Thoughts on the arts, society, politics, and various geeky topics.
This is the blog of Janice Dawley. Why is it called “Central Cortex”? Well, the Cortex was the interplanetary equivalent of the internet in Firefly, a show I was totally into back in 2003 when I first created this blog, and I’ve never changed the name since then. Strangely enough, I’ve barely written anything about Firefly here, but I’ve written a LOT about other TV shows and movies, as well as literature, politics, various cultural topics, and my own life.
Things have been pretty crazy around here. The web hosting is the least of it, really. Here’s the list. New hardwood floors. My housemate Mike has been lobbying for a replacement of the ratty old beige carpeting up here for a while. Nevertheless I was surprised when he gave me a mere week’s notice that his friend Larry the Logger had agreed to do the work. This meant I had to move all...
After four years with Phenominet, I’ve finally switched hosting companies. Since I’ve been adding new things like this blog and the soon-to-be-live Gallery2 photo album I’ve discovered that Phenominet is way behind the times. Their MySQL and PHP versions are both WAY old and can’t run some of the modules I want to use. And since their customer service pretty much sucks...
Sixteen episodes into season 2, and it seems like time for an evaluation.
Unfortunately, I have not been impressed with three of the last four episodes. However, we did have the fantastic “Scar”, so I am not entirely disillusioned. Click the “Read More” link to see my spoilery thoughts.
Sunday morning I was awoken by a call from a co-worker saying that he couldn’t connect to our main file server. I went in to work a bit later and discovered an orange blinky light on the machine. One of the disks in the RAID5 array was unwell. After two calls to Dell tech support and hours worth of diagnostics, I left at 7:00 PM thinking that the problem was fixed. Yesterday evening I got a...
Last week I clicked on a link in a Candleblog entry and read this Wikipedia article about what Bill Simmon called “the infamous Goatse image”. Infamous it may be, but I had never heard of it before — or, thank Peep, seen it. After I nearly herniated myself laughing, I commented that I thought this was a perfect example of the type of thing you would never find in Encyclopaedia...
I have become a Battlestar Galactica evangelist. In the past couple of months, I have pressed the season 1 DVD set upon half a dozen people. Several are now fans, and the others are at least interested. I would like to convert even more. Thus this blog post. At first blush, it seems absurd to suggest that anyone should spend precious time watching a remake of a cheesy 1970s television show with...
Orson and I were just talking about web hosting companies and using DNS Stuff to look up information about our respective domains. I was surprised to see that since I last checked, someone has registered therem.com as their domain. I clicked on the link and when I saw that the home page was called “The Remnant”, I thought I might have stumbled on some fans of R.E.M. Could I have been...
I’ve been watching a lot of politically charged movies lately. A few weeks ago I saw Good Night, and Good Luck, the short and focused account of Edward R. Murrow‘s stand against Joe “Red Scare” McCarthy when no one else would face up to him. It was so inspiring, it actually made me cry. More recently, I saw another Participant Productions movie, Syriana, which though very...
I’ve been admiring the new look of my friend Ben’s web site for a few months now, and today I took the plunge and upgraded my own site to NucleusCMS, the blog engine he uses. You’re looking at it right now. Isn’t it cool?! This new software has a much more active developer community than bBlog did, so there are loads of nice templates and plugins available. I’m...
I was just browsing Salon.com and came across this flashback to 9/11. By the time I got to the end, I was feeling pretty emotional, even after all this time. There’s something about being caught in the narrative that brings it all back. Afterward, I decided to look up my old AOL Instant Messenger chats from the same time period. (2001 was my most intense stretch of internet chatting. My...