Frequently, for a little background noise while I'm working, I'll stream videos from my PVR across the HomeLAN to one of my computers in The Lair. Unfortunately, it doesn't do automatic commercial skipping like the PVR can do, so I actually end up hearing them. From time to time, though, I'll hear something interesting, like the movie about rival turn-of-the-century magicians. "Hey," I said to myself, "sounds like an interesting and (gasp) original movie. We should go see it."

Last night, Karen and I decided to take a break and see a movie. I looked up movie times and saw that The Illusionist was playing. "Let's go see it," I suggested; she agreed, as I'd described the movie to her and she found it interesting as well.

So... what are the odds there'd be two movies this year about turn-of-the-century magicians? The one I'd seen the commercial for is apparently called The Prestige and will be out in about a week and a half. Still, The Illusionist was entertaining and visually quite pleasing. I didn't recognize Rufus Sewell until nearly the end of the movie, even though his name was in the opening credits, because every time he was onscreen I couldn't look away from the really bad moustache he was sporting. I mean, we're talking one of those dime-store fake moustaches that kids buy. Yeesh.

I decided to carve a pumpkin this year. And because I couldn't possibly do anything the easy way, I figured I'd give a try at doing one of those "portrait pumpkins".

(Click the pic for more images.)

A Google image search on a completely (I had thought) unrelated topic brought me to this 1930 catalog of supplies for Masonic ceremonies.

It includes such wondrous artefacts as the Fuzzy Wonder Goat, the Trick Desk Phone, the Molten Lead Test, the Invisible Paddle Machine, and more. Most of them could optionally deliver an electric shock to the victim ("See our electric carpets on pages 40 and 41!").

After seeing some of them, it now makes sense to me that Abu Ghraib could be dismissed by some as mere "fraternity pranks". If these are the sort of things people would to do those whom they ostensibly like and respect...

The Diary of Dr John Dee (h/t aeddie). The Court Astrologer to Elizabeth I (and first to use the phrase "British Empire") occasionally transliterated his sentences into Greek letters to hide their meaning. Whoever marked up his diary for the Web made it so that you can hover the mouse over the Greek letters to see their meaning... yet the popup text is rot13 "encrypted", further obscuring its meaning. I suspect Dee would have approved.

Ha... Queen Elizabeth I had a dwarf! I knew it wasn't just the Spaniards and Italians...

Hungary: A leaked tape reveals the Prime Minister's admission that his government has done nothing, and has been lying for the past eighteen months about the economy. People riot.

United States: House Appropriations chairman, under investigation for improprieties in spending oversight, simply fires the people investigating him. Crickets chirp.

(On the other hand, the Hungarian PM survived a vote of no confidence despite the riots, so maybe there's not so much of a difference after all.)

We've got a new build of our software ready for testing. The release notes, purportedly an HTML file, was corrupt, full of binary data rather than HTML. Apparently only one file has changed in this build, and I have that, but since the release notes are corrupt, I'm worried about the integrity of that other file.

So I asked the L3 software engineer assigned to our program what the MD5 hash value of the file should be (since that's the easiest way to check to see if it's corrupt or not). He didn't know what that was or how to obtain it.

Now, the average computer user has no reason to know about md5sum. But a developer? A Level 3 software engineer? Inexcusable.