Knockaround Guys is probably the last chance you’ll get to see Vin Diesel in a supporting role for a while, but that’s not why you want to see it. You want to see it because it’s a nifty little ensemble drama with a nasty sense of humor and a tight story structure. Sure, Vin is good and he gets to beat people up, but Barry Pepper and Seth Green and Andrew Davoli are pretty good too. Dennis Hopper’s kind of phoning it in, but John Malkovich is delightful. Solid stuff. ...

Now that my MT -> LJ bridge is finally working the way I want it to, I’ll take the time to do a little documentation. The basic architecture is as follows. I have an MT template containing a verbose RSS .91 feed, which is an index template, so the page it produces is rebuilt every time I post. I added a CGI script residing on my server to the list of URLs to ping when my blog is updated. The CGI runs blagg (an RSS aggregator) with the LiveJournal (original) plugin, which pushes the post to my LiveJournal. ...

Glenn McDonald says, “I’ve been asked, more than once, how I can be a music fan and a soccer fan, when there is usually, at least in this country, such a gulf between art people and sports people.” I could say the same of sports and computers. Many of my friends could care less about sports. Sports are where the jocks play, and we define ourselves as very much other than them. ...

Quick update to my last entry: Osama bin Laden (or someone claiming to be him) has taken responsibility for the French oil tanker attack. He did not take credit for the recent bombing in Bali, although Indonesian officials have made that link. Why is Al Qaeda so eager for us to attack Iraq?

A week ago, a French oil tanker in Yemen exploded; Yemen officials are now [calling it a terrorist attack](http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/287/nation/Yemen_now_said_to_see_terrorism_in_tanker_fire .shtml). Early evidence says it’s an Al Qaeda action. The attack was very similar to the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, in October 2000, and at least one American intelligence official was willing to make the link. So: why would Al Qaeda target a French tanker right now? France is opposing the US resolution in the UN Security Council. This action will strengthen France’s desire to fight terror, not weaken it. If anything, France will now be more willing to support the US. On the face of it, blowing up a French tanker seems really stupid. ...

Happily, an Alabama federal judge has struck down Alabama’s ban on vibrators. I haven’t yet read the decision, but apparently Judge C. Lynwood Smith, Jr., quotes Foucault therein. More judicial decisions need post-modern French semoticist quotes, in my opinion.

Hey, Californians. Dianne Feinstein knows better than you (original). I serve as the senior senator from California, representing 35 million people. That is a formidable task. People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office — and with no other factors — I would have to vote against this resolution. ...

[SCOTUSBlog](http://web.archive.org/web/20070630192455/http://web.archive.org/web/20070630192455/http://www.goldsteinhowe.com/blog/ (original) “SCOTUSBlog”) (original) is one of those places that those of us who like to claim we’re keeping up with politics ought to visit frequently. SCOTUS? Supreme Court of the United States. We sysadmins have no monopoly on acronyms. The Supreme Court is the final check on those unjust laws we so frequently protest, and it shouldn’t take an Eldred v. Ashcroft to get us to pay attention. (I remonstrate with myself, here, as much as with any imaginary typical reader.) Link discovered on the mad tea party.

Apologies to my LiveJournal readers for the unkempt apostrophes; the problem is now fixed. For the curious: the MovableType RSS feed templates escape the posts as if they were XML, and XML includes this ' entity which is not supported by most HTML browsers. So I switched the encoding to HTML style, and nothing seems to be suffering.

After three and a half weeks, my cable installation finally happened. Not currently recommending AT&T Broadband; they are very lucky that a) my landlord won’t let me get DishTV and b) RCN doesn’t go to my street yet. But hey, it’s there now and I’m happy about that. I also got to activate my TiVo. People say this a lot, but it’s an incredibly great invention, implemented quite well. I had my little TiVo epiphany while I was setting up some season passes (which allow you to specify a given show to record for the whole year). By the time I was halfway done, it was five minutes past the hour and I was missing Smackdown. But wait — I had Smackdown on a season pass, and it was recording, so I could just go watch it from the beginning. Superb.