Chatter Of The Squirrel

Movie: The Inglorious Basterds

First glance: Oh, another WW2 movie.

First whispers from a random review: Tarantino. Doing a war movie. With very little pew-pew. Sounds odd, but intriguing.

Another look: So it’s a fictional story about a team of Jewish black-ops killing Nazis in Germany. I can accept that.

At the end of the first viewing: HOLY CRAP!! This isn’t a war movie! It’s an alternate time-line fantasy!

The movie is all about the Tough Guys. Everyone’s a tough guy talking tough. Oozing menace / charm / power / vanity / authority through dialogue. And this made it extremely interesting and very, very fun to watch!

The strong-as-oak man-of-the-land facing off a German detective hunting Jews. The stereotypical drill sergeant shout-talk. Intimidation of Nazi captives. An SS officer sniffing out British spies. A war hero sweet-talking a French belle. Or just eating and talking about strudels.

Lots of very interesting face-offs with high stakes verbal dueling. Every scene well acted.

There must be an odd dozen and more fantastic quotable quotes in the movie. If the dialogue didn’t keep shifting between English, German, French and Italian. High points for realism. But a little annoying perhaps.

The ending blew me away…

With Hollywood being so Jewish, I’m surprised that a movie like this never materialized much earlier. It’s like everybody in Hollywood just flipped Germany the Bird.

One word to describe this movie? I’ld go with SCHADENFREUDE.

“Schadenfreude is German for: taking delight in the misery of others.”
“Schadenfreude. Taking delight in the misery of others. That IS German.”
~~~ Lyrics from Avenue Q ~~~

Tech: GoogleTalk in Pidgin

Using Pidgin, after setting the basic account information for your GoogleTalk account, you also need to do the following in the Advanced settings:

Force old (port 5223) SSL: Checked
Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams: Un-Checked
Connect Port: 443
Connect Server: talk.google.com
Proxy type: Use Global Proxy Settings

Movie: The Lazarus Project

One gimmicky idea. One Sixth Sense moment. 1hr 35min to tell the story.

And it’s not even a blow-your-mind 6th Sense moment. It’s a crazy person is really government conspiracy kind of story.

Granted, that for a moment the movie tries to build a Purgatory feel in the story… But the story is just too darn SLOW! And it’s got the kid from The Fast And The Furious.

Irony.

Book: The Lost Fleet – Jack Campbell

The Lost Fleet is currently a series of 5 books. To describe it succinctly, it is an attempt to be Horatio Hornblower in Space!

I was introduced to this by Saleem. The premise was very interesting: two galactic federations have been at war with each other for a century, and the stale-mate has depleted both sides of all officers with any skill in fleet maneuvers and tactics. The unnatural selection has resulted in fleets led by officers distinguished by their cowardice, sycophancy, and political savvy rather than military leadership. Kinda like the premise of Idiocracy. But salvation comes not in the form of Luke Wilson, but as a ship’s captain who was lost in hibernation sleep in an escape pod at the opening salvos of the war. Thawed out after a hundred years, Captain Jack Geary is put in charge of the remnants of the Alliance fleet and tries to limp back to home space with the enemy hot on his heels.

Capt Geary is Campbell’s fantasy of how a naval commander should be, and is the only well-fleshed out character in the series. The rest of the cast are merely faceless sycophants, faceless political adversaries, faceless traitors, and faceless lovers. The appeal of the books isn’t in the characters.

The appeal is in the detailed space combat. Campbell was able to imagine battles in 3 dimensions, taking place in the vicinity of 0.1 lightspeed with all its relativistic complications. Grapeshots. Hell-lances. Core-overloads. In a way, it’s the same appeal of the Death Star space fight at the end of Episode IV.

I managed to get all 5 books in audiobook format. So ‘reading’ this series didn’t cost me a lot of time. When I attempted to listen through it on Painting Thursdays though, Wolf was giving me no end of shit for the juvenile writing. He did have a point. The space combat was fun the first few times, but after a while, the didactic quality of the writing starts to grate.

Other elements in the story was also lacking. A lover jumping into bed, and then out of bed, passed for drama. Conflict takes the form of a string of near identical political nemeses. And when a character’s prejudice moved from extreme to questioning, that’s character development.

But still, fun is fun. And it’s still better writing than Tim Kring.

Tech: Microsoft Hyper-V part 2

FRACK!!

Bottomline is, the free Hyper-V is hardcore hypervisor. Bare metal.

Using the PowerShell Management Library, I’m able to create and manage virtual machines…

But there’s no way to create a session to connect to those virtual machines. Not locally. Not without using another Vista/Server2008 machine with the necessary pack to connect to it.

The Hyper-V Core does not have vmconnect.exe  nor any of the 101 thingamajigs needed to create a console to load up the VM and actually do STUFF on it.

Somebody needs to write a Dummies guide so people like me can save a bit of time…