hanging open for a good long while.

I got the distinct feeling that the audience at the theater I went to (Azalea Square in Summerville) didn’t get it. There was a small contingent of fans on one side of the theater that laughed constantly, but the rest could only manage an occasional murmur. Quite a few were displeased. I had to concentrate hard to keep from whipping out the double deuce on some chump behind me. During a key (and hilarious) scene, he said “Could this get any dumber?” Fume.

The film is drastically modified from the book. Whole subplots are gone, others emphasized or simplified, and new ones made up. Whole characters are gone or severely limited. Trillian went from a astrophysicist to…an endearingly crazy girl whose primary responsibilities consisted of flying the ship and getting kidnapped. You could call it a butcher job, or you could call it necessary adjustment to make the story fit into a movie. I could really see it both ways, but the way the parts they *did* decide to include were handled gave me such a terribly pleasant feeling (in the diodes on my left side) that I I was happy with it as a whole. The source material is so rich that it would be better served by a long-form “HBO Original Series” type format, where you could spend an entire season per book. Making a film out of it requires serious hacking and slashing, and I think they did about as good a job as could be done. I think it’s pretty fantastic they got in as much as they did (Vogon poetry! The little bejeweled crabs! The sperm whale-potted petunias bit! GPP doors! Gargle Blasters!)

I had mixed feelings about the Guide segments; by themselves they were absolutely brilliant, but they did tend to kill the pacing. Overall I liked the casting, Martin Freeman especially (I think he was grown in a vat to play Arthur).

High points: The opening musical number, the Magrathea planetary yards (I just couldn’t help gaping at that), “I’m a sofa”.
Low points: The lemon helmet thing didn’t do it for me. The double titles. Pacing, like I said before. Also, wasn’t there supposed to be a Serenity trailer attached? I did get there a little late, maybe I missed it.

If you’re wondering, I brought a towel. (It was a paper towel. I sacrificed some utility for portability.)

–riney

In-process shots of the “junction box” – all signals from the Xbox (DC, audio, video, usb) go through here to their endpoints (the cigarette lighter, the car’s audio system, the LCD, and the keypad). It also has a power switch, an Xbox start/stop button, and an extra switch in case I need it for something. Built-in 4-port USB hub, the interface box for the LCD, etc. This’ll get velcroed to the side of my transmission tunnel.

Side view

Top view

It’s all dry-fit currently, I’ll epoxy everything in place tomorrow. It’s got a 4-port hub to connect the keypad, a thumbdrive for song transfer, a webcam, whatever. To get all the signals from the Xbox in the trunk up front, I assembled a 12-foot snake, carrying power, composite vid, l/r audio, ethernet, USB, and some single-pair phone cable to carry the start/stop signal. So sore from zipping zip ties…hands…like claws…

The mounting tray for the Xbox didn’t come out so good.

It turns out that metalworking requires “skills” and “talent” and “appropriate tools”. Specifically, sheet metal is supposed to be bent with something like a 24″ Bench Pan And Box Brake, not by “whaling on it with a hammer and a piece of wood until it sort of bends, kinda”.

Feh. I might still use it, or I might plant flowers in it. I feel like a kid who just brought home the pathetic, screwed-up little birdhouse home from a crafts activity in third grade.

Okay.

My ears are ringing, and my arms are covered with oil and little shiny bits of metal. In true Edisonian fashion, I have learned several ways *not* to cut steel with a jigsaw. I’d keep experimenting, but I fear my neighbors would murder me at this late hour.

This new theme is brought to you by . It’s called “Smooth Sailing” and it’s five kinds of cool. It’s an entry in the LJ Style Contest which has other goodness to partake of.

Component == old busted.
Smooth Sailing == new hotness.

Pictures from my homeboy Mike’s visit last December.

I was in Best Buy a little while ago. They sell Apple stuff now – mostly just the Mini (which is adorable in person, btw), but also incidentals like mice and keyboards. On impulse I decided to get one of the Apple-branded mice. Look! It’s pretty!

Its prettiness apparently makes light rays bend around it. Problem is, it’s useless. Why? Bullet time:

• One button. This dosen’t absolutely kill me, as I’ve gotten sort-of halfway used to the click-and-pause action you have to use when using the touchpad, but it’s still a bummer.
• No scrolly wheel. This breaks the bargain. I’m absolutely retarded without a scroll wheel. One would think they’d integrate some of the touchpad tech from the iPod into it, but noooo.

Now, this is the interesting thing. Apple mice are effectively buttonless. “Ah-roo?” you might ask, if you were Scooby Doo. It’s a touch hard to explain, but very easy to see in practice. The top shell of the mouse, the part you put your hand on, is flexibly mounted to a teflon-coated “foot” so to speak, that contains the optical sensor. There’s no button to click, rather the entire mouse seems to tilt downwards slightly to signal your click. This feels rather nice. Here’s the problem with that method – it’s physically impossible to hold the mouse down, pick it up, move it, and set it back down, as is required when you hit the edge of your mousepad or desk. Here’s where the engineers went nuts. In order to solve this fundamental problem with their buttonless mouse, they added two buttons. They’re the little whitish bits on either side of the mouse, about midway up in the picture. They’re not really buttons that you could use for any useful purpose – they’re just little clamps that hold the “foot” in the tilted/clicked position. There’s an entire page in the manual dedicated to teaching you how to use this completely ridiculous mechanism.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, what we have here is a buttonless, one-button mouse with two buttons.

Now, I can perfectly understand the rationale behind a single-button mouse, having spent many an hour being asked “which click, left click or right click?” by new users. But being faced with a fundamental flaw in the design, rather than dropping back and saying “Maybe we should just add a button”, these engineers pulled out a thoroughly absurd and hackish workaround which completely breaks their age-old “single-control on a mouse” doctrine. I understand wanting to defend a design, but doing so to the detriment of the final product is, well, detrimental.

Bad Apple.

On the other hand, their keyboard is lovely. Has the right number of buttons and everything.

Got a couple more pages turned out for my Xbox article. That thing’s turning into a monster… Other than that I cleaned and watched ATHF.

Also this is really good. 35th Anniversary of Apollo 13

Testing Cingular to see if they’re still posting all that shite on my image posts, and indeed they are. I would post it behind a cut, but it screwes up the page a bit. It’s a gigantic HTML document with all sorts of hidden crap and giant advertising images.

Context Free Design Grammar

I like it. It falls under my “simple and pretty” qualifications for coolness.