The anklebiter has yet to show his face…..

A few entertainment reviews today…I picked up two new albums, Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard to Find a Friend and Ester Drang’s Inifinite Keys. It’s Hard… is David Bazan’s first album, and his best. A little less of a “book” than his later albums, but still great songwriting. Infinite Keys is a bit more interesting. I’d heard a few older Ester Drang songs, and they were, for the most part, instrumentals. This album is not the same. Good music, but the lead singer sounds a bit too much like the guy from Radiohead, and for some reason, I’m having a hard time getting past that. I’m not giving up on the album yet, though….

We also watched Death to Smoochy. I had heard good and bad about the movie, but I thought with Edward Norton, Robin Williams, and Danny Devito, it had to be worth watching. It was. Ed Norton does a fine job as an earnest, granola-crunching kid’s show host, and Robin Williams is bearable, since he plays a deranged, paranoid ex-kid’s show host. There were lots of good lines, and I’m quite sure that Williams didn’t have a written script (most of his lines are strings of expletives, but they work for his character).

In linux news, Slackware rocks. After a few additional downloads (the installation fits on a single CD, so there isn’t much _extra_ software installed) the system is running as good, if not better than, my old Mandrake distro. It’s definitely a very hand-on distro, but the extra work gives you a better, more customized system. The installation was very bare bones (no pretty screens like Mandrake or RedHat), but it did everything flawlessly. I was fortunate enough to already have my disks partitioned, so I just needed to format them, but I did toy around with cfdisk, the slightly friendlier version of fdisk, and it was easy to use. I’ve still got a 20GB drive sitting in the machine with nothing on it, so I’m considering downloading FreeBSB…..

Posted on 4 May 2003