I went to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie last night. As I’ve alluded to in other entries, I’m a pretty serious Douglas Adams fan. In the late 80’s there was talk that Ivan Reitman of Ghost Busters fame was going to do a HHGTTG movie, but nothing ever came of it.
Fans of the radio series and the six episode tv series know exactly what Arthur looks and sounds like, along with all the others such as Zaphod, Trillian, Slartibartfast and, of course, Marvin. Casting Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent worked perfectly. His mannerisms and appearance were very close to those of Simon Jones. Mos Def as Ford Prefect worked, too.
The two biggest differences in the lead characters were the way they portrayed Zaphod’s heads and the overall appearance of Marvin. They built on something alluded to in the books about Zaphod and Marvin’s appearance conveyed as much as the original one did.
The effects were top notch and the script was classic Douglas Adams. Look for at least two cameos by members of the original series.
The best bit is that the film left the possibility of a sequel (or more hopefully, sequels). if we’re lucky, we won’t have to wait another twenty years!

A teaser on CJON caught my attention, so I found the station’s website and poked around until I found this story and this follow up.

Shortly after writing the other entry about my Linux server packing it in, I powered it down and took the covers off. The burning leaves smell didn’t go away which made me think that perhaps it wasn’t the server after all. The suspicious wisps of smoke coming from the balcony below mine pretty much confirmed this hypothesis.

Yes, I said smoke.

I peered over the railing, but couldn’t see anything obviously on fire. Rather than pulling the fire alarm, I called the on-call building manager and told him what I was seeing. Meeting up with him at the apartment below mine, I watched as they tried all the keys to no avail. He and I headed back up to my apartment and he peered over the railing and then asked me to call 9-1-1. So, call I did.

A couple of minutes later, the fire trucks started arriving. I headed down to the main floor just as the firemen were arriving with their axes and what not and went out to watch the show from the corner of Spencer and Holland.

Three firemen appeared on the balcony and were poking at something. One of them returned with a pot of water and poured it out and then did this again. Satisfied, they disappeared back into the apartment.

I had a call later in the morning from the police. Apparently, a flower pot was smoldering/on fire on the balcony. Fortunately, there wasn’t any damage to the apartment below mine, but mine still smelled like burning leaves when I went home at lunch to check on things. Hopefully, the fan I’ve had running all day will have sorted this out, otherwise I’ll have to file an insurance claim to get things cleaned.

I put Pinetree back together at lunch and powered it up. It probably was swamped with a backlog of news and mail, but that should have sorted itself out quickly enough.

At least I’ll have a functioning door when I get home. I suspect the people in the apartment below me won’t.

It looks like my Linux server, Pinetree, which has given me many years of faithful service is unhappy. Got up this morning to a strong smell of burning leaves, which seems to have gone away when I powered off Pinetree. I had been planning on replacing it for a while now, so I guess I’ve postponed it as long as I can.

If you’re sending email to my pinetree.org address, I won’t see it until this evening, at the earliest. If you provide me an NNTP feed, it can backlog until this evening after 21:00 Eastern or so when I can start migrating things.

*sigh*

I hid my first cache in preparation for the GAG 6 event this weekend. (Technically, it is the second cache I have, but I didn’t hide the first one myself, so it’s really my first.)

Hopefully, it’ll attract a lot of cachers. The next nearest cache is a couple of kilometres away. There used to be one closer, but it disappeared about a year ago and the owner hasn’t replaced it.