Last week I mentioned World Backup Day and that I would take a look at my home situation. Not much has happened because I apparently already back up nearly all my irreplaceable files to the cloud. That the cloud happens to be DropBox for now is a later concern.
That said, I *really* need to clean up on my laptop that I currently use for commuting entertainment. There are several trees of folders and backups and some undoubtedly hold valuable project files and memories.

I also saw another movie. Up.

This is a movie I wanted to see because I got hooked on an unusual piece of hype. And now I am sad. They said that the movie would be slow and old-fashioned, and that it would distance itself from the loud and frantic style of so many other kids films… It was a lie! This is about as generic and noisy as kids movies get. And what’s even worse is that the twists are predictable and bad.
The story stars an old man who has just lost his beloved wife to old age and instead of checking in to a retirement home he decides to turn his house into a dirigible and fly it to a waterfall in South America that was significant to him and his dead wife.
And this is where the movie started going south. See, there is this kid, that embodies every single stereotype there is for an annoying kid character. He has an annoying voice, annoying habits, annoying personality, is generally useless and it is obvious that he is supposed to be annoying but it is only because the script says so.
NEWSFLASH! ‘Deliberately annoying’ is still ‘Annoying’!
Then we introduce the macguffin, a rare bird. The comic relief, a talking dog. The villain’s henchmen, an army of talking dogs and the main villain, the old mans childhood hero. You know he’s the villain because he has an army at his command and a wealth of resources compared to our protagonists, including a big gray blimp, that and he looks like a villain. One can usually tell.

Nevermind that this guy was a grown man when our elderly main character was ten, and he is somehow still alive after having hid from the civilized world for decades. The villain is after the macguffin because it will clear his name and restore his fame, so to hammer home just how despicable and ruthless the villain is the bird is of course one-of-a-kind and somehow also a mother of three.
Here is where the movie fails even on its own terms however. Things constantly happen for no reason! The kid is terrified of heights… at least in the beginning, not so much later on when it is convenient. But for whatever stupid reason he decides to stay on the porch of a house as it is very slowly shown to rip loose from the ground and very slowly lift. He had more than a minute to get off safely after the balloons were deployed, and plenty of auditory warning before and during liftoff. The house drifts into a storm shortly after leaving city limits, the old man is knocked out and when he wakes up the kid has steered the house to South America, because suddenly he has figured out the controls and would rather steer to another continent that to go home… because it’s convenient for the plot! But they not only end up in South America, but in the very exact neighborhood that the old man was looking to land the house. Which also happens to be the place where the villain and the macguffin reside. The main villain is not handled consistently either, he is out for vindication after having been falsely accused of having forged his discoveries, so he actually has a very understandable motivation when you think about it, but every other character, including the protagonist who was a big fan, is shown to think of the villain as being despicable. The villain is also shown to be remorseless about killing people who get in his way, this feels very arbitrary and, again, conveinent for the sake of plot. Basically, he is a villain because the script says so. The protagonist also has a relatable goal, he seeks to fulfill the childhood promise that he made to his wife but everything goes awry for him, the kid and then the bird and the dog are always slowing things down by complicating matters, sometimes arbitrarily. When the protagonist finally snaps and says that everything is the kid’s fault (and he is actually right! None of this would have happened if it were not for the kid) the scene is played as if the old man is being unfair.
So I don’t have a very high opinion of this film, but frankly what should I have expected? A movie about an old man that flies away with his house, the end? That’s all I knew of the plot before watching it. But to be fair, the scene where the old man’s heart melts and he decides to go help the kid and save the bird is pretty convincing and did not feel quite so forced as such scenes go.

I find myself wondering what would have happened if the movie decided to not have a villain, like in the Polar Express, and just be a nice whimsy adventure. Take some risks you know? Like old movies used to. What if the kid had not arbitrarily decided to stay aboard a house at it lifts off? Or if the kid was actually as competent as his collection of badges would suggest. Would the old man successfully evade the storm? Would he land the house at the right spot and then from there run into his childhood hero and together they catch the bird only to find the roost and they decide to let the bird go?
A slower, more unique and old type of film that does not feel like a big lie. I think I would rather watch that.
2/5

So, servers then.
I started up a couple more VPSes, this time with more of a plan. And I retraced my steps in setting up an email server with postfix and dovecot. And despite having done so once before I got stuck, but I think my email client is to blame this time. Apparently there is a difference between “Force SSL” with port X and “Use SSL on special port” with port X, and this messed up my working environment and made me consider switching clients. Then I solved it and it was as if nothing was ever wrong in the first place.
Anyhow, I now have @anaflabet.net running on another server. The old one is still running but nothing points to there anymore.

There are 5 new VPSes in total and i have plans for each of them. More on these in later installments.