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Yesterday we watched Adaptation. It is a great quine. And Nicolas Cage's performance is his best yet.
As we got out of the movie room, nobody was checking for tickets at the entrance for the My Big Fat Greek Wedding show which was about to start, so we sneaked in. It was so bad that we left after about half an hour.
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The Terror of Blimps, courtesy of Jamie.
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Oralia gave me Inspector Clouseau, always ready to hunt down the most terrible bugs.
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Today I switched to a VTE-ized gnome-terminal in GNOME 2.2. It is SO SLOW. So unbearably, incredibly, ridiculously slow. On a 1.5 GHz machine with a 1 GB of RAM. My Pentium 66 with ZVT was faster.
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For lunch Oralia made a pot of lentil soup with sausages, really good. We also had picadillo and broiled nopales, which is something of which we can eat unlimited amounts. After lunch we went to the little Cuban cafe near our house and had eggnog capuccinos; meanwhile I finished writing a letter for my brother in Ensenada. It's good to write on paper; one has more time to think than when writing email.
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We got a lovely postcard from Luis Javier, and I feel as guilty as ever for not sending him anything.
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Bus singer, from last April.
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Girl playing around the fountain.
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On Saturday we had lunch at my mom's, and my uncle told his stories of his days as a student in London and of useful Arab handymen vs. useless English ones. My mother got me William Gibson's latest book on her recent trip to San Antonio, and she also got a really pretty white shirt for Oralia. She also brought us new bed sheets. My mom rules.
So far we have gone twice to a little Cuban cafe that is a few blocks away from our house, and it is very nice. They have some delicious pastries filled with guava and cheese.
Yesterday we woke up early to take the long trolley+bus ride to Hugo and Juanita's house. We had some really good flautas de barbacoa for breakfast, and then we sat around to make a bunch of cadavre exquis. It was fun.
In the evening we watched Barry Lyndon and it was beautifully elegant. The composition of shots is very similar to classical paintings and it is all full of fantastic camera work with insanely fast lenses.
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Raph reports that the Spencer and the Peter are working together again. w00t.
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People don't want war, dammit!
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Of course, if all efforts fail, we can always masturbate for peace.
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AZNAR, ME CAGO EN TU TÍA SI APOYAS LA GUERRA
This is pretty much what the Mexican government should be saying to the Spanish one tomorrow as Aznar comes lobbying for war. -
Oralia found an interesting article about more of the U.S.'s motives for war. Also in Monbiot's own site and in ZNet. George Orwell must be knocking on his grave and saying, "I told you so". Oralia says, "the more I know about the world, the more I admire Orwell".
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A very important article by Robert Fisk on why anti-war lectures need to be targeted towards the common people instead of the anti-war people themselves.
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We had a big lunch yesterday with all the hackers in the office. For some reason people decided to go to Chili's, but it was actually tasty and nicely greasy, a reminder of the Red Hat days.
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Dentist appointment in the morning today; two of the three nerve canals of my back left molar are clean now, one to go. Will go again on Monday. I hope the tooth doesn't hurt during the weekend.
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I got Oralia a pair of hand-knit slippers. These days the weather is no longer cold, but the granite floor in the apartment remains unpleasantly cool to one's feet.
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A friendly message for today:
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Next Saturday 15th of February there are going to be demonstrations around the world against the war on Iraq. There are going to be rallies in Mexico City and other Mexican cities as well.
I'm sure that in addition to the war protesters there are going to be people complaining about everything else, including the recalcitrant supporters of the UNAM strike — I'm afraid they'll do something stupid and keep the march from being a peaceful demonstration.
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On Wednesday I gave my talk about the GTK+ 2.0 rendering model at the CONSOL. It turned out pretty well. But making diagrams with the GIMP is a pain. I should see if Sodipodi is really usable these days.
Making the slides, however, was an exercise in frustration. I said to myself, okay, I am an OpenOffice.org hacker, so I should do my slides with OOo. It turns out that Impress, OOo's presentation module, is a total pain to use unless you have a ready-made template for it. I wanted to use the nice Ximian background images, but I didn't have time to figure out how to create a template that I could use automagically from the outline view. I could not find the outline view, even. So after trying to lay text out by hand and seeing just how much time that takes, I resorted back to MagicPoint.
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On Thursday we watched Tuvalu, which is really a little masterpiece. Their choice of intuitive gestures and symbols is great, as is the brief set of spoken words they use; anyone from any part of the world could understand what the characters do and occasionally say to each other. The tinted black and white is lovely, too.
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Augusto Monterroso died last Saturday. This is sad news. The newspaper had a picture of his coffin with a plush dinosaur on top; it made Oralia cry.
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Now we are playing go on a 13x13 board, as the 9x9 one was starting to feel a bit constrictive.
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We have had some absolutely beautiful weather for the past few days, so we have been doing a lot of walking around the city. On Friday we went for a long walk around Coyoacán, with highlights of pretty good zapote and maracuya ice-cream. Yesterday we spent a good part of the afternoon in the Parque Hundido, or sunken park, and I took a little bunch of pictures.
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The dentist has started my second root canal, this time on one of the left molars, and the tooth in question has been very bothersome, especially when eating. Yesterday, Oralia gave me an anti-swelling remedy of epazote herbs and salt which worked miraculously well; at least I could sleep better than two days ago. I hope the doctor will get rid of the last bits of nerve endings during tomorrow's appointment.
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(Via Nat and Ettore): A beautiful letter written from Baghdad.