S.KRAUSE

Don’t be a Stranger

On this day in 1913 Albert Camus was born. A few days ago Alan Barra wrote an interesting article on him over at salon.com [registration and/or day pass required]—I highly recommend it. It is also the birthday of Leon Trotsky (Nov. 7, 1878–Oct. 20, 1940) and Joni Mitchell. Billy Graham turned 86—getting old, so perhaps he won’t see 87. And on this day in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution took place. Ah, November: always entertaining.

This week will keep me busy. There is a talk on Adorno’s aesthetics that I am tempted to attend, though I suspect the audience will likely consist mostly of critical theory freaks from comp. lit. and English. *sigh* There is also a small symposium entitled “Moral Choices in the Age of Terrorism: Kant on Religion, Ethics, and Politics” that I wish to attend. (aside: here is another interesting page on Kant) I’ll be giving my students two quizzes this week, and I need to return several books to the library (they were recalled on me). On top of that, we need to get a replacement set up for the old GDGSA website now that SIT has been decomissioned.

I still have my own server problems: I had to reboot again today since log rotation no longer works properly. I sym-linked /tmp to /var/tmp, which is on a different partition, so I may have stumbled upon a—pardon the pun—temporary solution. I prefer to think about interesting or nifty, which is to say positive, computer tricks these days rather than hardware problems. My current favorite is doing limited pattern matching/substitution within variable names using bash; I find this useful for batch file renaming. Example(s):

steve:# ls
20041018-fulbright-narrative_cv.doc
20041018-fulbright_proposal.doc
cges_fellowship.pdf
daad-grad.pdf
fulbright-foreign_language_report.pdf
fulbright-narrative_cv.doc
fulbright-narrative_cv.sxw
fulbright-program_notification_form.pdf
fulbright_proposal.doc
fulbright_proposal.sxw
fulbright-reference.pdf
fulbright-supplementary_material_record_card.pdf
fulbright-transcript_labels.pdf
steve_krause_dissertation_proposal.doc

If the variable $i is a filename, then ${i#fulbright} represents the filename minus the first instance of the string “fulbright” at the beginning of the filename.

steve:# for i in *; do echo ${i#fulbright}; done
20041018-fulbright-narrative_cv.doc
20041018-fulbright_proposal.doc
cges_fellowship.pdf
daad-grad.pdf
-foreign_language_report.pdf
-narrative_cv.doc
-narrative_cv.sxw
-program_notification_form.pdf
_proposal.doc
_proposal.sxw
-reference.pdf
-supplementary_material_record_card.pdf
-transcript_labels.pdf
steve_krause_dissertation_proposal.doc

Likewise, ${i%doc} represents the filename minus the last occurance of “doc” at the end of the filename.

steve:# for i in *; do echo ${i%doc}; done
20041018-fulbright-narrative_cv.
20041018-fulbright_proposal.
cges_fellowship.pdf
daad-grad.pdf
fulbright-foreign_language_report.pdf
fulbright-narrative_cv.
fulbright-narrative_cv.sxw
fulbright-program_notification_form.pdf
fulbright_proposal.
fulbright_proposal.sxw
fulbright-reference.pdf
fulbright-supplementary_material_record_card.pdf
fulbright-transcript_labels.pdf
steve_krause_dissertation_proposal.

## and %% can be used to delete maximum rather than minimum matches. I find this useful when/if I have a directory of files that all begin with some useless prefix that I would like to remove (or replace).

I am already very behind on my NaNoWriMo project for this year, even though I have, finally, started to develop a story of sorts. Or at least parts.

Today’s (arbitrary) links:

• Golden Age Greats: a neat comics page, with a number of “old” or “classic” images.
• Henri Fetischneider: If I could read Dutch better, I could give a better impression of what the page is about (in addition to being a gallery of the artist’s works). Not all the images are work-safe.
• DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux: an online how-to

I found listening to Beethoven’s 3rd and 4th piano concerti to be a wondefully relaxing experience this afternoon. The 3rd, especially, is quite bombastic. The piano does not enter immediately in the first movement, so the orchestral introduction feels a bit like an overture. When the piano does finally take over it exerts a calming influence through its forceful and sure direction, and seems to be saying, “Okay, now let’s get down to business.” The 4th concerto is considerably more mellow, one might say. The recording I have, by Stephen Bishop Kovacevich on piano with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, may not be the greatest performance or recording of these works, but in all the years I’ve had this CD, I’ve found something comforting in its naked virtuosity and lack of subtlety.

I do not recall ever watching Scream (1996), so when my brother and Rachel rented Scary Movie a few years back I missed some of the parody. Yesterday I got around to watching Scream 2 (1997), which proved to be amusing, if not particularly scary. The same can be said of Final Destination 2; it was a competent sequel to the original (which I caught on cable last winter, I believe). Last night a colleague (Rachel) hosted a Lebowski evening of sorts, and a handful of us from the German department (mostly 1st year grads, so I was a bit out of place, I suppose) gathered to watch The Big Lebowski and The History of the World: Part I, and to drink white russians all night long. Earlier in the evening I watched The Crow for the first time (which is to say, I’d seen parts of it before, but never the whole thing). It was better than I expected, but the reason for its supposed cult status was difficult to see. Somehow it made me appreciate Dark City a bit more, perhaps because of the ways in which the films’ respective cities have certain visual similarities but are really so different. I am also constantly amused by how often a certain actor or actress will show up in the movies I’ve been watching; in this case it was Jon Polito as Gideon, the pawn shop owner—he was also in Mimic, which I watched a week or two ago, as well as The Big Lebowski and other movies by the Coen brothers.

—November 7 2004

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