For our pleasantly palindromic mashup number 22, we’ll keep on plumbing the depths (or heights) of the 80s with The Lost Boys, the second best vampire movie of 1987. (The best one will no doubt turn up in this meme at a later date.) The setup is nice and simple; a normal family moves someplace and finds an evil both ancient and tempting. There’s not a lot of vampiric angst, although there’s a smidgen of romantic angst, but really it’s an action flick with fangs. Trivia du jour: that railway trestle is something like six feet or so above the earth. Camera angles can work marvels. On with the mashup.

Coming this fall: TiVo to computer functionality (original). It’s not what I’d like, since you don’t get full functionality — it’s some encrypted video format. Mind you, DRM is generally broken… but in any case, it’s more than we had before. I would very much like to be able to easily copy programs from my TiVo to a DVD. Cory Doctorow, bless him, is up in arms (original). However, I think his analogies suck. While TiVo is a disruptive technology business, it is not much like steam engines. It’s a different delivery mechanism rather than a new media form. ...

Pete Rose is still gambling. What kind of idiot would let him back into baseball now?

As per Phil Ringnalda’s advice — I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.

The IMF, noted tool of the socialist movement, notes that the US is looking like it might take down the world’s economy. That’s warming news.

Since it’s the 20th anniversary: 128K Mac (original; later upgraded to 512K Fat Mac) Mac SE/20 Mac SE/30 Performa 630 Performa 6400 (later ran linux on this) G3/450 (currently next to me running OpenBSD) G4/733 iBook tangerine clamshell iBook SE Firewire Powerbook 12” G4/1 GHz Loved ‘em all.

A couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Mirror ran an article claiming that Bush and Blair were arguing. The Mirror is a tabloid and not exactly trustworthy; however, there were elements of the story which might prove true later on: Presidential advisers in Washington wanted Mr Bush to be the sole leader to make a Christmas visit to troops in Baghdad and urged Downing Street to postpone any visit. The US refused to co-operate on security arrangements for a Christmas visit by Mr Blair, who is going to spend the festive season with his family in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. ...

Curt Schilling, Internet-savvy Boston Red Sox pitcher, has taken to commenting on blogs. If you ask me, which nobody did, I’d say it’s important to take his actions in our little corner of the Internet as the actions of a man who’s experimenting. People express themselves on the Internet every day. First-time blog commenters make mistakes; everyone has to get used to the culture of a particular web board when they start reading it. ...

I made a couple of changes to improve load times and rebuild times ( thanks, Ginger, and man are you ever right). I’m no longer bothering with “Recent Entries” on the sidebar, cause like anyone ever used those. I also killed most of the sidebar on the category archive pages and replaced it all with a full list of entries in that category. And there’s no full category archive pages anymore, because that didn’t scale very well. ...

The RNC wants MoveOn to apologize (original) for letting an ad comparing Bush to Hitler slip into their contest. Enh. I don’t particularly think MoveOn needs to apologize; they can if they want to, and people can form whatever opinion they care to form as a result of that decision. The only person who has the right to ask for an apology here is Bush. Last time I heard, he was a big boy, and surely doesn’t need us to act on his behalf. After all, cowboys do their own work. ...