The other weasel just purchased a shiny new digital camera. It's a Canon PowerShot A-80 and it's pretty damn kewl. It took me a few hours to get the software to install on her PC - after a lot of messing around it turned out the problem was with admin rights on the install shield. Doh. Even though I was logged in as admin, it turned out that somewhere along the line the admin privileges for the administrator had somehow been turned off when it came to some rarely used processes dealing with install shield. Anyway the other weasel was very happy when I managed to get it all fixed up, but unfortunately I had to uninstall the .NET visual studio in the process which we don't have the original disks for anymore, so that kinda sucked.

The picture of the lamp I took as soon as we opened the box and turned the thing on so it's the very first picture ever taken with the camera. Thought I'd post it for posterity or whatever. Kewl lamp huh? It's actually a tall standing lamp, not a little bedside or table lamp in case you were wondering. Ok that's all the news for now, I'm off to stick my bottom lip out and mope around for a bit just to see what it's like.

Hey. We've had some nice weather recently with temperatures yesterday hitting mid 80's°F (which is getting up to around 30°C). The crap that accumulated in the pool over winter was cleaned out yesterday as well, which is always a good sign that summer is on the way.

We headed out last weekend (Sunday) to Manhattan and spent most of the day sifting around Greenwich Village with our friend Alt (da Fish). We had a 2 o'clock lunch at a cafe followed by some time spent at nearby Washington Square Park where we sat down and chatted and attempted to get the squirrels to come to us (a couple did, until they saw we had no food and then they lost interest). It was nice there; all the trees have new leaves and blossoms are opening up and it was all very 'springtime in NYC' if ya know what I mean, that little period of time between the late winter's cold with dirty snow and slush on the streets and the summer's suffocating heat and smells that resemble something like fried goats, where to get some fresh air you need to open a window and stick your head inside a building. Heh ok it's Douglas Adams but there ya go.

After chillin' at the park for a while, there was a bit of shopping (clothes) and then back to the cafe for coffee and desert (they do an awesome carrot cake and just as awesome tiramisu). We then headed off to Angelika Film Center (still in the Village) which usually shows all the 'artsy' non-mainstream non-commercial type films. At Altie's urging we saw a movie titled 'Good bye, Lenin!' by Wolfgang Becker, and I have to thank Alt for that, it was a really good movie.

The dialogue was in German with English subtitles and tells the story of an East German mother living in Berlin in 1989 in the era of socialism. She has a heart attack and falls into a coma for 8 months after seeing her son in a protest march for freedom and democracy (she's a pretty gung-ho supporter of socialism). While she is in a coma the socialist regime crumbles, the Berlin wall falls, and coca-cola advertising runs rampant. When she comes out of the coma the doctor tells her son and daughter that their mother cannot handle any stress or shocks, so they (mainly the son) decide to take her home and pretend that the old regime is still in place. It's really funny as well as giving a good glimpse at life in socialist East Germany before the wall fell. If you get a chance to see this film, definitely do it, it's really worthwhile viewing. If you need more convincing, it's won a pile of European film awards along with nominations in the Academy and Golden Globe awards for best foreign language film.

Corzr mentioned the All Black Haka in a recent comment (the All Blacks is the name of the New Zealand rugby team for anyone who honestly didn't know) so I'll post a couple of clips of the Haka (it's a Maori war dance basically).

The first clip comes from allblacks.com and is a pretty staunch rendition of the Haka performed by the New Zealand Sevens team after winning the Wellington leg of the IRB World Series. The video is in flash format - if you're not sure if you have the plugin installed, you can check here and download if necessary - it's free.

NZ Sevens Haka (approx 1.9MB) - click the play icon in the middle of the screen once it's loaded.

I host the above file on this domain, but if you have problems viewing it, you can try viewing from the source location here : dialup | highspeed

Here's another one I had on my PC. Not sure where it came from, but it's the All Blacks doing the official Haka in one seamless clip made up of outtakes from a bunch of different games spanning a number of years. It's pretty good actually, if you can handle the 6MB size.

All Black Haka compilation (approx 6.4MB)

By the way, this last link above is an .avi file. If you want to use this clip embedded on your own website, right click the link and 'save target as..' then you can host it on your own domain rather than eat my bandwidth. Thanks.

Hey there. April Fools has been and gone. The MUD I play on regularly (slothmud.org) did a complete player base wipe for April Fools and left it like that for the entire day which made a lot of people freak out not knowing if it was for real or not. Pretty damn funny in a disturbing kind of way.

Here's a quiz from bluepyramid.org for you (thanks to Impz for the link). Turns out I'm a Hobbit. I think it should have been Weasel but they didn't have a book about weasels, so they took the next smallest fuzziest thing they could find:

You're The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
All you wanted was a nice cup of tea when some haggard crazy old man came into your life and told you it was time to do something with yourself. Now you're all conflicted about whether to stick with your stay-at-home lifestyle or follow this crazy person into the wild. While you're very short and a little furry, you seem to be surrounded by an even greater quantity of short folks lately. Try not to lose your ring, but keep its value in perspective!

The second time I did the quiz I ended up with Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Considered by many to be one of the funniest people around, you are quite an entertainer. You've also traveled to the far reaches of what you deem possible, often confused and unsure of yourself. Life continues to jostle you around like a marble, but it's shown you so much of the world that you don't care. Wacky adventures continue to lie ahead. Your favorite number is 42.

..OK, kind of contradictory profiles, but who cares.

Tomorrow we have a wedding to attend which should be groovy. Sounds like it's going to be a big one. Congrats Lenny and Regina for the big day!