Dominic's Diary

Life out of balance

I don't generally deliberately wax lyrical about a film I've seen; if I did this diary would probably contain nothing else. Koyaanisqatsi, on the other hand, deserves a mention.

It's a film I've been aware of for many years; my dad owns the soundtrack on vinyl, and I probably first heard it not long after it came out. Thus, I jumped at the chance to go and see it at the Phoenix late this evening (Friday). The film is hard to describe. It has no plot, no characters, and no dialogue. It is underpinned by a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack by Philip Glass, and brings together a hundred different visual images from the startling to the the ironic, the beautiful and the comic. It brings up many different emotions and can be experienced on many different levels, and some of it is just plain mesmerising. It's definitely a film to watch multiple times; I'll probably go and buy the DVD when I've got more of a budget for them. Anyway, if you get a chance to go and see this film, do.

In other news, I've booked my graduation in July (just received confirmation through the post today in fact). Went to the dentist last week for the first time in over three years, and yesterday had some minor filling work. The stuff they use these days, the "composite", has to be evil evil stuff. I'm not entirely sure how it's constructed but for it to set to a suitable hardness in a matter of seconds is quite scary.

What else? Well, work is chugging along nicely. It seems like I've been there forever and that I've only just started. Over half my initial contract has gone! (I have a promise of two further years.) We're steadily moving away from Tru64 UNIX and are looking at putting Alpha Linux onto the remaining Alphas, but moving the core compute grunt onto x86 boxen. Of course Neil is off for ages in a few weeks, so goodness knows what state the network will be in by then :)

It seems like I ought to stop talking before this page turns into the endless rambling of the blogger. It disturbs me that I now have to read my close friends' web pages in order to acquire even trivial gossip, rather than hear about it in person or even over IRC. Tomorrow, weather permitting, is lunch in Regent's Park day.