If not already before, since yesterday’s beat pumping Olympics Opening Ceremony, Torino became the new worldwide Disco Mecca I guess. Italians certainly do know how to heat up events!
a personal website slash blog
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Page 2 of 2
This week we went to see “Walk the Line“, the film about Johnny Cash. I won’t pretend to be a Johnny Cash fan or expert, honestly the only record I have is the Sun Showtime (Sun 106) recording from 1969 on vinyl, but I surely remember people talking about Johnny Cash in a different way. What I recall is the rebel Johnny Cash, the “Man in black” who cares about the american underclass, not the popstar Johnny Cash.
“I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.”
That’s a part I completely missed in the movie. It was way too much love story to suit my taste. The only controversial part are the three minutes when Johnny Cash is telling his managers that he’ll play in Folsom. The conflict with his father, his drug addiction obviously were important parts of his life too which I didn’t know before. I heard that Johnny Cash knew or worked at the script of this movie, so I suppose that maybe he wanted people to know that side of him. However, the movie only represents fragments of his live, it’s nice to watch but I it didn’t work for me.
Before the main film started the Trailer for “Good night, and good luck.” was shown. I saw that one already at the local film festival (VIENNALE) here. Now that movie worked for me! Simple scenery, great dialogs and film topic, impressing lesson about ethics and journalism. That’s definitely my favorite for this years Academy Awards.
Quite impressing in “Walk the Line” was the acting and even more the songs performed by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, simply stunning and, talking in trophies, worth an oscar.
I never seriously listened to country music but Johnny Cash is somehow different. Back home from cinema the first thing I did was ripping that old Sun vinyl I have and loading the songs into iTunes and my iPod.
This weekend were the last days of one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings in Vienna: Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Due to extensive press coverage and therefore resulted Klimt hype during the last weeks, numerous vienneses took their last chance to visit those paintings in Belvedere. The museum reported a record attendence for this weekend. Along with 4 other Klimt art works, Adele Bloch-Bauer I will be removed tomorrow and returned to their true owner Maria Altmann in Los Angeles. Austria could have come to an agreement with Maria Altmann earlier. Actually under more favourable circumstances. But for some unknown reasons our minister didn’t take the chance.
Even though it was obvious that this art was stolen by the Nazis from Maria Altmann’s jewish family our minister insisted 50 years later that it’s a question of austrian property. Kind of humiliating for us. Especially because Maria Altmann wanted the Klimt paintings remain in Austria.
Hopefully the paintings won’t disappear in a private art collection and stay available to the public. Some might call them kitsch, but I remember the golden women of Gustav Klimt as some of the first art works I really liked.
Granted, I didn’t know that each illustration of Mohammed means blasphemy and hurts religious feelings; but still I’m thinking that some people over-react on that cartoons and others take advantage off the current religious uproar. “Dialogue – at all levels – is the only way to get out of this very dangerous situation!” [M.W.]
Count me to the people who have updated to WordPress 2.0.1! Without having a closer look at it yet I believe them saying that about 114 bugs were closed. Even including those 114 bugs WordPress 2.0 served my purposes very well.
Once messing around with my WordPress installation I decided to update the other 2 plugins – Extended Live Archives and Ultimate Tag Warrior – as well. If I had encountered any problem updating WordPress or my plugins I would tell you at this point, but there wasn’t any. The whole update-process was just straightforward: delete the old files, keep the customized ones (e.g. wp-content) and upload the new ones.
A bit trickier was the update to beta 1 of my prefered theme Squible. Due to my own modfications and some significant theme changes, you can costumize Squible out of WordPress’s admin area, it took me while to find the right lines in the Squible sources. A side effect of this process was that I changed the layout colors and stripped out all my background images so that this site loads a bit faster now. Some might say the current color scheme is boring, but I think it’s just simple and slick. When I have some quiet time I’ll probably play around with colors and layout and make some changes. But the default page arrangement in Squible is already pretty good and useful I think.
One immediatly noticeable problem with Squible beta 1 is the broken image upload function within WordPress’s write section. Instead of uploading the image the Squible options panel will be displayed where originally the uploading form was, nor will the image be uploaded to the server (see this thread for more information). Both WordPress and Squible are watching for a parameter named “action” with a value of “save”. If not already done this can be fixed by changing “save” to “squible_save” on line 511 and 54 of functions.php.
Still an unsolved problem is the print layout issue. Hints will be highly appreciated!
Update #1:
Along with some other bugs the image upload problem has been fixed in Squible beta 1.1.
Criticising religious symbols is apparently not tolerated by some people. On that side of the globe it would be like protesting against Monty Python because of their “Life of Brian”. What an absurd idea!
What was the reason for Yahoo! to buy del.icio.us and Flickr? Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten posted some interesting thoughts about innovativeness vs. company size in this context.