I hacked for 3 or 4 hours on static rendering today. Almost have it complete where "complete" is defined as "statically renders your basic blog into html and other flavour forms" and is not defined as "handles dynamic content, comments, and other neat things seamlessly".

I think that'll all be in version 2.

In the process of implementing what I implemented, I moved some stuff around, cleaned up the common_start stuff, re-tested xmlrpc, removed some old files in the CVS repository, and fixed some bugs that had been lying around undiscovered.

Assuming I get some time tomorrow to work on it, I'll have static rendering finished before the end of the weekend.

I just made a bunch of changes to PyBlosxom and figured I'd test to make sure xmlrpc still works...

The previous posts were mostly about ushering and how much sleep I got. I'd like to dedicate this post to Ed who didn't get any gametime in any of my earlier posts. Ed's film was fantastic. It was at once eloquent and moving. It was the only movie with aliens flying around in their ships zapping people with their alien rays. It was the only movie with a brain in a jar.

Ed was a thug and then a pirate. I think he should quit his current job as a Web Developer and join the theatre. The world has enough Web Developers but it yearns for men of Ed's talent.

This is a fantastic reference card for those of us who use Debian, but not so much that we've got all the commands ingrained in our heads until the end of time. Pretty fantastic piece of work. I wish I had one for vim.

Update

03/14/2005 - I fixed the url to the reference card.

I'm really glad this is the last group. I've ushered for every single show thus far and my ass is really sore. When they sell out, I end up either standing in the back or sitting on the floor--neither of which are comfortable.

The hours are really long, too. Even though the Somerville Theatre is right around the corner from my apartment, I'm getting to bed at 1:00am after working at work for 9 hours and then at this thing for another 6.

There were some good movies in this batch. Now that I've seen all the movies from all the groups, I'd have to say the first group was the best overall, though there were movies in other groups that I liked.

The ImprovAsylum folks really like musicals. They're really good at them, too. It's tempting to go see one of their shows.

We did the third showing at the Somerville Theatre. I have to say, I liked being at the Brattle Theatre a lot more than I did at the Somerville Theatre.

I would have thought it'd be the other way around since the Brattle only has one screen and they're so artsy that you'd think they'd get into this "we're artsy and above all that non-art riff-raff" but they don't. The people were way cool and helpful and the place itself was easy to do our thing in.

The Somerville Theatre people, on the other hand, were just basically unhelpful. I get this feeling they hate working there--it's hard to say though. S remarked that it must be a job requirement that they're not allowed to smile. Ever. It's interesting to note they have a Good Humor vending machine in their lobby.

Anyhow, things went as they tend to go. It's really wild watching these people who participated watching the products of their weekends. Some are excited and really liked what they created. Others just hate it all. Some wax on about whose fault all the problems were.

It's interesting to note that almost all of the groups so far used a variation of Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro on a Mac. It's also interesting to note that Avid was one of the sponsors of the 48 hour film project.

This was the second (and last) group to be screened at the Brattle Theatre. It was a lot rowdier than last night. I'm not sure if that's because the groups were rowdier groups or that we had some ... technical issues.

One of the genres is "mockumentary". Last night we had a film that was very Christopher-Guest-ish which was really well done. After seeing that I figured that all the mockumentary films would be along those lines since there aren't too many other mockumentary films out there to derive the concept from. Tonight, however, was pretty different. I was pretty stunned to find out the guys who did it (their entire team was 4 guys--some of these teams had 25 people and org charts) decided to do it 2 or 3 days before the actual fest. That's pretty awesome.

Reminds me of this foreign exchange student that I knew back in college who decided to run the Boston Marathon at a party we threw the friday before. Then she ran it two days later and did awesome!

I digress. I got home around midnight again, grabbed some food, and then fell into a deep coma.

There's a song entitled Oh Yeah by Yello. It's a fun song and I listen to it sometimes when I'm in one of those awesome feeling moods where I'm actually accomplishing things and my todo list is getting shorter as opposed to infinitely longer. Anyhow, I was thinking of writing some of the lyrics down and sending them via email to a friend, but when I write it down, it's totally unrecognizable and certainly doesn't get across the general feeling of the song.

But, hey--some songs are like that.

I wonder if folks who listen to symphony music have this problem. Do they resort to poetical descriptions? Something like this:

Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor is so beautiful--it fills my heart with joyous melancholy!

Do they ever text message each other?

Yo! Rach PinCS rox!

It reminds me of this project I've had for a long time. I've always wanted to implement a barbershop quartet on a mud. How can I programmatically get across the difference in quality between an experienced quartet and one that's just starting out to the audience? That sort of thing fascinates me. Sometimes people ask me what I'm thinking about when I'm staring off into space. I'm probably thinking about barbershop quartets in mud-space.

Excitement simmered in the air of the first screening at the Brattle Theatre like jumping beans in a popcorn popper.

I was elected Lead Usher by the organizational committee in a unanimous vote. I think they were really impressed by my platform speech which outlined my plan for total usher awesomeness [1].

I carried out my lead usher duties with precision--handing out ballots and pencils like a professional. I had a flashlight with me but never used it [2]. I don't think I'll be bringing one tonight. For the second show I just sat around and watched all my usher minions deviously performing their assigned usher duties.

I'm tired now. I think I got home at midnight and then ate some dinner and went to bed.

The mailing list has been really active. There is definitely a BIG correlation between mailing list activity and my motivation towards fixing things. Some of the things Eugene has said have irked me, but in general he's providing a lot of solid observations which (I think) have led to some really great changes.

In the last few weeks, we've:

• fixed a couple of bugs

• optimized out the get_engine() silliness

• whittled down the managers (there's still some more to do)

• optimized the get_current_session() routine

• optimized the filter_mapper case of hook spamming

• made some really awesome changes to the python_cmd that make it far more usable

All good stuff none of which would have happened with a quiet mailing list.