Well it finally came up in my Netflix Queue and I kicked back and watched it. The movie is Carl Theodor Dreyer's brilliant masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc . Of course I watched the Criterion Collection's remastered version of it.

With the holidays approaching I would like to implore everybody who is eligable to donate blood. The revelry of Christmas and the New Year produce quite a bit of drunken accidents, and cold and icy conditions do a lot of damage on their own. I saw recently in the Seattle PI that it takes 900 donors A DAY to keep the blood centers adaquately stocked in Puget Sound. I hope that that many people donate, but the realist in me believes that that many do not.

Now, if you have Type O blood (45% of the US does), it becomes even more critical that you donate. Why? Two main reasons:

1) You are a universal donor. It does not matter of the recipient is A, B, AB, or O, your blood will be accepted by the person receiving it.

I stumbled across a flavor of Linux this weekend, pretty nice. It's OpenGEU . I'm impressed so far as I'm currently running it on two laptops. One is a Fujitsu N6010 P-4 3.2 w/ 2 Gig RAM and the other is an old Toshiba Satellite P-3 650 w/ 392 Meg RAM. The install was easy and the result is a very sexy yet functional Desktop

The following is a research paper I wrote on my favorite director, David Cronenberg. Less than 30 days left to my semester so hopefully I'll soon have some more time to get some reviews out there. Until then, enjoy!

“There’s a lot of mythology about what a director must be and the qualities that he must have and I think it’s all mythology. In fact, each person invents himself or herself as a director in a very intimate and specific and unique way.”
- David Cronenberg (Rabid commentary 34:05)

Well for professional reasons I loaded up Vista Ultimate on my desktop. I created a tarball of my trusty Gentoo and dove into installing Vista. Since I'm running a dual core AMD64 with 8 Gig of RAM I went with the 64 Bit version on Vista. The install was a basic Microsoft install, pretty brain dead. Once it was loaded up and I applied all the patch's I went sniffing around. I absolutely hated it, they bury everything and make it so damn convoluted to get to anything. But I was determined to make a good honest effort at it. The system was noticeably slower than my Gentoo even with all the eye candy of 3D, transparency turned on with Gentoo it still runs circles around Vista.

Very well said Kieth and as always you ROCK!

I decided to put this in a blog entry because I seem to be saying it over and over.
Proposition 8
Seems many people are upset because Prop 8 passed.

Let's look at the text of the amendment.

Here is a presentation I stumbled upon by Lawrence Lessig founding board member of "Creative Commons" (one of many credits) and who is a Law Professor at Standford who gave this at Stanford. He discusses the effect of Money on credibilty/trust on where the money comes from in relation to funding, research, tests, etc. along with other effects of money in Government. It's around 50 minutes in length, pretty damn interesting not only worth a look but I highly recommend it.

Less than 5 minutes ago I had the oddest conversation. Where I work, I see lots of people. Everybody knows me, and I know them. I'm always polite to people, so sometimes people will say things they might not around other people because they are more comfortable around me.

As a full-time graduate student with a job, I realized it was quite a lofty goal to review a movie per day for the month of October. Where was I planning to get this magical abundance of time? So here are the next 15 days of Halloween-inspired films in a more condensed form than my previous entries. Also, I have bypassed the rating for these films as they are more general recommendations than full reviews. Enjoy!

Day 10:
Dagon (2001)
Director: Stuart Gordon
Writers: H. P. Lovecraft (short stories “Dagon” & “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”), Dennis Paoli (screenplay)
Actors: Ezra Godden, Raquel Merono, Francisco Rabal

Staff Sgt. Christopher Waiters, of Lacey, Washington, recently served as a medic with the 3rd Stryker Brigade out of Ft Lewis. While in Iraq, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) was struck by VBED (Vehicular IED). Sgt Waiters immediately shot and killed two enemy fighters, and then without a thought of personal safety, ran 90 yards (about the length of a football field) through hostile fire to get to the burning BFV.

Here is a series of videos, I highly recommend taking the time to watch them. They explain rather well how money is created today and why. They do a good job of explaining the banking system and how debt produces assets. Then the second series of video's show how the world is manipulated, who creates war all in the name of "profit". Once you look through these videos you also may want to look at take a look at War is a Racket it was written by one of the U.S.

Only 14 more days to go.
For some reason this election cycle has really worn me out.
Maybe it's because I hate both candidates.
Maybe it's because I feel our country is on a path to destruction and I see people on the side lines chanting GO!, GO!, GO! As if the fate of our country is Milwaukee's Best making it's way down a funnel on it's journey to a college freshman's gut. The solution to everything these days seems to be, “Call the Government.”Politicians eager to win votes are all to happy to oblige. They are often less concerned with their actions actually helping than they are with being able to make a good sound bite out of it come election time.