Waipio

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Loan Woes

I got the Commitment Letter from the bank, but it came with enough conditions and clauses that I might as well start from scratch. Turns out I don’t have enough open credit lines, which means the bank doesn’t know whether I will be repaying them on time. So, instead of a nice credit card report, they are asking me to provide a ton of documentation from other places where I have to pay regularly. Continue reading

Seabiscuit

Great! So there is an underdog horse with an underdog jockey, but they win all races and power a whole generation of men and women desperately seeking a role model for overturning odds. Seabiscuit was the star of 1938. The one that already had given up on twice, who managed to recover and achieve the greatest results when he should have been long history. Made into a novel later on, the story of Seabiscuit the horse and of the men that made him into a star got to become an exciting movie, whose duration of two and a half hours is the only serious limitation to enjoyment. Continue reading

Elektra

The very memorable Jennifer Garner stars in this forgettable action-packed movie. Elektra is a spin-off of the recent Daredavil, starring Ben Affleck, which bombed at the box office. Since Spiderman captured the audiences and ranked in the Top Ten Highest Grossing Movies of All Times, comic book characters have become the targets of big budget Hollywood. It worked with Superman decades ago, it worked with Spiderman – why wouldn’t it work with Daredevil, too? Continue reading

The Life of Brian

How on Earth could I have lived almost 38 years without ever seeing “The Life of Brian” to the end? It is a movie in its own category, even within the Monty Python group; friends had been telling me I had to watch it for a long, long time. Now that I am through it, I have to admire the incredible finesse with which the MP crew packs a short amount of time. Continue reading

2005-06-23 Yosemite

Imported Photo Album Continue reading

Flying to L.A.

Short trip out to L.A. to visit a conference. It’s funny to fly out to L.A. for work, being used as I am to the city as a vacation destination. My first time was in 1998, shortly before I moved to the States for good. It was the last weekend of my stay in San Diego, and I had decided I needed to at least see Los Angeles before flying back and returning who knows when. Continue reading

Migrating a Mail Archive from Mbox to IMAP

It’s been several years that I store all my email in Kmail. It used to be Outlook back in 2000, but I soon got fed up and converted to a Linux box where the .pst format was quite useless. I used a nifty utility to do the conversion on a Windows box, and everything worked just fine. Now it’s time to move again. This server has a new IMAP implementation that polls my POP3 provider every minute, performs filtering, then allows me to connect from anywhere. Continue reading

No Fog in Fog City

It looked at first as if this might become a challenging day. The low clouds were hanging around dangerous, and it was hot from the get-go. The typical mixture that yields that dreaded fog that hovers over the City all day, putting us sun-loving Californians in a stupor. You probably couldn’t live here without the cooling influence of the Pacific. It is amazing how cold it is on the ocean side, and how hot it can get just ten miles East of here. Continue reading

The Naked Young Man in Mark 14:51-52

I was reading Mark again, the shortest of the Gospels. I reached the passage where Jesus is on the Mount of Olives, getting ready for the last days. The emotions are tense: the High Priest comes with armed soldiers to arrest Jesus; Jesus himself has not slept in days, and has urged his disciples to pray; Judas Iscariot is getting ready for the betrayal that Jesus already prophecied. Luke has a better account of the story. Continue reading