Jared’s Blog

A couple days ago, I arrived home and checked the mailbox to find Laura’s next Netflix selection, Battle Royale. Not having anything better to do, I popped it in. After 2 hours I was thoroughly entertained and a bit confused.

Being that it is a Japanese movie, there is no English audio, only subtitles. I missed the first few minutes since I was making dinner, but I soon became entrenched in the film. The premise of the movie is that it’s the turn of the millennium and Japan’s society is getting out of control. The youth are rebelling against the adults. To cure this societal breakdown, the adults decide to implement the Battle Royale Act which says that each year a random class of 7th graders will be selected to battle to the death. The game ends when only one student remains.

Apparently, the movie is banned from distribution in the US. The deaths in the movie range from humorous to downright violent, but this is clearly not the reason for such a restriction. I would venture to guess that the reason it is banned is because of the subject matter. With all the school violence of the 90’s, I’m sure the last thing anyone would want young people to see is a movie about their peers killing each other. I somewhat agree. Then again, I have no doubts this movie would be rated R and therefore not directed towards the age group it portrays.

The concept is interesting and quite thought provoking. Put aside the fact that these are 13-14 year olds and put yourself in their shoes. Could you kill your friends and peers. I know back in 7th grade I would’ve had no problem with some people, but some of my real friends I know I’d have a hard time with.

As I said earlier this was a great movie that really made me think. There are quite a few very graphic scenes, so if you’re squeamish, I wouldn’t reccommend watching this. I could’ve done without some of the cheesy teenage love subplots, but overall, I think this is a eye-opening flick.

A whole tour based off a TV show? I’m sure this isn’t the first time it’d been done. At least they took the best 3 bands. I hit up this show when it rolled through town on Tuesday. First off, I have to say how much I enjoy shows in the Ascot Room at The Quest as compared to the main room. That and even though I’m all for less government, the new indoor smoking ban rocks! I don’t mind it in restaurants since I often sit in no smoking anyway, but being able to go to a show and not be bothered by smoke all night kicks ass. Anyways…

Some local band I’d never heard of named Enola Grey kicked things off. I later found out they’ve got former members of Martyr AD in the band, which is/was awesome. Go MN Metal! The sound was a bit muddy, too much bass, but they rocked hard. Apparently their vocalist was in Italy, so they had 2 other guys trading off songs. While they were a good metal band, the rotating vocalists took away from their set. I would see them again if that counts for anything.

Up next was CYN (AKA Curse Your Name, AKA Cynder). I was surprised to see Big Dave from the show introducing them. I know no one else cares, but he seems like a cool guy so I thought I’d mention it. As for CYN’s set, I thought they rocked pretty hard. Even though I wasn’t that stoked to see them, they still got my head moving. One thing that stuck me was how diverse the band members were. The one guitarist and bassist were straight up NC backwoods redneck looking while the lead vocalist and keyboardist were more pretty southern boy looking. But who cares about looks? As I said, they rocked some fierce tunes.

Manntis took the stage next. Now if you’d asked me about 3 months ago if I cared at all about this band, I would’ve said no, but lately I couldn’t get enough of them. They are extremely talented and are a great metal band in every aspect. Unfortunately, one of their guitarists was at home because he’d just had hernia surgery (OUCH!). The guys in A Dozen Furies and CYN helped out though. Again, the rotating band member thing was a little annoying since they had to announce a new guy every other song, but it worked out ok. It definately wasn’t as distracting as the (pun intended) musical vocalists from earlier in the night. About the music: Manntis was everything and anything I had expected. I head banged my, well, head off. For their last song, Sleep in Your Grave (also the title to their album), the vocalist got everyone to scream the lyrics at the end. It made for a really great end to a rockin performance.

Probably the most known band A Dozen Furies hit the stage next. I figured they’d be the biggest draw since they did win the competition on the show and they were more well known before the show. I was surprised to see the crowd had dropped in size by about 1/3. This kind of made me sad since I really think ADF deserves better respect. While their performance was pretty good, you could tell they were somewhat disappointed. I was also surprised to find that their new material is MUCH heavier than their EP. I think a lot of people passed them off just another radio friendly metal band, but I think they’re way more than that. I stuck around for a while after the show, bought a CD and got it signed by 3 of the guys in ADF.

Good times, good show! I was having second thoughts all day about going. I figured for $14, I was only seeing 2 bands I was excited about. I turned out all 4 were really good. Check the tour out if it’s in your area. A Dozen Furies is on Ozzfest this summer. That’s your second chance to check them out. Manntis just signed to Century Media, so I’m sure they’ll line up some dates this summer. As for CYN and Enola Grey, I have no idea. Props to them for entertaining me.

I wasn’t able to pull of my scam as planned. Turns out it WAS my mistake that my package was shipped to the wrong place. I must have missed changing my zip code when I updated my address. Fedex caught my mistake and re-routed my package to my place in Plymouth. So really all that happened was I got my package a day late.

I’ve been cruisng along just fine with my new RAM now for the last few days. Turns out my processor is able to handle quite a bit more overclocking than what I had originally thought. I’ve got it at 194 x 10.5 right now and it’s rock solid. I ran prime95 for 24 hours straight yesterday and it went on without a hitch. I’ve been bumping the FSB 2MHz each night and then running prime95 to test it. So far, I haven’t been able to crack it. Hopefully the ram upgrade can hold me over until I get enough to buy a new mobo, cpu, HSF, and video card.

Not much going on the last few days. It’s absolutely dead here at work which is why I’m blogging. I just want to go home. I drank a bit much last night and was paying for it this morning. Needless to say, it made the first half of the day hell and I won’t be doing that again any time soon. I really wish Premier would figure out if they’re hiring for customer support or not. I think I’m a shoe in for the job if they open it up. Being a Johnnie definately helps. I also know one of the people who would be interviewing me. I’m definately qualified for the position as well. Everything about the job is better. Less calls per day, more pay, better commute. I’d be able to carpool with Burns and there’s no paying for parking. I would think I’d have the chance to move up into a developer or system admin position after a while too. For now I can only wait to hear if they open the job though. Burns seems to think there’d be a lot of pissed of people at the company and even a few who might quit if the job isn’t opened up. It sure would be nice.

I finally got the federal part of my tax return back last week. Of course I had to spend a bunch of it right away. I threw a nice chuck at my credit card bill, wrote my parents a nice check, and bought a little something for myself. That little something is 1GB of RAM. It’s “value” RAM, but its Corsair so I know its good. Well, I log into ZipZoomFly today and find that it’s shipped. Naturally, I clicked on over to the tracking page. To my surprise, the destination displayed Collegeville, MN, my old address. I was a little angry and a little worried I’d never see my package. So I called up their customer support to bitch. A frw rings later, no one answers even though I called within their hours of operation. I left a message and a few minutes later, they called back. I was on a call at work, so I called them back on my break. After about 10 min of going back and forth with Amy, she tells me they’ve shipped it to the correct address; my home address. When I asked “Why does the Fed Ex tracking say otherwise” she replied she didn’t know but she was sure it would ship to my home address.

I thought for a bit and decided it’d be really easy to scam them. I know a guy who works in the mail department at St. John’s so having him grab my package would be no big deal. I also got Amy’s word that they would send me a new package if I didn’t ever see mine. I figure I can work it out that they send a second pacakge to me here and then I can go pick the one up from SJU. That’s 2GB for the price of 1.

This all depends if they actually shipped it here and for some crazy reason Fed Ex tracking is showing it wrong. I honestly can’t think of any reason this would happen as the last time ZipZoomFly had sent me anything it was through UPS almost a year ago and there’s no connection between packages. I mean Fed Ex doesn’t keep a record of my address. There’s no way they would’ve mixed it up. It has to be ZipZoomFly’s fault and I’m going to exploit it.

If you’re viewing this, then my server made it through my reinstall ok. I had a few issues while reinstalling over the weekend. I got tired and gave up on Saturday night, but found the errors of my ways on Sunday and was able to bring my site back up.

For the technically proficient, the problem with with my Linux kernel. Apparently in the new version of Gentoo (2005.0), they don’t use the /dev/pts filesystem like they had in the past. So when I copied my old kernel config over and compiled the new kernel, it had those options enabled when they shouldn’t have been. This was giving me a problem with booting.

For the most part things are back to normal, but I am having some issues with bind. For some reason, it’s not working with the exact same config file. Looks like I’m in for some more reading on DNS caching.

Update: Looks like my bind problem was a missing semicolon in my conf file. STUPID SEMICOLONS!