heather: April 2008 Archives

Finally, here's the blog I'd written in mid April when I discovered the domain issues.

March... what happened in March? I can't remember but obviously I didn't blog. I took a long 6 day weekend around Easter. I Wii'ed. I caught up on 2007 movies on DVD. I made sure everyone in the family saw season 3 of BSG in preparation for the S4 premiere. I did a lot of planning for Dad's surprise birthday party (more on that in a later blog).

As formerly promised, here are my top 10 movies of 2007, keeping in mind there are still a few I need to see. I rate films by a few things: how did it make me feel, will I rewatch it often, was it true to itself and its subject, did it capture my attention to the point of total surrender to the story? With that said, here are my top 2007s:

1. Waitress
2. Juno
3. Once
4. Into the Wild
5. Things We Lost in the Fire
6. Eastern Promises
7. Superbad
8. Shooter
9. The Bourne Ultimatum
10. Lions for Lambs

Honorable mentions:
Sweeney Todd - even though I missed some of the musical numbers in the film, it was (excuse the double entendre) pitch perfect in all aspects.

Death at a Funeral - wonderful dry humor and a fantastic cast.

Music and Lyrics - just because it surprised me. And "Pop Goes My Heart" was an absolute joy.

Shoot Em Up - critics panned it but I was completely entertained. Who cares if it's inplausible and had some major plot holes? At least it made me feel an array of human emotion which is more than I can say for No Country for Old Men.

Movies I did not enjoy but other people seemed to love. The worst thing a film can do is bore me. I really didn't like any of these:
No Country for Old Men
Knocked Up
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Across the Universe

2007 flicks that I haven't seen yet though:
Atonement
Michael Clayton

And we're back folks. Just a quick note for now, I need to get everything pretty-ified still. But here at my new domain I have movable type so blogging will be MUCH easier from now on. For 8 yrs I'd been hardcoding it everytime. Granted I had quick templates but now... All hail GUIs.

As soon as I have everything configured I'll post my real blog that I composed earlier in the month but didn't get to post with all the domain hell.

Just as a FYI... I didn't intentionally nuke my heathersmith.net domain that I registered and maintained (some times better than others) since 2000. I went to upload a long overdue blog yesterday featuring my top 10 films of 2007 when I discovered a problem.

The domain which I would have sworn in blood was good through 2010 apparently expired last month. No one notified me of this fact -- not my hosting company, not the company I originally registered with, nada, even though they both still have a valid email address AND credit card numbers for me. Not that I'm blamestorming, ultimately it is my fault and responsibility.

During this period of ignorance, an Australian company acquired the management of my domain. Yah. Fuckwits. I'm still unsure as to how it ended up with them. :?

After a bunch of back and forth (initially they couldn't "find" it), they finally made me an offer: $310 to renew it for 1 yr. That is more than excessive, it's outright robbery.

So I purchased a new domain for 5 yrs for less than $60. There is a slim hope that I'll be able to re-register heathersmith.net once the redemption grace period expires. But if I do, I'll just park it at idio so this is officially my new URL.

I've decided to archive off my old blogs. I had toyed with the idea of converting/importing them all but... a fresh start appealed to me. So I've moved all my blogs since 1997 off to an external hard drive. I'll go from 2008 and on here.