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Plowing through things here in France. Completed today was the gazebo mentioned a few posts back. It started with a rather ugly looking shed and progressed from there. To take you all through the stages:

The beginning. It definitely wasn’t much to look at. We think it started its life serving the previous farmer as a place for him to hang various murder implements like rusty scythes and giant metal hooks. It had to go.

With a bit of effort (provided entirely before I got here thankfully) the walls were knocked off and the front roof was removed. As we don’t have enough material the rear roof has stayed, however it’s only visible from the field so that’s not really a worry. Anyway, here it is in a state of shocking nakedness:

And now time to start putting up the slats. These are a series of cross section lengths of wood. The purpose of which is to provide something for the ceramic tiles to hook on to. Extra points if you spot the Mini 9 in the background!

Another shot as I near completion whilst caught in a pitched battle with the native growth running up the pole on the side. Interestingly, that’s not some sort of devil-tree there, but a series of thick vines growing up an old telegraph pole. In any case, the thing provided a constant hinderance as we worked on that side.

With the slats in place the laying of tiles can begin.

Almost there! We put the final weight of the tile roof at around 1200 pounds. Always scary to think that we’ll be sitting under that amount of weight trusting our lives to something that we built up Oop, time to change the mp3 on the mini9!

Add some flowers and voila! Complete. Or, at least, the roof’s up. Other than some wood staining we’ll leave future upgrades to this shed for “La Patronne” Meanwhile though, it definitely will be good enough for us to throw a quick brunch for some friends here

One more closer edgier shot should complete this:

Now I just need to find somewhere new to keep all the spare murderous farm implements we have laying around.  Perhaps we should build a shed!

It’s been an agonisingly warm last few days here. Temperatures seem to have skyrocketed from 60’s to the mid 80’s the day I arrived and despite scattered showers they have stayed there. Not that this hasn’t prevented me getting out and about

So far, besides a main project I’m working on but won’t reveal as yet, I’ve taken in a few sights. Here’s a couple quick pics showing all I’ve visited thus far:

I’ve stopped by the local villages,

Been on a boat ride several hundred feet under ground,

Mocked the local peasantry from atop a castle,

And tried my hand at offroading round the farm! This photo of me was taken mere seconds before I entered “the stream.” Note also the location of the steering wheel.

Anyhow, if I can get things set up right, I’m going to try and put together a little video of this place to give everyone a sense of how surreal and beautiful the landscape is. No promises on that yet though.

No pictures yet, before anyone asks. I have made it successfully back to France though, however not without a minor trial.

The flights were relatively uneventful. I was fully prepared to try and explain why I had a fuel syphon pump, a filter, an empty water bottle, almost no clothes, wires, cable, and 500 tablets of a “generic pain killer” however security didn’t seem interested. The flight into Paris even arrived an hour early, giving me a little time to stop on the metro at the Notre Dame to enjoy a Fete de Pain. “A Festival of Pain? Awesome!!!” I said at first, but as it turns out “Pain” (pronounced “pahhn”) is french for bread. Not that the festival itself wasn’t wonderful. Lovely free samples of great buttery breads.

I will also add that the french city metro is a wonderful system. It gets crowded at times, half the trains aren’t air conditioned, many of them are scarred up with grafitte and occasionally you can sense they also serve as mobile urinals; however as a metro system they are awesome to use. With a single day pass ticket you can hop on almost anywhere (and it works for busses too) with no more than a 10 minute wait and cover all the ground to the next major attraction. Since they criss-cross the main city so well you can get almost anywhere from anywhere else with either no changeovers or one swapping of trains max.

Anyhow, the train system spans out beyond Paris as well, and after taking the metro to the Gare D’Austelitz I caught a medium-speed train out of the city to head south to Uzerche. I say medium speed because there are much faster ones in this country, though even these more mainstream trains go far faster than American counterparts.

It was on this train though that I hit the only snag in my journey. The train itself was so long and as I was assigned the last carriage it put me at the very far back. This became a problem when we arrived at my station 4 hours later. As the train stopped I looked out and there was only tracks on both sides of me. I quickly started rushing from carriage to carriage forward to get to an actual door with a platform. Just as I got up though the train started moving again.

Finding a conductor I inquired but it was clear from her that she couldn’t stop the train. She was very kind though and offered me a ticket back, saying I could get off at the next station and catch the next train backwards. Thankfully though the next station was only 20 minutes away and after getting my cell phone to work I was able to work out a ride from my father straight from that station.

Beyond that all is well. I’ve set to work putting a new ceramic tile roof on a shed-turned-gazebo out front. I’m going to try and get some video going so you all should see that soon. My diet thus far has consisted of bacon sandwiches, salads, and lots of chocolate. All sooo good, especially the bacon. A quarter inch thick and from the best parts of the pig. No terrible stringy stuff.

Anyhow, gotta go. will post more later.

made a reference in the previous post to the Dell Mini 9, and so here’s the promised full exposé:

Last february we here in the blissful noneventful world of perpetual easy living I like to call “government work” spotted a great deal on the Dell Mini 9 netbook.  The thing, normally 280-350 dollars had suddenly been dropped down to 185$ (plus another bit in shipping, still less than 200 though).  It’s an interesting mental evaluation on worth for these things, in that over 250$ they seem too expensive, but less than 200$ and you’d be a fool not to order one.

Anyhow, all of us in the office snapped at the chance of ordering one and we did so.  As we were to discover, the reason they were so cheap was Dell was considering discontinuing the Mini 9 and was trying to liquidate its stock of spare parts and half-assembled machines.  Since we’re here on the west coast timezone and as we foolishly debated ordering for a while, this meant that by the time we placed an order we were well in the back of the laptop assembly queue.   Just over a month of time’s back, in fact.  Mine was slated to be built and delivered over a month away, on 3/30/2009.

Well the weeks wore on without the laptop and I got a little tired of waiting.  To try and speed it up, one night I attempted to contact Dell.com to see if I could get a rush order placed on the production of the laptop.  After some chatting via email I was handed to associate “Sweety Madhawi” who assured me that my concerns were of most concern to him and how my business was of large importance.  After talking Sweety informed me that my shipping would be upgraded to “Next Day Delivery”, a 69$ value at no additional charge to myself.   Hooray!

I quickly hopped online and went back to my order.  Upon checking it I did indeed see that the delivery date had changed.  It went from 3/30/2009 to 4/1/2009.  Somehow the faster 70 dollar shipping managed to push the delivery date even further back.  Further email inquiries with Sweety were unfruitful, as I was merely assured that everything was in order and that they would do their utmost to make sure my business was a number one priority.

Disallusioned with this I went reading the forums at www.mydellmini.com.  It was there I learned of the Dell Outlet Store where one could aquire”previously ordered new” mini 9s for almost the exact same price, only with fast shipping.  Jumping on this I managed to find an upgraded version with 2GB of RAM and a larger HDD at only a few dollars difference to what I would be paying for the upgrades anyway if I waited for my first order to come in.  Quickly I snapped the machine up and made plans to cancel my initial order.

Of course, as I put the order in for this second mini-9 I noticed something else as well about the shipping.  The initial cost of shipping on the first order was 8 dollars.  The Overnight Next-Day delivery for this outlet laptop wasn’t a 69$ upgrade, but an 8$ upgrade to 16$ total.   I’m not really sure what to make of that, whether Sweety was overcharged when he changed my shipping, whether he was lying, or that Dell has such extensive customer-complaint scripts as to say things like that.  Most likely the latter.

Anyhow, the second one arrived within a week, however I decided to continue with the order of the first mini-9.  It still had 2 weeks to go but at the price we got them at it was still an excellent deal, and I decided it would make an excellent present for anyone I felt needed a new little laptop.

And so that’s how I came into possession of the mini-9.  As far as functionality it is one of the most easily converted OSx86 capable machines out there with 99% compatability of all its hardware.  The keyboard is fine (took me 2 minutes to retrain myself with the ‘ key by typing contractions repeatedly, and that was it).  The screen is absolutely beautiful.  And there’s nothing like having a 4 hour battery life.  My only hope is this thing survives at least 2 years as I use this device every day for webbrowsing, movie watching, and note taking.  I’d easily take this over any real mac laptop any day, as OS-X’s simplicity not only isn’t a limitation, but seems more useful on this than it does on any real laptop or desktop.

Recently (and of which I’ll go into in great detail soon on this blog) my office and I were overtaken by the whole “netbook” craze. Almost every one of us purchased the brilliant little Dell Mini 9. I’ve even gone so far as to put OSx86 on it and it’s absolutely awesome.

Anyway, that story for another time, it is sufficient to say I am now well versed in netbook prices, functionality, and value. This goes double for Dell and its website, from which I have personally ordered three netbooks myself. So when I spotted that Dell was launching a new website to sell netbooks to women, I figured I’d give it a quick look. The site is called “Della” though its URL is the more unmemorable http://content.dell.com/us/en/home/della.aspx . Anyhow, I browsed on there for a few moments until I came to the pricing page. The Mini 10, in “Promise Pink” was being billed at $479. That seemed a little high so I clicked the “buy it” button to do a little more investigating.

Well, after clicking the link and looking through, the laptop seemed the base model (plus pink). No special upgrades, no better screen or any of that. Finding this a bit odd I quickly brought the regular dell.com website up and after going through to ensure the entire configuration was the same I came up with the following discrepency:

Now I don’t know about you, but I find it a little odd that women need to pay 85$ more solely for the pleasure of purchasing a computer from a website that has more pastels on it…

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Nothing like restarting this blog off with a movie review. And yes, it won’t be good.

I am unsure how to start this. I suppose the best way would be to point at the title and OH GOD I’m still just too angry at this situation. This movie could not have been made any worse. Bewilderingly awful, mind numbingly shallow, hopelessly contrite, further adjectively indescribable in how bad it was. Indeed, I do know the best way to start this, and it is to break it down into all the problems it had.

1) The characters. It did not take a tricorder to detect the lack of depth in any of them. All the dialogue they spewed out was ambiguous, confused, and lackluster to make me think they in any way grew; or even believed in what they were saying. It quite literally was as if they were just reading a script of words that would briefly justify to the audience what they were going to do whatever it was the movie wanted to do next. None of the characters really ever felt interested in what they were doing and none of them came to any fundamental growths in their own outlook on life.

Never was this more apparent than in the main protagonist. What was his purpose? Why would he be possibly driven to destroy entire worlds? Why couldn’t I even tell him apart from his lackeys? It was as if he was just a movie prop, something that had to be in-camera to make the scene complete. Beyond that there was really no real purpose (or even thought) behind his character. He could easily have been replaced by a cardboard cutout and tape recorder and it still would have achieved the same affect.

2) The story (or really lack of one). This movie can be summarised really in one sentence: combine The Phantom Menace with 20,000 leagues under the sea then write it so that an 8 year old can understand it.

This is where we get into a *SPOILER ALERT*. You have been warned.

I suppose if you wanted me to get a little more specific it could be described as this: “Disgruntled and disallusioned cardboard cutout falls through time, and for no adequately explored reason breaks all continuity in the star-trek world while a bunch of random people bounce from plot point to plot point without meaning, focus, drive, or reason.”  Everything that was done in the movie wasn’t character driven, it wasn’t story driven, it was script-driven.  All things like logic, reason, or motivation took a back seat to just making sure that “plot piece A joins with plot piece B so we can move on to plot piece C”.

Don’t believe me? look at it thus: how could everyone accept time travel so simply and easily? Why did warp drive not actually impose any limits on traveling time but served as just a “next-scene” button? How is it the romulan ship could wipe out an entire fleet yet couldn’t destroy the Kelvin? Why the hell would the cardboard cutout dump Spock on some random planet that Kirk just *happened* to land on next, right next to where he landed?!?!

Just about every scene worked this way, but I think the biggest and best example of this was the showdown argument between Kirk and Spock.  Even with what little setting up they did there was no reason at all he’d give up command of the ship when entire planets were at stake.  The worst part was he dismissed himself.  By the very same arguement if he was going to follow such a strict moral code he would have relieved himself of command when he decided to rescue his parents.  The whole thing was just a simple cop-out to swap them as captains halfway through.  Really it boiled down to nothing more than the scriptwriters wrote themselves into a corner and as such the story had become too inconvenient to continue in any logical fashion.

3) Camera work/special effects.  I’m torn between agitated and nauseated by the work done in the special effects department.  Occasionally there were a few good camera shots, and the first once or twice the camera came in from a sideways angle was interesting.  But overall the while visual effect production effort was terrible.  Every outer space shot was zoomed in far too close to the ship to give any real sense of what was going on.  When you panned out even briefly the shot was then filled by a mind numbing amount of red and blue blaster fire or debris.  At no point could you ever get a sense of what was really going on in the scene.  And far from making it feel tense, stunning, frightening it merely left me overwhelmed with a sense of annoyance and disgust.    If I had to sum it all up in a single quote I would merely say “confusion wracked with ambiguitity,and overwhelmed with 10,000 blaster bolts”

And as an additional tip: lens flares do not offer realism, they suggest amateurism.  It’s as if you are having trouble understanding how lighting works.  Please stop using them.

4) Continuity.  I alluded to it briefly above, and I’ll expand upon it here now.  This review wouldn’t be complete unless I covered the actual Star Trek aspect of this as well.

Firstly there is the new design of the Enterprise.  I’m really not sure how much different they could have made it short of converting the saucer to a triangle and replacing the nacelles with hampster wheels.  Abrams’ “vision” not only removed what is well documented and loved and has replaced it with some rediculous hot-rod/steampunk hybrid that bears about as much artistic depth as a 3 year old’s crayon colouring book.  What little he managed to draw between the lines was still not enough to justify the extremely bad choices in colour, style, look, and appeal.

He doesn’t stop raping the Star Trek universe there either.  Everything, from the phase pistols to warp speed seem to be off.  There is no aspect (short of the uniforms, which I admit I quite liked) which was saved from his overwhelming lust to desecrate or overwrite.

And as far as the storyline goes, I’m not even a particularly heavy trek fan and I recognise that what they have done has nullified everything that has come before.  Continuity, timelines, backstory (or in this case forestory) of every single episode of all the star-trek series is now wrong.  I personally find this a slap in the face of all star-trek fans.  Not that I think that canon should be worshiped religiously, but to put this effort in perspective with an example: When the vatican restored the sistine chapel in 1999, I’m sure none of them would have been keen on the idea of tearing out every single fresco and instead replacing the imagery with statues of jesus made out of animal dung and pasta glued to cardboard.

And this is really what he’s done to the trek universe.  By wanting to put his own “mark” so badly on it he’s smeared and smudged over almost all the things that made it beautiful and enjoyable to me to begin with.  Sure, there were problems with the many of the original shows, but none deserved to have this amount of grime wiped across them.

5) Conclusion

For me the best thing I can hope to do is forget this movie was ever made.  And I find it a pity, because it could have been done so much better.  It wouldn’t have been hard to do actual dialogue between the characters, to have spent more time actually developing the enterprise, its crew, and its foundations, and actually have made a decent film.  Instead this was just a pointless two hour long exposé of JJ Abrams special effects erection, hastily glued together by a pointless story and hastily labeled Star Trek to bring in more moviegoers.