Kurt Pires
Director of Network Services
HoloNet Internet Presence Service
Aaddzz Internet Advertising Network
Information Access Technologies, Inc.
2115 Milvia Street, 4th Floor
Berkeley, CA 94704-1112
510-704-0160/voice
Public PGP Key
Lists and Points of Interest
Recommended Less Well-Known Movies and TV Series
I could list hundreds of movies and TV series that I enjoy, but here is a small list of off-the-beaten-path movies and TV series that I recommend:
- Diva -- coolest character ever!
- The Last Seduction -- evilest character ever!
- Priscilla: Queen of the Desert -- you have to see it to understand it
- Ju Dou -- a tragedy set in feudal China
- To Live -- historical China through the eyes of its middle class
- Grand Canyon -- a statement of our troubled times
- Swimming to Cambodia -- Spalding Gray's experiences making The Killing Fields
- The Producers -- early Mel Brooks at his best
- Better Off Dead -- Savage Steve Holland's teenage nightmares come to life!
- The Snapper -- A social drama set in Dublin by the author of The Commitments
- Eddie and the Cruisers -- A nostalgic look through the tragic history of this fictional band
- The Wizard of Speed and Time -- Mike Jittlov's meta special effect movie
- She's the One -- Edward Burns's movie after The Brothers McMullen
- Head Above Water -- Harvey Keitel & Cameron Diaz in a laugh-out-loud dark comedy
- Dark Star -- John Carpenter's and Dan O'Bannon's final project at UCLA film school
- The Night Before -- A movie with Keanu Reeves told in flashbacks quite well.
- The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave -- Claymation Greats by Nick Park
- "Red Dwarf" -- Very Well Written British SciFi Comedy
- "Blake's 7" -- British SciFi Drama
- "UFO" Home Page -- British SciFi Drama
Movie/show links from the Internet Movie Database -- my favorite heavily inter-linked database on the net!
Music
- Pink Floyd (both with and without Roger Waters)
- Wish You Were Here
- Dark Side of the Moon
- Meddle
- The London Philharmonic Orchestra does Pink Floyd in:
Us And Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd
- Suzanne Vega
- Luka
- Tom's Diner
- Small Blue Thing
- The Tommy Castro Band -- a SF Bay Blues Band -- Since they've gone national, I rarely get to listen to them and unfortunately their live shows are 10 times better than their recordings. Don't miss them if you can hear them live.
- The Fatt-Back Bluesman -- I heard Brother Yusef play at Blues on the Bay on Treasure Island for Labor Day in 1998. His acoustical one-man show was excellent! He's based in LA and so the only time I get to hear him is on the tape I bought that day, but if you're in LA and like Blues, I recommend checking his schedule on his web page and catching a show.
Random Facts
- Internet User since 1983: Use to telnet to MIT from UC Berkeley
- UC Berkeley EECS Cad Group System Administrator from February 1984 until September 1988.
The CAD Group had the largest computer budget of any group I knew on the campus. This meant I got a lot of experience with all the new toys as they became available. Those were the days...
- UC Berkeley Organizations & Clubs (between 1982 and 1990):
- Second Chairman/Director of the Experimental Computing Facility (XCF)
- Chairman of the Undergraduate Computing Facility (UCF)
- Secretary and President of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA)
- SUPERB Member and organizer of a two-screen all-night sci-fi film festival:
We showed 6 or 8 movies back-to-back in each of Wheeler and Dwinelle. People could buy an all-night pass or individual tickets. It was a success, but it required so much effort and risk that the SUPERB director decided not to do it again -- can't blame him.
Old Projects Still On-line
-
XMAP -- A Fast X11-based Street Map Display Program
- XMAP 0.1 Original XCF Binary Release
- XMAP 0.1 with Jeff Hollingsworth's modifications
- XMAP 1.0 -- Unavailable
-
Internet Worm of 2 November 1988 (a.k.a. Internet Virus of November 1988)
- A Tour of the Worm by Donn Seeley (Also in PostScript)
- The following paper about contains some inaccuracies (esp. with respect to what was happening at Berkeley), but it is still informative: With Microscope and Tweezers: An Analysis of the Internet Virus of November 1988