waider dot i e

May 17: DVD ripping: currently working my way through the titles - slowly, and in one of the more stupid ways I could do so - checking runtimes against expected runtimes. I'm sure I could kill this project entirely by tossing the whole thing into Plex, but where's the fun in that?
May 16: I don't know how you characterise a movie like That They May Face The Rising Sun; there's no story arc, per se, it's more like a series of vignettes that are, as far as I understand it, loosely autobiographical (it's based on a book of the same name by John McGahern and seems to have more than a little of himself in it) and set in some goregous scenery out Connemara way. There are scenes in the movie that are litterally slow pans or even long shots of the countryside, sometimes with cast included, sometimes not. And yet it's strangely compelling for all that. I started watching it with half an eye on my laptop but after an hour the laptop was asleep and I was fully focused on the lack of happenings.
May 15: The Murder in Angel Lane was a nice little murder mystery set sort of roughly in Jack The Ripper's London (he doesn't get a mention, but Leman Street police station does) and while we'd guessed some of the plot as it went along we didn't see the betrayal coming. Pacing isn't hectic but it didn't need to be.
May 12: We have a Roberts "internet radio" here that's proven deeply unhappy with mesh networking for some reason and periodically decides that no network is good enough for it. I have just now dug out the old Airport to see if it'll be happy with that. Problem being, of course, that it can go for weeks at a stretch without a problem before deciding that nah, Wi-Fi isn't worth it.
May 08: Crime 101 was a fairly straightforward movie that didn't try to be anything more than what it was, and worked well because of that. As noted by Mrs. Waider, we were coming right up to the inevitable denoument without really being sure of how things would play out, other than that snotty motorbike kid would get some form of comeuppance. Good stuff, would happily watch again.
May 06: Ugh, that was unpleasant: internet offline at 2pm, not back online until almost 9. Best guess at what happened: router firmware update deployet at 2pm causing an outage, and our normal diagnostic of checking the obvious (does the TV-which-shares-the-cable work? what are the modem lights doing? etc.) concluded with power-cycling the router which may have broken the firmware update irrecoverably. A factory reset after dinner, and reconfiguration to put things back the way they were (more or less) and then an inexplicable wait and all was restored.
May 04: Having words with the ZWave network, as is traditional. I did finally get the battery-powered device which has been running successfuly for months on, it claims, a 0%-charged battery to finally admit that the battery was in fact fully charged.
May 01: DVD project: right, we're back on track. I had apparently gotten to the point of wanting to match the discs to IMDb, and decided I'd implement my own IMDb API using the data they publish for download (why? because.) and that's allowing me to validate that I've ripped a movie/episode to within 10% of its IMDb-posted runtime, which is one more mechanism I'm using to verify that the rips are valid. I dunno, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, it's already identified one dud, so I guess it turns out to be worth the effort.

The International was a pretty solid thriller, although the ending was rather abrupt and the newspaper articles over the credits were kinda reinforcing Wexler's conversation with Salinger which was a bit of a buzzkill, but anyway. Between the two of us we managed to call a few of the, ah, shots before they were reveealed.
April 26: Ok, it's been long enough. Time to pick up the DVD ripping again. First problem: why did I leave so many bits of script lying around with no indication of which were going concerns?
April 24: I had never seen Scent of a Woman, which I am informed was Pacino's only Oscar-winning performance. I'm surprised at this: he has seemed equally qualified for the little gold man in other roles but I guess it depends on who he was up against for the award. Anyway, the movie was a little slow to get going but quite a bit of fun when it did. The inevitable rousing speech / old guy stands up for young guy he pretends to look down on thing happened, of course, and it was kinda lumpy, and overall I felt the movie itself wasn't sure if it wanted to lean into the "stand with your colleagues even if they're dicks" bit or the "it's not wrong to tell the truth, you muppet" bit which meant that the lumpiness extended to that whole scene. The Ferrari bit was funny, though. Overall, not a bad movie, but not exactly great either.