So I've recently been sick with the flu. Not just "the flu", but "THE HEAD-POUNDING, 102 DEGREE FEVER-INDUCING, CHILLS-PRODUCING, SLEEP-DEPRIVING, SOUL-SUCKING FLU" that has swept through the Central Valley -- and Fresno in particular -- with a vengeance this February. A week ago I watched my wife, daughter, and our border all crash and burn within a 24 hour time period. And like *all* other times I get sick, I watched everyone else around me get it first before succumbing to it several days later. It's like a prolonged death sentence, where you first get to be tortured and see the pain and misery of everyone else around you for days on end before being subjected to it yourself. A chance to savor the experience, so to speak. All during that time period the "Dread" was upon me, like some horror flick that is playing out in High Definition, 7.1 Surround Sound that you desperately want to turn off before realizing that you're in it, and you're the next target. And wouldn't you know it, 4 days later -- like clockwork, just as the tide was turning for everyone else in the family, down I go.
Ah yes, and now I remember why I always think having the flu is not that bad until I get it myself -- because every time I do get it, I repress the horrific memories of the experience as soon as possible and purge them from my brain until the next time it comes around.
Well, when you are as sick as a dog and are lying in a pathetic heap on the couch, you tend to want to fill the time with things that distract you as best as possible from the misery you are experiencing, even if it's only for an hour here or for an hour there. So on Friday, after coming home from a brief period of work where I had to submit a $25,000 proposal, I hobbled into the movie store to pick up Johnny English, one of my all-time favorite comedies. Admittedly, the beginning/first half is a bit slow, but the last half an hour has me rolling every time I watch it. I simply love satire, especially when it pokes fun of conventions that are so near and dear to a society's heart. The way that Johnny English deals with British and French culture and lampoons the pomp and circumstance of England has tears rolling down my eyes by the end of the movie every time I see it... ...except, except for this time, where I almost died in a fit of coughing while laughing. But still.
So anyway, my favorite scene is when is when Johnny English, as Agent One, confronts Pascal Sauvage at the Coronation Ceremony and tells Bough to play the DVD of Savage describing his insidious plan for England once he becomes King. Johnny being Johnny, of course, took the wrong DVD, and instead of the evil mastermind's plan being revealed, Johnny is:
Every time I see that Indian princess staring up at the screen with her mouth gaping open and then cutting over to Johnny loosing control and lip syncing to his own lip syncing, I just about die laughing. Only this time, more so.
Well, that ABBA tune he's lip syncing to actually *is* pretty catchy...
I think part of what makes that scene work so well is that just about every one of us, at some point in time, has done something similar in the privacy of our own home when no one else is looking. I know I certainly have.
At any rate, even though I've seen it a bunch of times, something about that ABBA song struck a chord in me this time around, and so after a sick Sunday afternoon of Googling later, I came to realize that as a kid, I actually loved listening to ABBA. I just had forgotten completely about it. My father had a couple of old ABBA records that we used to listen to as a family every weekend, and boy, did the memories come flooding back. I was even tempted to buy their Forever Gold album this afternoon (only $12.67!), since those catchy pop tunes really are fun to listen to -- that is, until I told my wife about it and I got made fun of the rest of the evening. Maybe she's right, and its just the sickness talking. Maybe, just maybe, and this is a line of thinking I really don't want to go down, if I was any sicker I'd be delirious and not only would I want to be buying old ABBA albums, but I'd also want to be buying old Debbie Gibson and Tiffany CDs as well...
...well, at the very least, Thank You For The Music , ABBA. You certainly perked up my spirits this sick afternoon.
There were some major updates to the webpages, and some major overall changes to adjust to, though, so not all was in vain. Didier's Enlightenment repository has officially come to an end, which left a lot of people without an easy way to install E17, so I decided to learn how to develop spec files, build rpms, and host my own Yum Repository . Over 90 Enlightenment related packages are now available for installation (including a few of my own), and updates to other programs such as xosview, xv, etc. are available in the repo as well. The repository has become popular enough to be mirrored, and last month I had over 400,000 hits on the server, averaging above 10,000 per day. The last time E17 packages hit the repo, my server was hammared for well over two hours before settling down, so I guess overall it has been a tradeoff. Certainly learning how to build rpms properly (including the use of mock) took *a lot* longer than I hoped, but at least I now have a set of scripts that perform all of the work for me.
I've recently been asked to port the RPMs over to the Fedora repository (which would be really cool!), but their packaging guidelines are just a wee bit daunting for me to tackle at this point in time. And there are too many other committments pulling at my attention for me to be able to put everything else back on hold for another 2 months. So the Fedora repo will have to wait. Maybe that will be the major undertaking for Fedora 9. =p
Plus, I need time to finish my 64 tri-color LED Graduation Hat using PWM control, LED shift-register drivers, and A/D conversion before graduation time in May! More on that later. ;)
It makes me think the words should all be used in sentences for vocab homework. I always found vocab boring and tedious, so I would alway try to cram all of the words into a single sentence -- The noob was hopeful that he would be allowed to live after being careless by failing to account for the intolerance of his stupidity while getting his LAN mates killed in battle. :)
I've been meaning to put these images up on the Blog for over a semester now. I *still* love playing with legos, and these pictures capture their essence in a way that is much more meaningful than I could ever hope to write about. Talk about a picture being worth 1,000 words!
