One of my Christmas presents was the British edition of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. I got it in English because I tend to enjoy movies or books more if I see/read them first in their original version. My sister, on a totally unrelated xmas present, got the Spanish version, just as a few friends did. They say it was impossible to find a copy of this book in Valencia the weeks before and during Christmas. Not surprising, as Bowling For Columbine has been one of the most seen (and discussed) films during 2003 in Spain, when all the Iraq war stuff was going on.

Anyway, I didn't know if I should start reading this first, or go ahead with Ferran Torrent's "Espècies protegides". I took "Stupid White Men", as I have very recently read the first part of Torrent's book, so it's probably time to switch a bit. While I travelled to Uni in the subway, I couldn't stop laughing at every single page of this book, and it was just the "introduction to British readers", where he tells the story about the book being printed on September 10, 2001, and after the 9/11 attacks, Harper Collins refusing to put it on the shelves if Mike didn't "rewrite 50% of it". A nice little story of how a bunch of librarians put so much pressure on the editor that they were forced to put the book out, without any media covering or anything, and the book literally dissapeared from book stores the first day it was out. I'm going to enjoy this read.

I hate when I know I have something important to do, and I keep avoiding doing it by doing all sorts of other lower priority tasks.

For example, I just read Antti-Juhani's call for help on dctrl-tools' i18n/l10n. Instead of studying for the already too menacing exams, or at least translating Debian Installer, I suddenly felt the _urge_ to have a look at this package. The result is cool, grep-dctrl is now translated to Catalan for the next release, but the really important duties remain undone. Antti-Juhani just pointed out that I'm obviously not the only one, and I think I'm glad I don't have a cat, at least. :)

Let's see if I can get *something* done in the next few hours. After scribbling this stupid blog entry, things don't look too bright, though. ;)

My dad rented a Terminator 3 DVD tonight, and I decided to watch it with my brother. After 20 mins of playing, the DVD player started to do weird things and the display would click and bounce forward randomly. The player must be dirty or something, and everyone gave up, except my brother, who wasn't too happy about what was going on. He proposed watching it on the DVD drive in his computer. First try: Windows Media Player won't grok DVD's. Fine, I see it's WMP 8. Windows Update has version 9. Install, reboot, click on "I agree"... same result; "probably it needs some CSS module too, the MPAA is a pain even on Windows", I conclude. I go to the Windows Media site. WTF!! They want me to _buy_ DVD support for their player. Booting to Linux. I install Totem, but it refuses to play the DVD. I find out about libdvdcss, and download Marillat's .deb. OMG, Totem is playing the DVD, but it is *so slow*. Of course... nVidia card and using the "nv" X driver. Oh well. We move to my desktop. I quickly install libdvdcss2, and Totem starts playing, but I see no image, I just hear the music, or sometimes it just crashes. Xine crashes with some cryptic X error, and mplayer just complains about the video driver. Finally, some GNOMEr tells me I need X 4.3, even if I thought we had the patch that Totem needs backported.

Finally, after upgrading to xserver-xfree86 4.3, Totem starts playing the DVD very nicely, and we continue watching Terminator 3. The sad thing is this movie sucks so much, it made us laugh in a few moments. The best one is when the T101 deactivates itself crushing a car in front of him. After a while, it mysteriously restarts. At least on this one, the bad terminator is hot, and better, I'm now able to watch encrypted DVD's.