Posts Tagged ‘Journal’

Long Weekends, ‘Iron Man’ and New Music Discoveries.

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Well, the last two long weekends have been a pleasant change, albeit chaotic in terms of repercussions when most people get back to the office and face the mountain of work they did not do during the public holidays. For me, it’s been a frustrating time. Making calls, sending mails, trying to get appointments to see houses or flats to share… driving all over Johannesburg…

I was also housesitting for friends of mine while they went away to celebrate a birthday. Which gave me plenty of time to reads my RSS feeds and catch up on some podcasts. One of those was a Dave’s Lounge Podcast I hadn’t gotten around to listening to yet… Dave’s podcast has become something of a regular feature in my music library these days.

In episode 107, he introduced me to a new music project called Sleepthief, featuring some of the vocalists and themes from another music project I enjoy, namely Delerium. The track he played was off “The Dawnseeker” album, called ‘Sublunar’:

Well, the lights are on and I don’t feel safe
By this tainted window
So if you’re looking in, you might see the pain
But I don’t want you to know, so…
Just go on pretending that you don’t know
All I am is empty, an empty world in my heart,
In my heart, in my heart, in my heart
Sweet angel sweet angel sweet angel
All my pretty things make you stop and think
I must be a sweet angel
But when the glitter smears and the wires appear
You’ll see I’m horribly mangled, but
Hush hush hush la da da da
Hush hush hush hush hush
Hush hush hush hush hush hush la da da da da, da da

I don’t quite know how to put into words the ethereal quality of Kristy Thirsk’s voice. Reviews online describe the track as “melancholy but heavenly” and “Kristy Thirsk’s crystalline vocals are truly angelic and stunning within the celestial textures of Sublunar.”

Now Dave generally promotes a lot of smaller label artists so I wasn’t too hopeful about finding this on anything other than CDBaby or iTunes but I see Amazon has it as does Take2 so I think I may get this for myself sometime. Once my move, etc is done and I’m settled again.

The other highlight of the weekend was seeing “Iron Man” with some work colleagues. I’m not going to spoil it for those that have not seen it, nor am I going to repeat what several hundred other blogs are bound to say, except that this was a good movie. Specifically, a good comic-related action hero movie. And I think we all know how rare those are these days. It has all the elements of success in it. And as one blog put it, if you could leave your preconceived ideas at the door and sit back and watch it as a technology-fest, the geek in you would love it.

Reading some of the RSS feeds this morning on the topic, the folks at Marvel must be smiling, as Iron Man has taken the box office by storm.

Another page I stumbled upon recently lists all the upcoming movies for the next 3 years with links to their IMDB records. Some awesome titles on the cards, it seems, and some questionable ones too:

Filtered from titles slated for 2009

Filtered from titles slated for 2010

Filtered from titles slated for 2011

I can only hope that they don’t screw them up too badly. Specifically the ones in bold… (please do not let Uwe Boll near any of these movies!). As for the ones in italics… well, one has to wonder…


Dusting off some of the cobwebs…

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Wow… tempus fugit… time flies…

Considering that my last post was in February sometime, and we’re almost done with April, I feel I’ve neglected this site for some time. Time, specifically spare time, has become somewhat of a rare commodity for me lately…

Ok, some updates (for those that care and even for those that don’t):

I’m moving… where to, I’m not too sure yet, but I’m hoping it will be a little closer to work to cut down on traffic, etc. I should be seeing a place tomorrow night that sounds perfect…

Work has been going well, just busy. At present I’m on-site at BCX (Business Connexion) in Midrand, standing in for a work colleague who has decided to get married… poor sod… another one bites the dust. I’m studying as well, brushing up on my Checkpoint Security Administration knowledge so I can write my CCSA (Checkpoint Certified Security Administrator) and CCSE (Checkpoint Certified Security Engineer) exams when I get back to the Randburg office.

What else? Oh, I’ve been raiding a little again in World of Warcraft with my US Stormrage guild, Awakened Guardians. My rogue is somewhat under-geared and underpowered in comparison to some of the uber-backstabbers out there, but some recent gear upgrades has made her a far more formidable than she was.

Sadly, with this move, I’ll be offline again for some time unless Telkom miraculously pulls it’s collective finger out of deep, dark, unmentionable body cavities and does something quicky for a change…

Not that I’m a pessimist… not at all… I’m just a strong believer in Finagle’s Law, which states:

“Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.”

OR

O’Toole’s Corollary of Finagle’s Law, “The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.”

In other words… Murphy was an optimist.

I haven’t had much time lately to discuss or even explore the various metaverse cultures out there or my more recent research into trans-humanism, but catching up this morning on one of the more interesting blogs out there on these topics, I found that Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks want to make a 3D CGI movie of one of my favourite anime films of all time… Ghost in the Shell. As a self-confessed fan-boy of the Ghost in the Shell franchise and Masamune Shirow’s work, I sincerely hope and pray that they don’t screw it up…

Reading further (my GoogleReader has too many feeds for me to catch up on all of them in one day!), I see that there is talk of a live-action version of Akira. While I was never that fond of the Akira story, it was and is still a well-known landmark within the anime/manga culture and I hope they do it justice.

Other than that, not much else to report. Eskom is keeping us on our toes with load-shedding (thank Heavens for laptops with batteries and podcasts/movies to watch while waiting for the lights to come back on), traffic is a pain in the butt (especially on Allandale and Malibongwe)… and I think I need a refill on this coffee… or maybe some hot chocolate.