i summon one kim

Tonight turned out to be a double feature, a rare occasion since years ago. I chose another feel good movie: Disney’s The Kid.

I guess a Disney film would be a safe bet in the feel good category. Bruce Willis and Spencer Breslin provide a good contrast as the 39-year old Russel Duritz of today and the 8-year old Rusty, the kid of Russel’s forgotten childhood. Russel has worked hard to change himself into what he is today, but it turns out Rusty’s dreams don’t match the man he has become.

You may feel like you can guess the whole story, but even if you did, I think the plot stays interesting throughout the movie and you’ll never guess all of it.

And then there is Lily Tomlin, who always delivers a delightfully funny experience, no matter how small or big a role.

Here is a movie for everyone to see. Life is serious, life is rewarding, life is surprising. If this does not get you hooked on Scandinavian films, nothing will.

As you can read from any review, Babette’s Feast is about a French cook, Babette, who flees Paris and moves into a small and remote seaside town in Denmark. After winning in a lottery she asks to prepare a French feast dinner for the villagers. She is granted her wish, but then the villagers start to worry about opening the door to sinly pleasures, not knowing what to expect. It is a pleasure to see the effects of the feast on everyone.

I really enjoyed the movie. The story is heart-warming, the actors true to life, and the scenery is beautiful if austere. Definitely worth renting, or better yet — add it to your collection.

GW’s Manhattan network has been back since October 6th. It took a while to bring everything back to normal, but now it is done!

We had no Internet connectivity for almost 3 weeks, and there was really nothing we could do about it. These pictures from the CO that our lines run to won’t leave you wondering why. I’m glad it didn’t take any longer to restore connectivity. We had a wireless link up a bit earlier, but it was only for private connectivity and could not be used effectively for our services.

Several temporary services have been running at my home to provide e-mail and net access to our users. Next week these are being closed down — my residential RADSL line is no T-1. I almost lost that line, too, but Speakeasy relocated their NYC POP customers to other POPs. For a while I had to run everything on the Optimum Online cable TV hookup, which is practically never down. It is just a pity they don’t provide static IP addresses or allow running servers.

Now it is time to plan for better replication of important data, an off-line archive of backups, and a new network hookup that does not run through NYC.