I was up bright and early this morning, and I was at the Festival at 8.00 am to get tickets for 2 shows that were sold out in the advanced ticket sale. The line wasn't very long and I got my tickets.

The Festival has nice tables with good coffee and wireless access. I'm on my way to get in line for the next show that starts at 9.30 am, 2 movies about Africa.

The beautiful Carolina theater.

Lines for tickets.

Tonight I went to the Full Frame Festival right after work. I saw two movies in a session that started at 5.45 pm: South of Ten followed by Radiant City.

The first one, South of Ten, was only 10 minutes long. It showed daily lives being picked up after hurricane Katrina -- a little girl bicycling through a littered landscape, boys looking at a broken bridge...

I selected this session for the 2nd movie, Radiant City. This was an entertaining film about living in the suburbs in North-America. Conversations by experts on urban planning were mixed with interviews of a family that lives in a suburb in Canada, and what influence living in a suburb has on their daily life. It was a fun but thought provoking movie that was about much more than just the urban planning aspects of the suburbs.

At the end of the session there was a Q&A session, but I was getting pretty hungry so I went home right after the movie ended.

The Washington Post did an interesting social experiment a while ago.

"No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Read the complete article here (through Mark).

Tonight Sasha and I saw an absolutely delightful movie, Castells. It's a documentary about people in Catalonia, Spain who create large human towers.

The movie has breathtaking visuals, but it offers much more than spectacular images of this intriguing sport. The movie shows the social life of the villagers and the preparations by the colle, the participants in these Towers, workings towards big festivals and holidays (see the movie trailer).

These human towers are truly fascinating and I had never heard of them before. A Tower can be up to 9 stories high, and the upper layers are formed by small children. In the movie there is one little girl , Zoraida, who is scared and only climbs to the 8th layer in a training. These little kids are completely incorporated in this sport and are expected to perform with the adults-- Zoraida is perhaps 4 years old.

Every now and then the tower would collapse and everybody will fall on top of each other. True harm seems to be rare, although the children sometimes get bruised and cry. The movie is touching, funny at times and an absolutely recommended film to see.

Castells is the opening night movie of the Full Frame festival here in Durham, which is the largest documentary film festival in the U.S. I'll be watching a lot of documentaries this weekend, and even if they're only half as good as Castells then this will be a great weekend.

A scene from the movie where the colle is building a castell, a human tower.

Today the State Attorney General of North Carolina finally announced that the sexual offense and kidnapping charges against three former Duke lacrosse players are being dropped.

It's a long, sad case based on what turned out to be about false accusations, with an overly active District Attorney who wanted to get reelected.

It is tremendously important to be careful and diligent when researching rape allegations such as these. However, when it became clear that the accusations were clearly false District Attorney Mike Nifong should have dropped the case.

Today's conclusion by the State Attorney General: "We believe that these cases were the result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to verify serious allegations," Cooper said. "In the rush to condemn, a community and the state lost the ability to see clearly. Regardless of the reasons this case was pushed forward, the result was wrong. Today we need to learn from this and keep it from happening again to anybody."

It's strange to see this from so close. The Kroger supermarket on Hillsborough Road where we do our shopping played a small role in the case.

The website has been down for over 3 days -- the longest outage in years!

A power outage in Middenmeer, combined with my parents being out of town were the root cause of the outage.

Thanks to Jaap the various problems have been resolved (thank you). The resignation of the Minister for Energy in the Netherlands has been demanded.

I tried to go to the Farmers' Market in downtown Durham this morning but I couldn't find it. Today's the first day that the Market opened, it will be every Saturday morning throughout the summer.

Since a few months there is a Starbucks store in Kroger, the supermarket we usually go to, and I went to pick up two cups of coffee.

In a few weeks there will be the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 and last night we saw video clips of some of the participants. It promises to be a wonderful show of bad musical taste again. It would be awesome if we could see Terry Wogan's show somewhere, although the chances of that are slim...

The Dutch participant, Edsilia Rombley, won't stand a chance with a boring performance. The Bulgarian participants, Elitsa Todorova & Stoyan Yankoulov, aren't too bad, but to win the competition more extravaganza is required. Titles as "Push that button" or "Shake It Up Shekerim" are more likely to score high, as is the "vampires are real" act from one of the small European countries.

Drupal uses GD, a library to manipulate images. The operating system of my webserver is OpenBSD, and I recently upgraded to OpenBSD 4.0. The upgrade went fine, except for GD: I couldn't upgrade it. I would always get the following error message: lib not found freetype.13.1.

It turns out that OpenBSD now comes with a new version of GD, which requires the freetype library. The only supported way to install that on OpenBSD is by installing xbase.tgz, the X-Windows libraries. I don't use X-Windows and it's not exactly a clean solution to install 10 MB of code to get a single library to work, but it helped. After a reboot of the server GD now works under OpenBSD 4.0.

Here's the error message I used to get:

pkg_add ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.0/packages/i386/php5-gd-5.1.4-no_x11.tgz
Can't install ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.0/packages/i386/php5-gd-5.1.4-no_x11.tgz: lib not found freetype.13.1
Even by looking in the dependency tree:
gettext-0.14.5p1, jpeg-6bp3, expat-2.0.0, t1lib-5.1.0p0, php5-core-5.1.4p1, libiconv-1.9.2p3, png-1.2.12p0, libxml-2.6.26
Maybe it's in a dependent package, but not tagged with @lib ?
(check with pkg_info -K -L)
If you are still running 3.6 packages, update them.


When I worked in Rosslyn we often went for lunch in Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant.

They serve a number of delicious dishes, and I especially like the noodles soup with Vietnamese meatballs. There is always Sriracha sauce on the table, a hot chili sauce. I'd never tried the sauce before and I really like it. It has a natural deep red color, and it's very spicy and very tasty.

I found it in A Southern Season two weeks ago and bought a bottle. Tonight I had green beans and it worked great with this Sriracha sauce.

Last night we went to see Delirium by Cirque du Soleil. The show was in the RBC center, an indoor arena for the Hurricanes and Wolfpack, about 25 minutes from our home.

It was the first time I saw a show by Cirque du Soleil, and it was very entertaining. I really liked the video projections -- they made for great visual effects. The show took around two hours and featured great music, dancing, acrobatics and nice characters. There wasn't much of a story, but most of it was around the "dream" of the main character who encountered beautiful and strange situations.

When the show was after we were from our seat on the I-40 in 10 minutes, a testament to the smart design of the RBC center and its traffic arrangements.