We're back in business! So, the Great LJ Blackout of 2005 - much noise, little heat, many lessons learned about InnoDB. I wonder how the grand researchers in various areas of software would use this as a case study:

• Nachum Dershowitz and Dave Schmidt (software verification and formal methods)


• Raghu Ramakrishnan, Geneva Belford, and Maria Zamfir-Bleyberg (databases)

In any case, kudos to the folks of Denga Assimilated (kindasorta like Andromeda Ascendant, only not so much) for their round-the-clock hard work in getting things working again.

And let that be a lesson to the rest of you all!

Let's see. Tonight's film was:
The Red Violin
Poignant, passionate, soulful film. I watched it for the second time with my grandmother, who was seeing it for the first time. She said the whole Cultural Revolution vignette brought back memories of the communists' late-1940s dou₄ zhen₁ hui₄ (persecution cadres). Look closely at the expressions of people's faces throughout, especially in that segment: the whole film is very well acted.

A couple of questions:

1. Is the implication supposed to be that Poussin opened the grave of the orphan boy (Kaspar Weiss), or that someone else did? The last scene in the Vienna vignette is of him standing over the coffin with a look of disappointed irony, and then we see the open grave and coffin, a shovel, and a fade-through montage of the violin in the hands of all its Roma owners. It had to be Poussin, right? As far as I could tell, no one else should even have known about it.

2. The buyer who says "you may have it" at the end represents the Pope Foundation. What happened to the monastery's phone bid? Did they drop out before Ming (the boy from the Cultural Revolution vignette, grown up)? I thought I saw them call it quits the first time, but I didn't catch it on second viewing and I don't have the tape handy to replay.

--
Banazir