Colin Charles Agenda

Slow movie month, Easter vacation has reduced my movie times, but it was significantly increased by long flight times. Air New Zealand also has nifty personalized video, so its probably now only United that sucks.

• Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber - nice because Jennifer Love Hewitt was in it, but it was generally, a really, stupid movie. Passing time while lying in bed at Apollo Bay, late into the night… thanks to cable TV.
• Mr. Bean’s Holiday - very funny. Definitely worth a watch, if you’re a Bean fan. Plus there’s a interesting looking French girl, rather than the usual girl Mr. Bean seems to be into (in the series).
• Notes on a Scandal - its really not that interesting, but on a long flight it was okay.
• The Holiday - Running away for a dream vacation to move on from broken hearts? Seems sensible, I think lots of people do that…
• The Pursuit of Happiness - great show, amazing story.
• Freedom Writers - another amazing story, great show, highly recommended. Its all about 2nd chances and how everyone of us really does rock.
• Sherrybaby - maybe a little too much sex and the idea that you should use your boday to gain an advantage? Probably not the movie for women’s rights proponents…
• Catch & Release - secrets abound, everywhere. Jennifer Garner is here, its got a lot of themes around love, friendship, loss and so forth.

Today I cooked. 2nd time in the week - chilli con carne when I arrived back on Monday, and marinara wine-o mix pasta.

Chilli con carne was easy to prepare: 500g shredded beef, 1 can tomatoes, 1 can kidney beans, a couple of onions (chopped), and add the Maggi chill con carne mix ;-) Goes well with garlic bread, wholemeal bread, and so forth.

Marina wine-o mix pasta is a lot more interesting. Chopped onions and garlic, wine, assorted marinara mix (i.e. go get crabsticks, prawns, squid, mussels, etc.) all in a pot. Add more wine (white) liberally. Make sure the flame is at medium. Toss in some lemon rinds and lemon juice. Add a dash of parsley and basil. Cook pasta separately, and when al dente, toss into the big wok containing marinara wine-o mix. Stir properly. Add a little more wine. Stir.

Tastes delicious. YP, my housemate, decided to try some sauce because she dislikes seafood in general. “Tastes like wine,” she said. Oops. Minor problem is that with ~750g of pasta, and ~1kg of marinara mix, I’ve got two large container loads of this stuff.

Yes, I’m cooking to de-stress. And to sure as heck consider it payback for the horrendous amounts of hotel food I ate while in the US of A.

Everyone likes to scale - Peter Van Dijck has got some top 10 presentations listed - Twitter, Flickr, LiveJournal, Six Apart (Vox), Last.fm, SlideShare, etc. Guess what these sites are all generally backed by? You guessed right - go MySQL. I however didn’t know that Bloglines was backed by Sleepycat.

If you’re interested in viewing some rather swanky MySQL-related presentations, check out the mysql tag on SlideShare, as well.

I especially like Brad Fitzpatrick’s LiveJournal: Behind the Scenes talk that he gave at Yet Another Perl Conference Asia 2007. The LiveJournal folk (Brad mostly?) have built some amazing tools that we all take for granted daily - memcached, perlbal, djabberd, OpenID and so much more. In fact, for those thinking about presenting at the MySQL Users Conference Japan 2007 (in September), I’d suggest looking at Brad’s slide deck - look at how he does dual languages! I don’t know if he wrote the Japanese as well, but I think this is definitely a good idea.

Now to go read up on mogilefs and all the other cool tools at Danga Interactive.

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