There are two upcoming shows that I would like to go see and am looking for people to go along with me.
The first is a rendition of the 1922 silent film "Shadows" being shown at the Laserdome on Saturday, Dec 11 at 9:00 PM. This should be an interesting show. I've never seen a silent film, except for what I've seen on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The original music score is being performed by local artists, The Reese Project, who frequenty perform at Alois Restaurant in Mt. Joy.
The second show is Larry The Cable Guy, a redneck comic similar to Jeff Foxworthy, performing at Hershey's Giant Center on February 10, 2005. Tickets for this go on sale this Saturday morning.
If anyone is interested in either show, let me know ASAP.
With the birth of our daughter this summer, Karen has been hinting about wanting to get a minivan sometime in the near future. In general, I have been against this idea for a few reasons, but mostly dealing with cost of the vehicle and my environmental concerns and the general poor fuel economy of the larger vehicles. I agree that there are times when a van or SUV would be nice, especially on trips to simply picking up larger objects at my toy stores (Lowes or Home Depot).
Lately I've been telling Karen that she can get a van under two conditions. Her car needs to be paid off first, we have a little over a year to go on that, and she can only get a gas-electric hybrid. My thought was that Toyota was supposed to be releasing a hybrid version of their Sienna van, but I have yet to see anything on their website or hear from my dad who works for Toyota. With the incredible success of their Prius, this is the hybrid engine I want since they have the best one on the market and in general, the Toyota is a very reliable, and environmentally friendly vehicle.
I started to do a bit of research into the actual fuel economy of the minivans since it's not looking like a hybrid minivan is going to be available by the time we really need to get one and found a few interesting sites. I was told by John that Yahoo! had a chart comparing all of the vehicles by type and their MPG rating, but I couldn't find it. I ended up at www.fueleconomy.gov which has a great listing in PDF or print form of every vehicle made, broken up by model year. I also found NESEA's Green Car Club website which has a list of "green" vehicles and a bunch of pointers for improving the fuel efficiency of your vehicle by changing some of your driving habits and keeping your vehicle in good condition.
It will take a bit more research to convince me that a gas powered mini van will get a reasonable MPG rating, but I am looking into this. Don't expect a mini van in our driveway in the near future though, still have the other car to pay for first.
A few weeks ago, while working my late shift, I stumbled across a very kewl site (thanks to slashdot.org) that shows the differences between all the releases of the original Star Wars trilogy. DVDAnswers has now been updated to include all three of the original movies, with their differences. Most of the changes are just remastering, some color cleanup, etc, but there are some major changes, most of which are easy to spot, but some not so easy.
One change I am not thrilled about is changing the actor that portrayed the ghost of Anakin Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi.
I bought the new versions on DVD, but have not had the chance to watch them yet. I do look forward to sitting down with my daughter one day and sharing the greatest movies ever produced.
I'm running the testing flavor of Gentoo on my laptop (and my server for that matter) and noticed that the new version of tar is broken. Of course, this is after I start to pull 600 MB of source and compile it which has now taken over 27 hours (off and on with errors and such).
The error I was getting is pasted below, along with the fix.
In file included from /usr/include/stdio.h:28,
from argp-fmtstream.h:32,
from argp-fs-xinl.c:27:
/usr/include/features.h:265:41: operator '&&' has no right operand
Fix:
emerge tar
cd /var/tmp/portage/tar-1.14.90-r1/work/tar-1.14.90/lib
patch -p1 <
+++ argp-fs-xinl.c 2004-10-29 13:45:26.385342488 +0100
@@ -22,8 +22,9 @@
#endif
#define ARGP_FS_EI
-#undef __OPTIMIZE__
-#define __OPTIMIZE__
+#ifndef __OPTIMIZE__
+#define __OPTIMIZE__ 1
+#endif
#include "argp-fmtstream.h"
#if 0
EOM
ebuild /usr/portage/app-arch/tar/tar-1.14.90-r1.ebuild merge
Thanks to the gentoo forums and this bug report for that one! I'm not churning away at the remaining 96 packages. And to think, I get to do this all over again on the server probably tomorrow.