March 24, 2003

Ain't No Place Like Home, Right?

Coming home has become a somewhat bittersweet event these days. While I do enjoy the time off, sleeping in my queen size bed (versus the twin in my apartment from which my feet hang out), watching episodes from the first season of The X-Files, and generally doing nothing but eating and chilling, I'm also growing somewhat bored already, and it's only been 2 days. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that many of my friends are not home at the same time as me, so thus I haven't really been hanging out that much. Also, I feel kind of guilty, because when I'm bored and have absolutely nothing to do, I haven't been doing homework like I should be because I have a ton of crap right after break. But it's still early. I'll probably get around to doing my homework soon enough, considering the rate that my boredom is increasing.

I watched the Oscars yesterday, and while they were very subdued, despite the 75th anniversary, I still liked the show and hearing who had won this year. I have always been a pretty hardcore fan of movies, and haven't missed the Oscars in 6 or 7 years, but this years show was somewhat of a bust, because it was shorter and definitely less glamorous. I suppose this was necessary, considering the war and all that, and I think that some of the speeches made by the winners made up for the glamor, because it showed that some (not all) Hollywood celebrities do think about other things than just the proverbial limelight. Particularly noteworthy in my opinion were the speeches made by Adrien Brody, who won for Best Actor, and Michael Moore, with his Shame on you, Mr. Bush acceptance speech. I was glad that Bowling For Columbine won, because I really thought that the movie had a really important message, as I previously said. I think Moore has a lot of balls to go up in front of such a large audience and say what he did. If you didn't hear what he said, look for a transcript on the Internet. You'll understand what I mean.

Also, on the topic of movies, I wasn't expecting The Pianist to win as big as it did, so I'm pretty to excited to watch that and Chicago, neither of which I had seen. Guess I've been lagging this year, but I plan to make up for it soon. Finally, in my boredom, I spent many hours yesterday and today trying to recompile PHP to support PostgreSQL. I ended up breaking some things, and some random programs seem to be having problems (such as GNU gettext—but who uses that anyway, right?) but in the end, upgrading Apache seems to have done the trick and everything on my web server is once again functional. I took the opportunity, now that I had DB support with PHP to write a new comment system for my blog, and decided not to use text files like BlogKomm or some other readily available comment add-on scripts do. I tested this a little bit, and I think it's working.

I'm really running out of things to do here in Irvine, and this is making me question whether home is really all that it's cracked out to be. To early to make a conclusive decision, I think, but I can definitely say that Irvine is not a place to hang out when no friends are around. I think I'll take my dad's advice and stay away from the computer for a bit now.