Spooky SUSE

My wife and I watched the first part of TNT's remake of Salem's Lot last night. I think they are doing a pretty fair job of it. There is a lot of story and characters to cover and I think the device they used to do it (Mears' voice-over narration) worked admirably. Most of the major relationships were established in the first fifteen minutes! This efficient exposition set the pins up quickly, so there is plenty of time to knock 'em down.

Granted, there is a lot of "telling" (rather than "showing") going on. A few choice edits would have reduced that annoying technique without sacrificing too much character development. But the producers had a daunting task ahead of them in reducing a huge novel with many characters and plot lines to a four hour mini-series. I can live with the result.

I am not a Stephen King fan but I enjoyed this book very much. The story is good Old Testament stuff: no sin goes unpunished in this book. The characters are all believable and the plot doesn't suffer from Mr. King's tendency to start with a bang and end in an awkward whimper. There is a lot of stuff in the story - and it would have read just fine without most of it - but Mr. King does an excellent job introducing you to the town and he gives you time to live in it awhile.

But at the end of the day, it's about the vampires. Not the Anne Rice tortured poet vampire but the vampire-as-disease. Vampirism blossoms in the evil that lives in all of us (did I mention the Old Testament?) and it spreads quickly in hospitable environment. Most of the emotional impact in this story is in the way this affliction readily takes root and is almost embraced by the town's residents. In many ways, the heroes in this story are just the lucky ones who missed dangerous exposure by inches.

I am looking forward to the conclusion.

I spent some time this weekend playing around with SUSE Personal 9.1. I like it. I am a casual computer user and I don't find this Linux distro much different from Windows or Mac. OpenOffice appears to do all that I'd ask it to do. I was unable to try out Konqueror, the web browser bundled with the operating system, since I am not connected to the net yet.

I ran the OS directly from the live CD. It took some time to figure out how to boot the computer up from the disk but once I figured it out, I had no problems with it. Now I should download the system onto the computer and partition the hard drive so that I can choose to run either SUSE or Windows. If anyone has any suggestions or comments, then please share!