Super, Man

Don't read any further if you don't want to read spoilers.

Films made about comic books are a genre. This means we have certain expectations. Perhaps the most formulaic of genre films is the romantic comedy. In a romantic comedy, there's the would-be couple. They meet. They fall for each other. They fight and break up. They get back together again. Once you see the pattern, you'll wonder why you keep falling for this formula. The reason? It works.

Comic books about superheroes used to be about superheroes like Superman or Batman that fought bad guys. Their alter egos typically got along well. Clark Kent was a newspaper reporter. Later on, when they needed to modernize the character, he became a television reporter. What more obvious way to get in the public eye as two characters than that?

Marvel Comics, the rival to DC Comics, which made Batman and Superman, decided to go in a different angle. They dealt with superheroes that had problems, and lots of them. Peter Parker could barely pay rent. He was late to class. He was the bookworm. He's a lowly photographer to make ends meet. This is in contrast to Kent who's supposed to be a good reporter.

Life's tough for Parker. Being Spiderman doesn't seem to help him out of the messes he gets in. He's bright, but somehow not bright in a useful way that makes him money. In a modern world, he'd be a programmer or researcher and make some bucks that way.

When a filmmaker wants to make a film about superheroes, he (or she) has to ask himself what kind of superhero to portray? Should the superhero be flawless, or one of these guys who needs to see a doc to deal with his oversized emotional problems?

Superman was created at a time when people didn't really talk about their issues. He was, after all, meant to be super.

Bryan Singer did X-Men, one of the most popular comics in the Marvel Universe, to Superman. The question is: what kind of Superman should he portray?

Here's the problem: on the one hand, Superman is supposed to be in love with Lois. On the other, he's supposed to be a kind of savior for the Earth. What does he pick? I don't think Singer knows the answer to that. It's made worse. Lois has abandoned Superman for the nephew of the editor. There's analogies made to Superman. He flies planes. He's successful. But, he's no Superman. Is Lois the kind of woman that would sacrifice her marriage for Superman? After all, he is Superman?

Then, there's the big secret. Her son. The often-sick moppet who seems the opposite of super. Well, what do you know. He's Superman's son.

OK, back up. His son? OK, how does this not get mentioned? Did Lois happen to go to bed with Superman, and somehow she doesn't realize it's Clark, who, by the way, disappeared at the same time as Superman? And when she sees Superman, she somehow manages to not bring it up at all. No histrionics. No "How could you leave me? How could you leave your son? How?". Indeed, she never mentions it to him.

Which then begs the question. If Superman knows he has a son, why does he not tell Lois? Why doesn't he say "I have to leave to find my people. But I promise I will return. I don't know how long it will take. But I will be back." True, he might decide that he really needs to stay on Krypton (were it not destroyed).

Even when he returns back, things go on pretty much as normal. He's been, presumably, flying in space for years and years and years. He's dealt with no one, and when he gets to where he's going, he doesn't find what he's looking for, so he heads back. So why? Because he has no other place to go (although, in the original Superman, there is some sense that there are other populated worlds he could go to--and Earth happens to be the most promising). Is he coming back to the only place that needs him? Is he going back for his son? Is he going back to save the Earth?

This question is never answered. It might have said something if he confesses to his mother (well, Ma Kent) that he was out there for long periods wondering what he'd find, with great hope, even as he was leaving all he knew behind. Then, the sheer sense of defeat. We need some sense of why he comes back.

I'm reminded vaguely of the film Lucas. Lucas is played by Corey Haim. He longs for a girl that's just a little older than he is. She, on the other hand, likes Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen isn't a bad guy. Indeed, Lucas has helped his character out being a tutor. Then, there's Winona Ryder, the gawky girl that likes Lucas. In the end, there's no bad guy. There's Lucas trying desperately to impress, and of course, he is a geek, and he is young, and therefore he doesn't get the girl. The film doesn't know what it wants to do, and therefore it gives him some kind of victory at the end, but not the girl.

Superman Returns has this problem, but even worse. Even Lex, who's made out to be darker, isn't quite as passionate or passionately angry, except when he's trying to kick the crap out of Superman. It's not quite explained why he hatches his plan when he does. It seems like he should be in prison, but because Superman wasn't there to testify, they let him go (not that that makes much sense). But five years go by, and Lex waits to hatch his plan only when Superman returns? Does that not seem like a bad idea? He had all this time that Superman was gone, and he laid low? Kind of amazing, right? And they make no exception, because, well, gee, we're a country of law, and even a man like Lex Luthor can be let go to do what he wants.

Minor kudos to Singer to remember that in Superman the Movie, the kryptonite was found in a meteorite in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Mr. Luthor, Mr. Luthor, are we going to Addis Ababa?).

Everyone seems to know kryptonite makes Superman weak. Dangerously weak. So, um, why doesn't Superman find this stuff and get rid of it? Oh, no, it just sits in a museum that Luthor happens to know about, but no one else does. He's a genius, after all. So Superman's not ready to handle Luthor.

And, then there's this crystal business. Drop it in water, and it makes huge islands. Why is that? Who knows? Oh Jor-El told him. Why? Because he's indiscriminate. The superrace can't tell who his son is, even in crystal form.

In the end, Superman is a real cipher. What does he believe in? Does he really love Lois or not?

The end scene is a bit odd, and it reminds me of the second Spiderman film. Recall that Spiderman is trying to stop a train that's going out of control. At some point, Spiderman is injured, and somehow his mask is removed. The passengers on the train says "he's just a boy" (nice there's no camera out to record the event).

Similarly, Superman appears to be dead, but hmm, let's take him to a hospital so we can treat him like, er, a human. And you're in a hospital, so gotta take off the costume, which raises the question that Lois raised in the original movie...I assume all bodily functions are normal? Excuse me? Er, to put it delicately, do you....eat? Yes, yes. When I'm hungry. And it coincides with rumors that Superman's manhood (well, Brandon Routh's) had to be digitally altered to make it less noticeable (the reality is that he was wearing a codpiece).

It's an odd scene, though it's almost effective, because you could see Singer wanting to create an ending where he kills off Superman. And for a moment, there's doubt. But what revives him? I suppose it might be his son. But their relationship is never established that strongly. I'd almost opt for a creepy kid who's silent and always looks into the distant. It might give it away sooner, but the kid's almost too 1970's cute to be effective.

There is a moment, when Superman is flying over the earth near the end where you begin to sense a joy that's lacking in the film. This joy might have made more sense if they could have pushed the theme of loss and belonging more. However, they didn't play up the loss that much. I know it would have probably stretched the film even longer. It runs surprisingly quick for the two and half hours it runs, but it almost needed to run another half an hour or so.

If I were to redo it, I would perhaps play back his leaving more in flashback, even working out the journey, letting it take minutes as he flies in his ship, then as he reaches his destination, realizing nothing's there, and then, seeing his dead planet, crying. Something.

There should be a strong sense of loss once he returns, and then something that captures his sense of purpose, of why he's back, of why he returned.

I know that heavy exposition is not considered wise, but comic books often have melodrama in it. They're often more soap opera than soap opera. Singer sidesteps melodrama, but ends up with something rather bland in its place.

Even the moment of realization, that he is a father doesn't quite come across so well because the kid is played a bit wrong. You want to duplicate the sense of alienation that the father would have gone through.

And that's another part that's difficult. Does Lois know that the kid is superpowerful? At one point, she asks him if he can help mommy. You think he's going to do something heroic. Somehow save them. But, again, Singer decides that maybe that's too corny. How do you show he has superpowers, but not let it be too distracting? And somehow, he is perhaps not quite immunte to kryptonite, but more so than dad?

This film isn't nearly as awful as the last two Superman films, but neither is it something you can embrace either. The characters are so distant emotionally. What's missing is all the history of Lois and Superman and how she adjusts. We're left to fill in those pieces, and we can't.

There and Back Again

In Kill Bill, Volume 2, Bill makes an unusual observation which reminds you that Tarantino is writing the dialogue because it seems so odd for Bill, as he's been portrayed, to say it. He tells Uma (the Bride) that nearly every superhero has a secret identity, and that they put a mask (like Spiderman) to become a hero.

The one exception is Superman. By all accounts, his Superman uniform is what he might wear on Krypton. His disguise, being an alien, is being Clark Kent. He disguises himself as he thinks humans would see him.

Superman the Movie came out in 1978. The tagline was "You'll believe a man can fly". This was an origin story. It crams a lot of a storyline in, to be honest.

The film starts off with the sentencing of General Zod and two others to the Phantom Zone. At the time, the special effects for this were pretty good. The three prisoners are standing in these encircling hoops, and then a mirror floating in space spins and captures the prisoners.

At the time, Jor-El, father of Superman, realizes that the planet is likely to be destroyed by their star. He creates a crystal like space vehicle (also rather clever at the time) to send baby Kal-El to Earth.

On Earth, the Kents adopt Kal-El and name him Clark. He's a bit of a bookworm, and knows he can be a football star, but has to hide it. There's perhaps 20-30 minutes devoted to this section of his life. He then takes a journey to the North Pole where he creates the Fortress of Solitude.

When he learns what he needs to, he heads to Metropolis. Christopher Reeve plays Clark has a bit of a bumbling, shy guy, who is uncoordinated. This was a completely new take on Clark Kent who had, up to then, been portrayed as something of a tough guy.

There, he meets Lois Lane, a tough as nails New York broad. OK, maybe not quite like that. One thing Donner did that was particularly interesting was to portray a stylized New York, with New Yorkers being rude, or impatient. There's a sense of New York the city in Metropolis.

Gene Hackman plays Lex Luthor in a light way. He's never all that menacing. He just has weird plans to cause an earthquake to occur so that he can own what's left of California. He surrounds himself with the bumbling Otis, and the voluptuous Miss Teschmacher.

Initially, it seems, Superman Returns might retell some of the origin story, but instead, it takes up after Superman has returned back from Earth after being missing for five years. Where did he go? He had to fly out to Krypton to see if his people were still there. Answer's negatory. He comes back to the only place he's ever known.

The question is, how much should Singer, the director, reimagine the Superman story. The story pays homage to the original in many ways, from the crystal like structure that is the Fortress of Solitude used in the original, to Routh's near impersonation of Christopher Reeve.

The problem with the film is that there's both not enough storyline, and also, not enough character. Routh's Superman comes across nearly as bland as Reeve's. His Clark Kent doesn't really make it as a character. He doesn't play him nearly as bumbling, but then, he doesn't play him almost at all. It's not that he's bad, it's that he's not that much of a character.

The story revolves around Clark/Superman's feeling for Lois. He takes an oddly detached longing for Lois. Lois herself is having a hard time dealing with Superman's return. She's missed him too, but has moved on, marrying someone else and having a kid.

It's this repressed, well, it's hard to call it desire. And this is where Singer works himself into a corner. He doesn't want Superman to be this lusting guy who can't wait to be in Lois's arms. He also needs to convey that Superman hasn't been back in a long time, and that too doesn't come across very well.

Routh makes Superman somewhat ethereal, almost angelic, but tough to relate to. Kate Bosworth isn't that much better. Margot Kidder gave her Lois Lane some spunk. Bosworth's Lois has a higher degree of difficulty. Somehow, she has to have repressed feelings for Superman, and yet also feel something for the husband she married, and it gets all kind of muddled. It would seem a bit too shallow for Lois to just jump into Superman's arms and yet Marsden as the husband is also not that exciting, at least, not to compete with Superman.

I don't envy the story that Singer wanted to tell, and it leaves all parties interested in this middle ground that they can't escape from. I don't know who thought Parker Posey was funny. She's a complete non-character. She makes a few (very few) smart remarks, and emotes here or there.

Even Kevin Spacey can't properly save the film. His Lex Luthor has a bit of pizzazz, but what to do with his character. On the one hand, they don't want Spacey to be completely menacing, and on the other, he's not really comic enough either. Again, another ehhh.

At one point, they do something in the film that resembles a bit of the second Spiderman film. I won't reveal what it is, but it seems almost too odd. (Oh yeah, I suppose there's a twist too, but come on, even the twist wasn't so effective).

For some reason, the story seemed awfully distant, and rather muted. Even if the original Superman is dated, there's something that makes it easier to follow as a story. The second film is nearly as good, and has a bit of fun. This film tries to be more personal than the original franchise, but I don't think it succeeds.

I give it a "C" for enjoyability and a "B" for what it was trying to aim to.

Are We Ready for Social Networking?

The web world is filled with people trying to change the way we do things.

You know how they say, in a relationship, that you should never try to change the other person to be who you want them to be? It invariably fails, and you irritate the heck out of the other person as you try to get them to be some idealization.

I realize this isn't the same thing, but the alpha-geeks want us to look at the next bright shiny thing. I realized that there are plenty of people who just don't get it. Why do we need RSS? What is RSS? Why do we need Wikis?

There are some applications people just get. Email, people get. Photo uploading sites they sorta get. Wikis they don't get. RSS they don't get. Browsers, people get.

The latest trend, even since Flickr was the darling of the Web 2.0 crowd (before people realized that Photobucket is King, and no one gets Flickr tagging, and lacks the patience to use tag), is social networking.

Oh, I'm not talking about dating services, though people get that, and they get eBay (I don't get that) too. I'm talking about sites that try to get its members to share stuff.

I was listening to a discussion at Bloggercon. Many people, even those in the know, don't use bookmarking sites. They often use their own blog to store bookmarks, or use the old standard, del.icio.us. Did I mention? People don't get bookmarking either, at least, not outside their own browser (upload bookmarks? why on earth would I do that?).

Every year, the Web 2.0 community implores us to do things we didn't think we wanted to do. Do I really want to bookmark? Do I really want to share my bookmarks? Or my photos?

The need for constancy, for things not to change, at least, not so fast, may be one reason why Blogger still sucks. The folks doing Blogger feel there's no compelling reason to change its look each year, and so they keep it old and reliable, and unchanging. Some sites still do this. Yahoo, for example, runs a bracket software thingy for March Madness. Even though it updates your draw in real-time, it doesn't update your points in real-time. Instead, hours and hours must pass before it's updated. I don't get it. Fine, you can wait hours for the rankings, but for a few relative points? I don't get it. It's easy to fix, Yahoo has a year to do it, but no. Same old crap.

Even so, some people find comfort in the same thing over and over. Software companies hate this. They feel they aren't innovating, don't you know, if they don't change something. For three years, Office hadn't changed. Now, they are designing a huge makeover. To be fair, Office sucks, and therefore I welcome the new makeover. But it goes to show you that in this business, things change. You're almost afraid a company won't last even two years before it folds. Where will it be twenty years from now? Does anyone look that far ahead?

But back to social networking. Does it work? We're asking people to be more public than ever, to make their lives a matter of public record. While there's some evidence that people are willing to do that--witness MySpace--what about people that care about their privacy? They simply avoid the web, I assume.

You know, though, there's still something I haven't seen a while on the web, possibly because I'm not looking yet. I recall many years ago, before blogs were blogs, reading several blogs whose authors lives were soap operas. I wouldn't trade my life for their dysfunction, but boy was it fun to read what happened. Most blogs are functional blogs. Learn about Rails or something useful. There aren't so many popular blogs about people who really you wouldn't want your kids to hang out with.

Now that's not social networking, but I'm surprised that blogs like that aren't part of, say, the top 10 MySpace blogs (maybe it is--I don't pay attention to MySpace).

My feeling is that there is a small adventurous crowd willing to try out new things on the Web, and the vast majority who are content doing what they've done for years. They're not looking for better ways to do things or different ways to do things. They need to get the idea of why they should be doing something. For example, my brother understands surfing. My parents don't.

I understand social networking, my brother doesn't. Not because he's not bright enough, but simply because he doesn't care. It's just not that important to him. For example, you really don't need an RSS reader if you only check out 5-10 sites. But once you get one, you start to realize you can add more and more to your list. But then, after you add too many and it's sapping your time, you may want to completely shut them down.

How many people are listening to podcasts? I'm the perfect demographic for that kind of audience, but I still don't listen. I'm told the Gillmor Gang is fun to listen to, but I haven't checked them out.

These days, I do a semi-reasonable job of keeping up with the tech world, in its odd way. I check out reddit and occasionally digg. I check out TechCrunch. I scan TechMeme. This has made me aware of a certain crowd. But, a few years ago, I couldn't really stand to check out Slashdot or Kuro5hin. I knew they existed, but it bored me silly to head over to those sites.

And yet this still puts me in the minority of folks. There's plenty of people who don't keep track of any of this. I'm not even talking about folks like my brother that aren't tech geeks. He can be forgiven for that. I'm talking about people in the industry. People who write software for a living. Some of them have no idea about any of this either, because it simply doesn't impact their lives. It's just nothing they care for. They should know better, but really, it's so geeky even for geeks to keep up.

So are we ready for social networking? What's the next cool fad?

Buffalo Gals

There are two Chinese restaurants in Rockville, located mere miles from one another. One's called Joe's Noodle. The other is called Bob's Noodle. I suppose they both have their share of noodle soup, but certainly serve other kinds of food. Joe's is spicier, more Hunan/Szechuan from mainland China. Bob's is Taiwanese cooking.

I've been to Joe's a few times, maybe half a dozen times. I've been to Bob's maybe three times. The first time was on my birthday about two years ago. I recall we ate some food which ended with some slush pile of ice. Imagine a snow cone on steroids. Literally a shovel full of snow, topped with syrups, fruits, and so forth. It's a meal unto itself.

The last time was a bit of a disaster. Brian had been visiting from Union College and wanted to wat at Bob's. A large gathering was there, and I was trying to drive there from work, getting suitably lost. It took quite a while, but I did eventually find the place.

Some of the co-workers like to go drink and play bool at the Orange Ball or Bowl, a place just up on Rockville Pike. As it turns out, this place is right around the corner from Bob's. I accidentally discovered how close this was to a route I usually take to head for Bombay Bistro.

Turns out, Friday night, I wanted to go to a place called China Bistro. With a name like that, you'd imagine it would be some posh place, but you learn quickly not to trust names of Chinese restaurant which can sound as extravagant as China Palace, when it's often nothing of the kind, and can be a hole in the wall. China Bistro is just such a place.

I found it from Dirt Cheap Eats, a special segment of the Washingtonian. For years, they had done "Cheap Eats" for good places to eat that don't require more than about fifteen dollars a person. Admittedly, that's not so cheap. I figure five dollars and less is dirt cheap, but most places can't afford to run that cheaply, even McDonald's.

This place is supposed to specialize in dumplings, but Friday night seemed to attract a few folks that wouldn't know good Chinese food if it hit them. You know, they want fried rice and sweet and sour something or another. Still, the folks behind the counter seemed perfectly content to serve them that. I got an order of the dumplings. It was decent, in fact, quite filling. I also got some bubble tea.

As I was rolling to head home, I turned left at a light, and within moments, I passed by the Orange Bowl Billiards, and realized just how close it was to Exit 6 on 270. I figured I could find my way back there again today.

Oh, I woke up particularly early this morning, at least, for a weekend. I wanted to head out to Mayorga's. The closest one is in Silver Spring somewhere, but I decided to head to the one in Gaithersburg, only because it's near work and I wanted to head out there. I should get their coffee more often. It's quite yummy, as coffees go.

Anyway, as I went to Bob's, it was raining quite hard, traffic having slowed to twenty miles an hour. As I entered the restaurant, I was surprised to see it packed. I ended up having to share a table with a pregnant Chinese woman who seemed to be by herself. She ordered some three dishes, though the intent was to have it packed for home the next few days, I imagine.

I ordered a Taiwanese meat pie. This turns out to be a dish that I've had before, though it was not exactly a pie. It's a gelatinous kind of dish with mushrooms in some sauce. It's a bit chewy, and perhaps not for the average American who doesn't like tofu. It was fine for me.

I also ordered buffalo fish in some hot sauce. Now, I have no idea what buffalo fish is, but it has bones like pine needles. It's everywhere, and it's a pain to eat. It was smothered in a garlic sauce that seemed made from 20-30 cloves of garlic. There was a lot of garlic! Fortunately, I like garlic, but even this was a lot. One saving grace was the soft tofu that came with the dish.

I may take my brother out there, but I'll probably ask for some recommendations, and avoid the fish. I don't mind fish, provided the bones are so large as to be easily avoided.

Anyway, that was my meal o' fun.

So much for losing weight...

Freak Show

It's always an adventure watching Peter Greenaway films. He does one thing that nearly no other director does. He films nudity without eroticism. Even the films that ostensibly have love as subjects, like Pillow Book, are not at all about eroticism. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover is about love as an escape from an overbearing thief.

Greenaway loves the contrast of prim and proper with, well, whatever is the opposite of prim and proper. All his films have its share of nudity, but often, in the oddest setting. The characters keep blabbering on even as they get unclothed, and there's a strange feeling that, by god, these are naked folks. There's a series of photo books which basically are people clothed on one side, and unclothed on the other. It really brings home the point of "naked underneath one's clothing".

A Zed and Two Noughts is one of Greenaway's "earlier" films (he's been making films for over forty years, so it's not so early) made in 1985. The film it most reminds me of is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both are films about twins. However, A Zed and Two Noughts is about grief. Or at least, that's one of the many subjects it attempts to deal with.

Early on, there's an accident. One woman dies (the wife of one of the twins). Another loses a leg. As a kind of grief treatment, one of the twins begins filming things in decay, using time-lapsed photography. There's also some deal with black and white animals, most particularly, a zebra (pronounced through out the film, except in one spot, as "Zeb-bra" rather than "Zee-bra").

Throughout the film, I was thinking of how a zoo is a place for animals to be put on showcase, but it's not so far removed from a freak show, where you put people on display, and there's a sense of that happening as well. Once you lose a limb, you become something of a freak. After a while, the film reveals the twins were once Siamese, and were something of a freak.

Zed also deals with life and death, often showing snails writhing around. Greenaway knows how to push buttons when it comes to showing mildly cringeworthy scenes.

He juxtaposes such scenes with these oddly mannered settings. Many of the scenes are in the one-legged woman's bedroom (eventually, no-legged, when she decides to get the other leg cut off), with her huge windows behind her, curtains flowing, and one twin on one side, and the other on the other side.

A Zed and Two Noughts is also an odd way of looking at the word "Zoo". I had heard the title for many years, but it never crossed my mind that he was referring to a zoo. But it also suggests things like "Z", the last letter of the alphabet (the end) and two noughts as two nothings, in this case, perhaps the two twins (the woman even says it late in the movie, they are a zed and two noughts). Greenaway must revel in the cleverness of the name and its double, possibly triple meaning.

There's also one other particularly Greenaway-esque touch beyond the obvious use of non-erotic nudity, and that is the music. Michael Nyman composes Greenaway's films, and has an odd bleating style of music that overlays what's being seen. The music really plays a heavy role. The only other music Greenaway likes in his film are songs from the 40s or so. Two songs are used in this film, and there's one song played in heavy rotation in Pillow Book.

Even though I found the film difficult to grasp (there's an older guy who hangs out with another woman, and another amputee in the film, then the little girl who wants to start her own zoo, then the doctor who wants to do the amputations, and have relations with the women he meets), it was still oddly compelling, filled with an odd display of grief.

I should watch The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover again, though that is more highly mannered than this film, set almost entirely in the museum-like restaurant, and a library, about a woman who finally decides she needs out of an oppressive relationship and finds a bookish man to be her lover, a complete contrast to the bombastic thief, just to see what that's like. I haven't seen that in over 15 years.

Greenaway begins to toss more visuals in his later films, his scene within a scene, the heavy use of calligraphy.

He's also fond of numbers, letters and patterns. For example, in Drowning by Numbers, the numbers 1 through 100 (I think) are spoken throughout the film. In A Zed and Two Noughts, a little girl says the name of animals from A to Zed (though there's none for "X" as she points out).

It's said that Greenaway makes films like no one else, and really, no one seems to copy his style. His lack of accessbility tends to mean tiny audiences, but they're large enough that he continues to make films. I want to catch up with a few more, in particular, the Tulse Luper Suitcases. I should be getting The Falls, which is from the last 70s and said to be one of his "best".

You have to say you really like film if you like Greenaway, mostly because his films are challenging. You don't really "like" the characters, and there's a total sense of strangeness, even as people are going about their business of living.

Andre the Giant

Andre Agassi has recently announced his retirement. He'll be closing his tennis career after the U.S. Open. It's 2006 and I've been watching Andre play since 1989. That's 17 years of Andre.

Andre's been around so long it's hard to remember what things were like when he started playing tennis. Let's rewind the clock back. For those who followed tennis in the 80s, one of the big names around was Nick Bollettieri. Bollettieri wasn't a tennis professional. His background, if I recall, was that of a paratrooper (though sometimes these bios are dubious). He did play tennis, did some coaching, and eventually opened his own tennis academy.

There were many players that went through his system. Perhaps the first two of note was Jimmy Arias and Aaron Krickstein. These two were about as different as could be. Arias was the outgoing New Yorker. Krickstein was the quiet kid from Michigan. They had several things in common and became the prototypical Bollettieri kids. Both had howitzer forehands, serviceable backhands, eh serves, and couldn't volley to save their lives. Arias's star burned a bit brighter, but shorter than Krickstein.

Arias played with the old Donnay Borg Pro, a standard sized racquet of 66 square inches. He played during the early 80s (about 1983 or so). The era of larger racquets was just coming about, and he never did quite get used to playing with a larger racquet, blaming his demise in the sport to a change in the technology that he couldn't deal with. Arias would play with a whippy backhand that made it look like his arm would fall off.

Krickstein's career lasted much longer, partly because he had compact strokes, and that his two-handed backhand was not as much of a liability.

Bollettieri would have plenty of other players that trained at his camp. Jim Courier, Mary Pierce, even Monica Seles (though Seles would credit her dad with most of her training).

Bollettieri was more of as motivational coach rather than a true X's and O's guy. He would rarely tinker with a player's stroke, which was perhaps partly his genius. He wanted players to swing away without abandon.

Critics often said he would never produce a world champion, that is players were too one-dimensional. All forehand, and not much else.

Then, came Agassi. Agassi was the best of the bunch. In those days, the benchmark for forehands was set by Ivan Lendl, who should have gone down as one of the best players ever, but ran into three players that were his undoing: McEnroe, Connors, and Becker, and mostly dealt with each in turn. Lendl was compared to Borg, but really, the two were quite different.

Borg was quiet, placid, relying on speed of foot, and heavily topspun shots to win. He was the best of breed from the late 70s, adorned with the look he helped popuralize. Fila clothings. Headbands. Wristbands. Borg was a machine. He could knock back shot after shot after shot. The women were playing a similar backboard style. Evert, Austin, Jaeger. Borg lead the baseliners of his era: Vilas, Clerc, Solomon.

Lendl was different. Though he started off quiet, Lendl saw what McEnroe did. Complain to officials. And it worked. And so Lendl complained. He used to spit up a storm too until it was decided that was far too gross for a leading player, and so he stopped doing that. Lendl used the full 30 seconds between points to rattle opponents, slowing down the pace as a form of irritation.

But he did as much for the modern style of tennis player as anyone. His was the standard when it came to power forehands. It was rare for players to whip winners from the baseline in those days. Connors could do it. At times, so could Vilas and Borg, though they mostly wore opponents down with their bullish style. Lendl could power shots down the line like no one else. Early in his career, Lendl was famous for gunning at players. After all, it wasn't against the rule to hit a player when trying to pass them, and it was hard to volley.

Lendl had one thing that Bollettieri's kids didn't. A serve. Lendl served with the best of them. He tossed his serve some ten feet high, timing his swing to the falling of the ball. Vic Braden would shake his head, preferring the quick Roscoe Tanner release to the moonshot of a toss that Lendl employed.

Agassi came much closer to the mold of Connors. Connors won without a good serve. It helped that he was a lefty, and the spin would come at the wrong angle, and so even his lefty hook was good enough to sneak in and volley sometimes. Connors relied on his ground strokes which were, until Lendl, the toughest out there, and even when Lendl was around, Connors flat strokes would counter Lendl's topspin shots until Lendl solved Connors, by playing off-pace shots, the Ashe approach, and essentially lull Connors into errors, as Connors was much better at redirecting pace than generating it on his own.

Agassi's serve was OK. He'd serve like he was playing doubles. Either far to the left or far to the right, using the angle to spin players out wide. He was the best returner of his generation. If he had had a monster serve, we'd be talking about Agassi, not Sampras, as the best.

Agassi eventually left Bollettieri. His most successful hookup was with Brad Gilbert, the ever talky coach who learned to win ugly. He had a great record against Becker, but could never quite beat Lendl. Gilbert learned how to play junk, to play the kind of shots that bothered better opponents. Arias would yell at himself in disgust wondering how Gilbert was beating him. Mary Carrillo coined the "winning ugly" phrase, and it stuck.

Gilbert helped Agassi play a lot smarter. Agassi would sometimes defeat himself. When Courier was at the top of his game, which lasted only a brief few years, he would outsteady Agassi. This was surprising. Courier was a bit of a hothead. A fanatic of baseball (loved Cincinnatti, but oh that Marge Schott). Courier had the same problems as Agassi, if not worse. He would get impatient, especially when he was losing, and would spray shots all over. Spaniard Jose Higueras (Higgy) who had married an American became Courier's coach, and taught him to calm down and harness his power.

Even so, people claimed Courier lacked real talent. He was an overachiever, winning even uglier, and that eventually the better players would win. And somehow, these so-called experts were right. For a player that played as well as Courier did, his sudden fall from great heights was awfully surprising. Chang didn't have nearly the career Courier did, and still lasted much longer. It was dubious whether Chang was that much better than Courier.

Once Agassi played smarter, he still had players that would give him trouble. Becker and Sampras topped the list. Sampras, especially, was supremely confident against Agassi. He knew Agassi felt a lot of pressure just to hold serve since Sampras felt that Agassi just couldn't break his serve, as good as Agassi was at return. And Sampras hit his groundstrokes just well enough that Agassi couldn't overpower him. In particular, Sampras was great at hitting winners on the run. Arguably, he was more dangerous fetching shots (especially on his forehand) than hitting a relaxed shot).

Agassi also had odd career dips where he'd just completely fade, have a year or so where he just played awful, so distracted, he'd fall out of the top 50. This happened at least twice in his career, but ironically enough, it may have lead to a prolonging of his career. The fragile Sampras retired because his body could no longer take the pounding of running on hard surfaces. He's unlikely to return because of that. Agassi, on the other hand, was more of a bull.

While Agassi still plays quite well, the new generation of players have their way with him. Federer dominates him as he does pretty much any player not named Nadal.

What was distinctive about early Agassi was his look. Remember he had long spiky hair? He looked like a reject from some glam metal band like some Bon Jovi. He wore bright neon clothing. He was marketed right away, and was trying to capture a crowd that didn't care for tennis.

I knew people who didn't know tennis, but knew Agassi. His hair. His look. He was not the prim and proper look of tennis. That drew attention. And he was good. Not Tiger Woods good, but good enough that early in his career, he was making semifinals of Grand Slams. He made the semis of the French and the US Open early on.

His name was a bit unusual. Son of a former Iranian boxer, Agassi grew up in Vegas, then trained in Florida with Nick. Like Sampras with his Greek heritage, Andre was evidence of a melting pot of Americans.

Over time, Agassi moved away from the look that made him famous. You could tell, from his brother Phil, that receding hairlines was strong with his family. When Agassi began shaving his head, you could see it too. But that was cool too. Here was a guy not ashamed he was going bald.

Will Agassi come back out of retirement? He's 36 years old. Connors played until he was 40 or so, but he was a bit lucky. When Connors retired, he still was perhaps in the top ten hard hitters in the game. His flat strokes were a bit of an anomaly compared to the topspin shots everyone hits now. Agassi could perhaps be more effective than Connors at his age. I wouldn't be surprised if he took potshots here and there just to see how he is doing, but full-time travelling? I doubt it.

So, Agassi, you were one of the guys that made tennis watching throughout the 90s. Hard to believe you've been at this sport nearly 20 years.

Thanks for the memories.

Brown vs. Bored of Education

Sometimes I really can't stand listening to sports pundits. Yesterday, Larry Brown was fired as the coach of the New York Knicks. Brown had been coaching the Detroit Pistons for a few years. They had won the NBA finals one year, and went to game 7 against San Antonio last year. Brown was basically fired from that job and decided to coach the Knicks.

The president of the Knicks is Isiah Thomas, former bad boy himself, from the Pistons. He's been an awful executive in the CBA, then for the Pacers, and now for the Knicks. Because of his track record, most people assume that Thomas was the problem and that owner, Jim Dolan, is too enamored of Thomas to ever get rid of him.

Commentators speculate like crazy about what Thomas must have been thinking, what Brown must have been thinking, what the interaction between Dolan and Thomas must have been. But come on. Any of those guys ever interview Thomas? Or Dolan? Or Larry Brown? Do they have inside sources? Or are they just making this crap up?

This is what some commentators get paid to do. They get paid to guess what things must have been like, even though they lack any inside information, and only rely on what they hear and read in the papers like everyone else. Rather than do any real research, they just make stuff up.

At least, Tony Kornheiser realized this, and decided that he'd sometimes talk about his wife or son or daughter or dog. Something he knew something about. He wouldn't sit and speculate wondering what a person might be like and doing so ad naseum.

Augh. And I let myself listen to it too. Sad.

Marky Mark

I've come to realize that there are a ton of bookmarking websites. Just mind boggling. I'll name a few of the services out there.

Furl, Simpy, Ma.gnolia, Blinklist, Markaboo, Spurl. And of course, the original, del.icio.us.

Let me explain what a bookmarking site is all about. Every browser allows you to bookmark websites, so you don't forget just in case you want to go back and check it out later on. Here's the problem. You're on your friend's laptop or at some public kiosk, and you don't have your bookmarks.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access them? It sure would. Maybe a company, like Google, could do that for you. The first major company to do this was del.icio.us and for a while, no one was competing. But now, they're everywhere.

Once you have your bookmarks up, and your friends have them up, then, well, that's a lot of bookmarks. If you keep a lot of bookmarks, you might actually placing them in folders. This can serve as a form of tagging.

Tagging is all the rage, don't you know? It's the simple act of adding keywords to the bookmarks. For example, you might see some clever piece of Java code to do sorting, so you might add the tags: Java, sort, clever.

Then, if you forget the link, you can search by tags.

But wait, it gets better than that. If many people use the same tags as you do, then you can check out other people's bookmarks.

This is what bookmarking websites do.

Here's a problem. You have a bunch on your browser. How do you get them from your browser and uploaded to your bookmark account? All browsers allow you to export bookmarks to a file. You upload this file to your bookmark account and voila, you're good to go.

But how do you add new bookmarks? You can't use your browser to just say "Add bookmark" because it adds it to your browser's bookmarks, not to your account.

The solution? Most bookmark sites have "bookmarklets". You drag that to your bookmark bar. When you're on a webpage you want to book mark, you click the button.

Most sites do the following. You are sent to a bookmark webpage with some information partially filled out. You fill in some tags, submit, and it returns you back to the page you were looking at.

However, this annoying because it causes your list of traversed links to include the bookmarking site. Thus, some bookmarking sites have popups, so you can (presumably) fill out the information without leaving the current webpage.

Some bookmarking sites do more. Most allow you to search your bookmarks. The one feature most bookmarking sites have that the original del.icio.us doesn't is private bookmarking. By default, all bookmarks in del.icio.us are readable by anyone (though they'd have to look for you). Almost all competitors allow you to hide yours.

A more obscure feature is exporting bookmarks. I was using Blinklist because it was the first I came across. It runs fast enough for my purposes (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch raved about Markaboo--so I got that, but it ran like a dog for days afterwards, taking 10-15 seconds to send in an update. It also has no obvious way to export stuff. I could go on and on about why Markaboo is not that great at this moment.)

However, some bookmarking sites are evil. They want you to easily import your bookmarks from a browser or del.icio.us, but they're not prepared to make it easy for you to export it and try some other bookmarking service. One guy left Blinklist for exactly this reason. It's not that Blinklist doesn't allow exporting, but they don't do it in convenient formats. This guy went to Simpy.

Simpy is a bit ugly, but has many options for importing and exporting.

Many bookmarking sites have other features, like the ability to save notes and sometimes even upload files.

Here's the impression I get from reading stuff. First, TechCrunch loves Markaboo. Blinklist is pretty popular, using a Digg-like format to blink sites. The idea is that people "vote" for sites (mainly, I assume by having it saved as a bookmark). I like its look, its speed, but it's annoying that it doesn't allow a variety of export mechanisms to get you out of their system. (But then, why doesn't del.icio.us simply make private bookmarks? I mean, come on. Everyone else is doing it).

Ma.gnolia looks good, but man, it's tough to remember where to put that d*** period. Someone has remarked it uses up a ton of real estate per link, even if it looks good.

Spurl appears to let you use a sidebar to examine your bookmarks. They're from Iceland. That's a pretty clever idea as that's how I currently use my bookmark. Some sites also allow for integrating del.icio.us
bookmarks everytime you click a special button.

This is a crowded space.

Let me end by telling you what I want in a bookmarking site.

Private and public bookmarks. Tag folders that hold bookmarks. A pop-up "bookmark" this. The ability to import and export in a variety of formats. An API to program against. Some place to send email and suggestions to (and someone that responds). An easy to use interface (Simpy's looks like a mess). Some nice Web 2.0 features (I can't zap multiple bookmarks easily). I want many bookmarks per page (like 25).

Yeah, you can use tag clouds, have some recommended bookmarks, have suggested tag names that I should use. Also, have a calendar view letting me know when I added which bookmark. Be able to see the bookmarks added in most-recent order.

And it needs to be fast.

So far, I haven't hit a site that does all of this. I'll take some better notes and give an update at some point.

Tee Pod

I signed up for Apple Pro Care thinking that it would be a bargain to have their 1-on-1 consulting once a week. But it's been a disappointment so far. To be fair, I'm not the typical Pro Care guy.

A typical Pro Care person has money and doesn't know a lot about computers. They want assistance to get through the basics. I have a computer science degree. I'm a software engineer. By all rights, I should not need Pro Care.

Still, I find I don't learn software if I don't have to, and if I can have someone teach it to me, I'd rather learn in that way.

The problem is that the people I've met are not software types. I suppose those types end up doing software. Most of them are graphic artist types, those who might otherwise not have much income doing graphic arts, but are nerdy enough to use the Mac to help them out.

Of the four people I've had sessions with, only the first guy, who I met to talk about IPhoto was decent. The next two guys don't seem to have extensively used Keynote at all. This is one gripe I have with the way ProCare works.

Presumably, because of scheduling, it's hard to guarantee that you can meet a specific person. You can't even find out who you're going to get when you sign up online. It's not like Apple has a list of "pros" and their expertise, and their credentials. Thus, I was likely given whoever was available that had played with the software more than once.

There's a second problem with the 1-on-1. I don't think some of them have been trained to teach very well. I've done teaching before, and I have a sense of what I think is good or not, and it takes a lot to be good.

I'll give you an example. I wanted to learn about GarageBand to do podcasting. However, there was no way, when I signed up, to convey this information. As it turns out, the person who was supposed to do my session begged off and asked another guy to do it instead. He apparently teaches GarageBand for the Apple Store.

The bad news was that he knew very little about podcasting. He was more of a musician type and understood music features more.

Lucky for me, the Apple Store had invited Tee Morris as a special guest to talk about podcasting. Unlike the Pro Care guy, this guy actually podcasts for a living and has co-written a book on the topic. I had to spend a few hours at Tyson's though, since he was scheduled to talk at 1 and I was at the store at 9 AM.

Tee is a jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. He's written fantasy books. He's been an actor. He's a geek. I don't know how good he is at any of them, but he's certainly very capable as a presenter.

He showed us GarageBand and some of the tricks he uses to edit. He told us his opinion of "ducking" and how he prefers to edit volume himself. He talked about using clicking noises so he could mark errors while reading wave forms, and so forth.

This is the kind of practical experience that is highly useful to new podcasters, and the kind of information that was completely lacking in the 1-on-1 session. They really should tape it, make the employees of Apple who do Pro Care training, review and learn more about it.

I suppose if you get a good person, the Pro Care sessions might be worth it, but even though these folks know more than the average person working at a store, they really need even more training when it comes to ProCare. It's too bad the .mac website is also lacking. They have basics there, but nothing too sophisticated.

The lesson I learned? It's better to look for special guests and go during their sessions. They have more knowledge about the topic, and can give you inside information that the average Apple employee, who's generally ten times more capable than other store employees, can't.

I may still do some of these training sessions, but sadly, they're rather disappointing. Fortunately, there are other things that make up for it.

Par for the Course

This was going to be Phil Mickelson's tournament. He was finally winning majors. He had been near the lead for three days at the U.S. Open. If he won, he'd win three in a row, coming close to the Tiger Slam who won four in a row, but not in the same year.

With three holes to go, he had a two shot lead. Par, par, and par would be a safe win. Colin Montgomerie made a tough birdie, and it looked like he might force a playoff if he stayed at 4 over. The U.S. Open is notoriously difficult. It was predicted that the winner would not go under par. The last time it was held at Wingfoot, the winner won at 7 over. Monty had never won any major tournament. If he could hang on at 5 over, he might force a playoff.

But the last few holes did them all in. Monty followed up a birdie on 17 with a double bogie on 18, and he was at 6 over. Maybe good enough to tie, but he knew he blew his chance.

Geoff Ogilvy, an Australian married to a Texan, parred his last four holes and that left him at 5 over, but if Mickelson would shoot par all the way, he'd win outright, and if he bogeyed twice, it would at least be a playoff.

Mickelson was 3 over at 15, bogeyed at 16 to move him to 4 over. Still, two pars would win over Ogilvy. Mickelson parred 17. But like Monty, poor judgement did Mickelson on the 18th. He hit one bad shot, a second bad shot, a third bad shot, and was even in danger of not staying in second.

Mickelson double-bogeyed 18, to lose by 1 stroke, and fall in a tie with Monty and Jim Furyk. Mickelson has finished second (or tied for second) at the U.S. Open four times (1999, 2002, 2004, and now 2006).

Tiger Woods had not made the cut, the first time this has ever happened to Woods. He's had a gaudy record when it comes to majors, having made every cut. However, his dad passed away earlier this year, and for such a tough course, Tiger was simply not that sharp.

Despite the lack of a well-known name, at least, to non-golf fans, Ogilvy is ranked 17th in the world in golf. While it's more unlikely for a 17th ranked tennis player to win a major, in golf, surprises do happen.

I find that I can watch more golf than others who like sports. Even so, I only watched the last three rounds of the tournament. There was still plenty of excitement to see whether Mickelson could pull it off.

Congrats to Geoff Ogilvy.

Justify My Tech

Technical book writers have it tough. They have to explain a difficult subject and make it easy enough to read. Unfortunately, tech writers often delve into "how" and not "why".

For example, Eclipse is an IDE, mostly used for writing Java code. It's got tons of functions. Most books explain how the various parts work, possibly skipping over every detail, since there is so much of it. But how many books justify why Eclipse did the things the way it did? Why did it choose perspectives? Why are there so many options?

This happens a lot. For example, suppose you're using a blogging website. You might be asked if you want to turn on "adsense" or whether you want to enable RSS feeds. It may then do so, on your command. But how many websites explain either. What is adsense, and why should you use it? What is RSS and why should you use it?

Clearly, what's happening is that the author has used it for so long that they don't even question the feature. It's there. They explain it. They don't say "this is so annoying--I wish they did it like product X". Now, to be fair, that's not that useful either because the person may never have used product X and unless you're going to devote ten pages to how that feature worked in product X so the person reading can say "oh yeah, I see why that might be a useful feature", it's not worth ranting like that.

This is a lesson in teaching. Explain why, even if you're not 100% sure why.

Java, for example, is highly verbose. Why? Presumably because they want programmers to come up with highly verbose method names. And you know what? For the most part, they do. You rarely see method names that are like gtpiod() for something like "get the penultimate index of data". This is very common in C, for instance. Java's long method names are often made bearable because IDEs like Eclipse let you type two or three characters, hit control-space for method completion, and pick the method you want.

Don't just explain how. Explain why.

Teaching is Preaching

Last time I talked about teaching, I noted that there's a reason to talk to students, and that's to assess where the students are relative to where you think they are. This may not be that comfortable for some.

There's often a barrier that teachers put between themselves and students. There are several reasons for this. First, there's an age difference. A teacher can be 10, 20, or more years older than the students s/he teaches, and that's often enough to make it difficult to find common interests. The problem is worse the younger the student, since they really lack comparable social skills.

But even with college aged students who are starting to become intellectual equals, many teachers avoid getting too close. Some teachers aren't all that social. They're teachers in college mostly out of necessity. They really see themselves as researchers. These people may find it difficult to talk to people anyway. Some see teaching as a job. They come to class. They present a lecture. They go home. Their responsibility for students ceases once they walk out the door.

Some see a danger in getting to close to students. Sexual harassment. Perceptions of favoritism.

Now, to be fair, you don't have to be much closer to your students than, say, a coach is to his or her players. But you can't be so distant to have no idea where they're coming from.

Ultimately, you're trying to figure out what assumptions students are coming into class with and what background they're coming in with, and trying to see how to get them to where they need to be. If you're not teaching at a high-powered institute where students are expected to be brilliant, or at least, know how to work hard, you may want to spend time trying to get people simply to talk.

This means opening up the class for discussion. What do you think a computer scientist does? How do you think they get good at what they do? How do you think you can get better at what you do? If you go in with a healthy dose of realism, then you should be good. Realize that most likely, you can only change someone's behavior so much. If they can't set their own goals and meet them, then there's only so much you can do.

However, it may be worth realizing that you can get students to start to pay attention to these things. Initially, you may be the one setting goals. For example, you may want students to outline how much time they expect to spend on a project. Do they plan to work on it tonight? Or tomorrow? How long? Will they open a book and ten minutes later go, man, I can't read this. It's too boring.

What are their priorities in life? What do they want to do? How much time do they care about their career and what to put into it? By working collaboratively on various goals, you might be able to persuade the students to focus on what's important.

Realize that people can learn in different ways. Some like to read. Others have to do. Sometimes, others need to be handheld. They don't get very far unless their is a great deal of patience.

With people who lack good college study skills, one key job is to make people aware of the skills they need. Have students summarize what happened in today's lecture, and what they did since the last lecture. They may hate this, so there may be better ways to improve. Can the class use some sort of collaborative offline method, such as a Wiki? How easily frustrated do people get?

As you're thinking about this, ask yourself where you want the students to end up. What do you think they should already know? Do they already know it?

By forcing yourself to write a list of what you think students will learn from your class, then you can begin to be clear about what's important and not to your class.

This is a useful exercise because it makes you consciously competent. It makes you aware of what you think about your class. What are the key concepts? How can a student be sure they understand the concepts? By writing definitions? By solving problems? How do you justify why students need to learn certain things?

Now, let me get back to technology. How can you make technology useful? This is where you sit back and revisit how you present material to a class. Do you lecture, primarily? Do you have exercises for the students to do? Can students do something outside of class that's interesting? Do you want them to collaborate in some fashion?

As simple a thing as having students create their own webpage might be something that would be cool, but could be used for learning. Perhaps they can write a blog about their class experiences. The key is to find out what works and what doesn't work and how to get students to get closer to something the students find fun.

For example, maybe you want students to learn how to run a website that does something simple, and something each student can participate in. This is something they can show off to their family and friends. Can they do this without being too abusive? Can you produce an API for code that can be run on some server?

This can take a great deal of creativity on the design of a course and certainly appeals to teachers willing to learn new stuff.

How about writing a simple game? You provide part of the engine, they write smaller components. How might they debug the stuff they write? Maybe they work on the "model" while you do the view and controller. They can debug the model without the rest of the code.

Ultimately, though, by getting a better model in your head for what a student does, and being able to do some customization, you can present a better learning experience than just lecturing.

The more you learn about how people learn, the better off you are. Think about how people learn, and how you learn.

John Williams Returns

Perhaps this summer's most anticipated blockbuster movie is Superman Returns. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Indeed, this version harkens back to the one that came out in 1978, where ads proclaimed "you'll believe a man can fly".

The original had an all-star cast except Superman himself, who was played by an unknown, Christopher Reeve, who had been in soap operas. He created a version of Clark Kent that was so indelible, that most people consider it the prototypical Kent. Actors, like Dean Cain, have sought to make their Kent less nerdy and socially awkward as Reeve. If you watch the black-and-white television show, Kent was portrayed as tough as nails. He wasn't the meek guy that Reeve portrayed.

Superman Returns, which I believe is based on a comic book with the rough story line (comic films have abounded lately, including the newest X-Men movie, but also films like Constantine and Hellboy and V for Vendetta, most of which are "graphic novels", a fancy name for a fancy comic book). Unlike the original, this film covers a period of time where Superman has left the earth and has returned.

Like the original, Superman is played by a relative unknown, Brandon Routh. Kevin Spacey plays Lex Luthor, and seems to be enjoying hamming it up for the camera.

Early trailers for the film used the John Williams score, in particular, the theme played when they are on Krypton. Williams heyday was in the 1970s and just around 1980, when he composed some of the most well-known film themes in American cinema. During this time period, he composed Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg has used John Williams (as has George Lucas) in nearly every film he's made.

The current opinion of Williams has turned negative. He's considered bombastic and not too subtle. Still, there aren't many composers with his pedigree of fame. I'd put maybe Jerry Goldsmith in his league. (You could go back to earlier eras where Bernard Herrmann, Nina Rota who were noted for their compositions).

Even so, the music for Superman was so effective, that it really made the trailer work, even when there was very little of the film to show. Now, they probably could have gotten Williams to compose more music. After all, he did just that with the latest Star Wars films. However, they've gone with more of an unknown: John Ottman, who has based his composition on Williams original.

Apparently, the reason director Bryan Singer chose Ottman is that Ottman has not only composed music for many of his films, he's also been the film editor. Presumably, like Spielberg has had a long working relationship with John Williams, Singer wasn't prepared to abandon Ottman to get Williams. I haven't found an interview to hear why Singer made this decision. Certainly, Ottman could have focused exclusively on editing duties, and I'm sure he'd have been happy with doing that too.

If anyone's got a link to an interview where Singer explains this, I'd love to read about it.

Errata on Dutch Treat

I was informed that I wrote "Jerome Krabbe" when it should have been "Jeroen Krabbé", which I should have known, but not sure why I wrote it that way. The name seems to be pronounced "Yeroon" as the Canadian fellow pronounces throughout the film. He's still relatively prolific. He was in Ocean's Twelve (must have missed him).

Teach America

This is a follow-up to Chris's post whose attending some kind of seminar on teaching and technology.

There's something ironic about the use of technology in the classroom for computer science courses. Computer science teachers don't use a lot of it. You would think they would be on the forefront of teaching technology, but they're not.

There are several reasons. First, many computer scientists, ironically enough, are not technologists. They're mathematicians. They're old-school science folks. They believe that real understanding comes with deep knowledge of proofs and mathematics. They believe they have mastered a skill and it should last a lifetime. They think Pascal is a fad. C++ is a fad. Java is a fad. Heck, all programming languages are a fad! So it's not worth learning that.

Much of that thinking was because computer science wasn't that mature in the 70s, and the department often grew out of mathematics (and electrical engineering), so many of the early practitioners were mathematicians, who saw technology as something that was trendy, and not worth any intellectual power.

To be fair, even if a computer science teacher were plenty happy as a technologist (a hacker in Paul Graham's words), there was still something of a problem. Ten years ago, reliable presentation hardware wasn't available. Even if you had Powerpoint, it often took a bit of magic to get it to show up on a screen to present it. In the last 5-10 years, things have gotten a lot better, with standard setups that most anyone with a laptop and Powerpoint can put up a presentation.

And since this is the most common way to present at conferences, which professors gear up for, especially if they still are trying to get tenure, they can apply the same technology to teaching.

Indeed, this has become increasingly popular, especially among the younger teachers who often do their own presentations (I recall a professor who wouldn't touch software, despite having a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His students typed up his papers and his presentations. He corrected it by hand.)

However, many students find Powerpoint presentations rather poor. There are several reasons. Some presenters cram way too many slides. Say, 60 slides in an hour. At that rate, it's too hard to pay attention. Often, it goes so fast, students can't even take notes, and some learn merely by the act of writing (or at least, remember). But really, where it's become highly problematic is the borrowing of other people's slides.

Most people who borrow slides are barely familiar with it. It's much like being an actor in a play, while holding the script and reading it aloud. You're that much better if you practice, and you're even better if you write your own words (maybe you're not a more effective writer, but you know your stuff better and why you wrote the words, and what they mean to you).

But there are all sorts of other technologies people could use. Chris mentions podcasting. There are message boards. There are live IM sessions.

This is all fine.

But I'm going to tell you to do something simpler, less technical, and it comes from a lesson that seems obvious, but isn't.

Teaching is a cooperative experience.

In order to teach, you make assumptions about students. How many people think students, once they are in college, ought to be mature? If you tell them to read something, they read it. And they don't just read it, they try to understand. They learn to ask good questions. They learn what is important, and what is not.

While this may describe the best students, it hardly describes all students. Many are simply not prepared to be college students. By learning where students are coming from, you can adjust your assumptions about where students ought to be.

Indeed, many of the assumptions teachers make about students are not something that's fully conceptualized in the heads of teachers. Here's an exercise. Write down what you expect the students to know before classes start. Then, try to find out what students do know. Write down trivial stuff, like be able to write a program, compile and run it. It seems silly, but if you haven't programmed in a while, you forget this. And this is even after taking two or three classes! It's shocking.

If you have students like that, and you feel they can still achieve, it's time to have a crash course sometime in the first week. Tell the students if they're not ready to do the crash course (and I mean, coming outside of class at some point) then maybe they should seek another major. You don't mean to be harsh, but they are basically so far back, they should be in the first course.

Now, I've suggested something that is not very politically correct, so you may have to massage it a little. On the one hand, you don't want to explain how things are in the real world, at least, not in full detail, or you'll really scare people off, but you need to talk about what programming is like in the real world, and see if people are prepared to learn that or not, or to find something else they can be good at.

If you want to bring up a sports analogy, Michael Jordan tried to play baseball. Unlike Deion Sanders who was succesful at football and baseball, Jordan was not good at baseball. Imagine if he had chosen not to come back to basketball. Would that have been a mistake? Most people would say so. He had far more talent for basketball, already acknowledged as the best. To leave what he was best at would have been a waste of his talent.

In order to get a sense of where students are, so you can revise your assumptions, you need to talk to them, get a sense of where they're coming from. You don't have to be their best buddies, but they shouldn't be so remote that you know nothing of them either. I used to ask each student to tell me one interesting thing about them, and I used that as a point of reference when talking to them. Believe me, students like it when you remember who they are.

These are all low-tech things, requiring no technology, but they can work remarkably well. Much of what people suggest technically is presentation oriented or it's student oriented. But it doesn't give the feedback loop you need to have some idea of where they are and where they need to be. Indeed, you may find you're helping them discover where they need to be.

In a software environment, we often have progress reports indicating how we're doing week to week. This might be something useful to do once a week or so. People can highlight what happened in class, what they've done outside of class, and so forth. Often by getting a sense of what everyone else does, they can see where they need to be.

You can see, much of this is beyond the actual mechanics of learning a particular subject, and moves to metalearning, learning how to learn. And some people in college need to know that before they learn real stuff.

Make Space for MySpace

About ten years ago, the modern incarnation of reality television hit the airwaves, lead, most notably by Survivor. There were others. Big Brother with its bland first season that let viewers vote off members retooled itself in the Survivor vein, and has expanded into several other countries (indeed, I don't think it originated in the U.S.). Since then, there's been a plethora of reality shows and also game shows.

These programs are noted for being cheap to produce, the contestants can be given a fraction of what a typical star on Friends made, and still be very happy. Where reality TV shows have generally failed is in reruns, but since it's so cheap to make, people keep churning them out.

Reality TV shows also reflect a growing trend in the American public--to be noticed. Orwell predicted Big Brother would look over you and you would lack privacy. These days, people don't want that privacy. They want to be celebrities.

And this ties in to the desire among those in high school to be popular. Not everyone was popular, but enough people cared, and others, most noticeably, the Columbine kids resented the popular ones. However, before the Internet, popularity was primarily confined to the high school itself.

The Internet through websites like MySpace has pushed the notion of popularity nation and worldwide. Originally conceived as a place that bands could put their information, it's become the place for high school kids to create webpages. The numbers involved are astonishing. Recently, TechCrunch reported on the massive growth of MySpace.

Much of MySpace popularity is the similar base appeal of reality television, to watch and be watched. How many friends do you have? Other than Tom? Are we witness to the fall of Rome, when our interest falls into the decadence of who has the most friends, who is the hottest? What happened to intellectual pursuits? Is it compatible with the MySpace world?

The one positive, I suppose, is this huge awareness of the Internet, once thought of as the playground of geeks, and now migrating to every household that has a teen waiting to break free of the physical confines of their town, their high school, their parents' homes.

But what happens when this group grows up. Do they outgrow MySpace, or does MySpace create an adult outlet that can market to this crowd. Will there be an Oprah for the MySpace generation, or will Oprah be that Oprah?

Parents raising babies are now becoming increasingly aware of MySpace, but what happens when those parents are themselves from the MySpace generation?

It's likely MySpace will be around for a while, though supplanted by some snazzy competitor that's figured out something that can build enough groundswell to take over. It's the story of the Internet writ over and over. You think you can dominate and do well (witness AOL), and someone else comes along to take over, to spot a trend, to get the masses interested, and you're left scrambling, the models of commerce ever evolving.

Tacky websites and sounds alike, MySpace is thriving, much like AOL thrived ten years ago. What do the next ten years portend?

Feed Me

How long have newspapers been around? A few hundred years, right? This is how people got their news for hundreds of years. Beyond the daily newspaper, there was the weekly or monthly periodical. It could be "news" like Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, or something a little deeper, more opinionated, Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist.

The web's already created a revolution when it comes to the timeliness of news. Sports junkies can now find what's happening in many sports often in real time. Want to know the live score of every Division 1 college basketball game on any night? You can. Indeed, that's been a feature for so long that we don't even realize that such a thing is possible. Who is sending the scores? To whom? How do the websites get it?

Thus, the modern technical person now augments their news with the web. This wouldn't have been possible had the personal computer not decreased in price. Remember when the typical computer was two thousand dollars? It had to drop to one thousand dollars a pop for people to buy them. If you don't need the flexibility of laptops, desktops are a few hundred dollars cheaper.

There are many levels of web savvy. Most everyone who uses a computer that is semi-technical at least has a few favorite websites to visit. Movies, companies, all sorts of people advertise their website. If you know where to type on a browser, you're set to go.

Search engines then provide the glue to find stuff on the Internet. Most everyone just uses Google. It took me a while to switch over, but nowadays I almost exclusively use Google. There are other search engines, Yahoo, and MSN Search, for example, that do just about as good a job as Google, and then many, many others that are lucky to see a query a month from users. No one wants to find new search engines over and over.

Then, there are sites like Amazon and Ebay, where people can purchase online. Admittedly, there are still a few folks paranoid about having their information online, but the convenience certainly outweighs the threat, so most people are content using the net to buy things.

But what happens if you're starting to visit a bunch of websites, or you want to read some good blogs or good blogcasts. Experts have estimated that there are somewhere on the order of thirty million blogs out there, and that doesn't include spam blogs whose purpose is either to encourage click fraud, or to add links to a real blog to increase its visibility. There's no way any reasonable person could even begin to find desirable blogs to read.

Which is why many people often don't read blogs. But, I did, even before I got RSS. I'd head to Joel's site every few days to see what was happening, and most days, nothing was happening. Though I've been diligent about that habit, people would tell me, "don't do that, get an RSS feed".

For a long time I resisted the idea. I didn't like RSS feed aggregators. They didn't seem comfortable or convenient. I wasn't so technically unsavvy as to not know what it meant to subscribe to an RSS feed, though there are plenty of people who lack that savvy.

And that's the point I want to make. RSS has caught the content providing websites by storm. Here's the idea, for those who aren't familiar with it. A decent website will have one or more URL whose content is XML. XML looks a bit like HTML, but it contains data, and is not meant to describe a webpage.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you're basically bookmarking this link. There are two ways to bookmark it. Either you use a web-based RSS aggregator. Two of the more famous ones are Bloglines and NewsGator, but there's also MyYahoo.

Web-based aggregators are good when you aren't always near your computer. You can be at a kiosk somewhere or at work or a friend's laptop, head to the website, log in, and you can see what's new.

The other way to view RSS content is to use a desktop application. Unfortunately, the software depends on the platform you use. I'm currently using Omea as my desktop RSS aggregator, which looks a lot like Outlook, MyYahoo on the web, and Vienna on my Mac.

What does an RSS aggregator do? Basically, it checks the content of the URL (the RSS feed). The content of that file is basically several things. There's the title of the article, a brief description of the article, and a link to the article. It's up to the website to update this URL with recent data.

Like a web browser (sometimes because it is one), a good aggregator displays this information in a pleasant way, either like Outlook or like a Yahoo news page.

There are severals ways to subscribe. You can look for an RSS tag of some sort. It's usually a tiny little icon that says something like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom Feed. Unfortunately, there are three different flavors of RSS feeds, and so some sites have to support several versions. Some websites have tried to make it easier.

If you go to TechCrunch for example, and click on the Orange radio sign that indicates RSS feed, you see about 7-8 icons that include Bloglines, MyYahoo, NewsGator, Rojo, Pluck, and a few others. If you're using any of these feed readers, you can typically click it (assuming you're logged in), and it adds it to your subscriptions.

Otherwise, you have to do a little more work. There are two ways to try. First, if you do see a feed like RSS 1.0, drag the icon into your reader. Often, this will be enough to subscribe to it. If that doesn't work, you'll have to find a button that says to add the feed by URL, and cut and paste the URL that contains the RSS data.

Now, many RSS readers let you aggregate this information into folders. But any step you take beyond the basics is enough to discourage people. For example, I had expected that a small percentage of people even bother to use folders. I was told that maybe 25% of Bloglines users even have folders. Many of those use folders on their computer, but can't think of how they would use that feature to manage RSS feeds.

The folders are a bit like tagging. It can provide a way to categorize the feeds you subscribe to. You might be interested in sports and technology and create a folder for each. Apparently, many people are blogging about knitting.

But the real problem is the number of blogs out there. I met a guy who's a Ph.D. student trying to classify blogs based on goodness and content. He's doing so based on folders people use to classify them. That way, he hopes, users can find the blogs they want without trying to sift through millions of blogs, which of course, no one would want to do, or could reasonably do.

But let me back up some.

A few days ago, shortly after setting up my RSS aggregator, specifically, Vienna, on my Mac, I decided I would subscribe to TechMeme, recently rechristened from the awful tech.memeorandum.com. Immediately, it told me that Gabe, who runs TechMeme, was planning to be in town. Usually, he hangs out with Omer, who he used to live with.

Common among the blogoscenti are these open calls to meet. We were to meet at Urban Barbeque in Rockville. I didn't really know of this place before, though one of my housemates had eaten there. He said the place was tiny.

Initially, there were only four of us there. This was Gabe, me, Cynthia, who is the primary blogger at ipdemocracy.com, a blogging site that covers issues related to technology and politics as it affects public policy, and this guy who works for blogdigger.com, a search engine meant to find interesting blogs.

There's an interesting story about that. The guy who was from Blogdigger works for a guy (with?) named Mike Miller. I used to TA for Mike Miller. He used to teach a Fortran class. I TAed with another grad student named Jan Rizzutto (I'm probably mangling the name). There's now husband and wife. Small world. I think I recall him saying something about Phil Rizzutto who's in baseball? I don't follow baseball well enough to know. Small world.

We were later joined by a few other folks. One guy was the Ph.D. student doing work in finding spam blogs and finding topically related blogs. One guy I didn't talk to so I don't know what he does, but he seems to travel partly on the blog circuit. Another Asian guy was there, but I didn't talk to him either. Omer also showed up with his friend. In the end, we had 9 people. Urban BBQ is not really set up to handle this.

Now, it seems, with such meetings, taking pictures is the first order of business. Cynthica pulled out her cam-phone. I carry a tiny camera myself, the venerable Canon SD-200. Gabe had an older Sony. I recently bought the W50, but haven't migrated over to my new camera yet. I took a few pix. I know Gabe gets rather self-conscious about pix, but it would have been odd of him to say no to pix given that someone else was already doing it.

The discussion focused around blogs, most obviously. There's a particular problem I see with this, and that's that not everyone is interested in blogs. I know, I know. This was the reason we were there in the first place. If this were stitch and bitch, wouldn't you expect people to knit or crochet and bitch about whatever? I mean, why would they talk about the blogosphere. When you advertise to bloggers and blog fans, you expect to talk about blogging.

But there's something about being so completely immersed in this culture that it has the effect of putting blinders on. I asked where people thought the blogosphere was heading in a few years. I like asking crystal ball questions. It's true most people will guess wrong, but what I discover is that most people simply don't care for the exercise. They worry only what they can see in the horizon.

There aren't like Bruce Sterling whose expected to forecast stuff fifty years down the line because he's a science fiction writer. It's true, he's likely to be seriously wrong, that something will sprout that no one expected. I mean, think about the blogosphere. Why has it grown so much? Companies are willing to host blogs for free and have created simple enough software for everyone to use.

I'm using Blogger, and it's pretty darn simple. Blogger has made glacial progress for a company run by Google. It doesn't do many things different from what it did last year, but that's most likely because it's pitched to the least common denominator, the average Joe Blogger. Joe Blogger doesn't want to see the blog web page change every few months until he can no longer figure out what to do because the folks redesign it all the time.

One thing that's missing, I believe, is what we had just done in person. We had gotten together to eat at a restaurant in Rockville. Now, it was something of a trek for a few folks. One guy came from Baltimore. Another took forty minutes to get to the place, but was planning to visit his folks who lived close by. I happen to go to Rockville a lot, so it wasn't a big deal for me.

There was talk of getting bloggers together to talk about blogging regularly, but with a crowd that lives near Virginia, and one that lives near Baltimore, it's inconvenient to many.

One possible solution is to use MMORPGS, much like Worlds of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. It doesn't have to quite get to avatar status, though that's one way to do it. You could, for example, use the built-in webcam feature from the Mac, and if bandwidth permitted, have several people talk. But I feel this kind of remote meeting is going to be the way people communicate in the future.

People don't like, I know, because it feels weird. But that inhibition may occur because it's the new edge that most of us haven't explored. There are many people who don't get on the web or use RSS aggregators because it's something that doesn't feel comfortable. They don't read blogs because they're not used to it. They don't know how to find it. They'd rather read books, play sports, watch Oprah, cook, and do the things that people have been doing for years. To push that to a new realm of experience that people have not done at all is odd.

If people start heading down this line, it will resemble stuff people were writing in books in the eighties, when cyberpunk SF was all the rage, pioneered by William Gibson's dystopian vision, Neuromancer. Writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling jumped into this brave new feature, where people would jack up to an alternate, artificial universe, perhaps explaining the strangely prescient Philip K. Dick who wrote of futures with loss of identity as a subject.

Even the Matrix films tap into this cyberspace when Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus hook up into the matrix. We're not necessarily going to have that kind of experience, but it would allow for the kind of communication we're lacking because physical distances separate us.

But reality. I ended up eating the 2-meat combo, with pulled pork and beef brisket. I should have paid more attention to the sauces I was adding, or in my case, not adding, because I had a rather bland concoction, instead of something fiery. I should have noticed it, but I was engaged in the ongoing conversation.

It's again an odd happenstance that I was recently trying to get back to using RSS, and read briefly about OPML, which is some kind of, I assume, XML format for representing the feeds you susbscribe to, which can be exported, primarily so you can switch to other readers (basically a way to save your RSS bookmarks and move it elsewhere). Bloglines apparently makes this publicly accessible so anyone can read it.

In the conversation, people were naturally curious, how do you do it Gabe? (Meaning, what's the secret behind TechMeme). He doled out a few small nuggets, but I'm sure he's spent so much time thinking, tweaking, testing, that even the small nuggets would be sufficiently hard to duplicate in a real setting.

One thing that's interesting is that this new technology means new ways of making money, and that sense of capitalism is not far from what bloggers want. There was some kid who had a website with a million pixels. He charged a buck a pixel, but had minimum requirements for how many pixels you could buy at a time. That site was apparently threatened by an extortionist who wanted money or else he'd bring the site down using some kind of denial of service.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the guy did it himself, to get the news, to get people to go the website, to find a few folks that would spend the money to give him the million bucks. If so, more power to him. The problem with the idea is that it only works once. Heck, who'd visit that website more than once? I mean, I don't know why the advertisers even bother. It's hideous to look at, and too hard to tell what's going on.

TechMeme, for example, doesn't earn Gabe any money. He's had opportunities to make money from it, though mostly, the terms haven't been to Gabe's liking. I suppose he'd be happy if people just gave donations, but he hasn't gone so far as to do that either. I suppose he's looking for some innovative way to advertise, rather than stoop to stuff that some guy I used to hear on the radio do. He was some competitor to Howard Stern, and his brother would sell all sorts of goods, which he'd mention on the radio the whole time.

A few months ago I wasn't even really plugged into this community, and I'm not really that plugged into it now. It's time consuming business, and certainly takes away from traditional ways I could be spending my time.

I read an article by a guy I know who writes film reviews. He said that we're living in an age where inventions are being created like crazy, and his sense was that we wouldn't even begin to comprehend the kind of world we'll live in twenty years from now. Even so, even with cell phones, wireless networks, laptops, websites, RSS feeds, digital cameras, fast Internet, and so forth, there are still many things we still do the same old way we've ever done it.

There's still the daily commute. There's still eating at restaurants, watching movies, going for a walk. True, somethings have evolved. For example, there's more choices in restaurants. Coffee houses have sprouted up everywhere to become a hangout throughout the country. Most people are more savvy when it comes to international cuisine. We can order samosas at Indian restaurants, sip on a large bowl of pho, nibble on empanadas.

Perhaps, most notably, guys are now doing things that once were relegated to women. Guys cook their own meals, clean their own clothes. Women work, rather than stay at home cleaning house. This has changed the way men and women interact. That, to me, is perhaps more profound, between the generation in their fifties and those in their thirties.

And we're all becoming more well-read. We read more, whether it be useful information or not. We find people of similar interest. I remember I used to follow tennis, I thought, rather rabidly. But I discovered this wasn't the case. I joined rec.sport.tennis and talked to people who were far more into tennis than I was. That was my first foray into what might be termed as the netnewsphere, which is far smaller than the blogosphere, but was a community before the current sense of community.

The new world of web are bringing people together that would otherwise not have met. Think about what Gabe did. He effectively put an ad at his own website, asking people who read to come to a restaurant. Sure, this wasn't Bono saying he'd be over for tea, which would send thousands en masse (indeed, Alton Brown was advertised coming to Border's and it was packed). Those were advertised in the old-fashioned way, by newspaper. Now there are websites.

Here's the problem with communicating. At one point, people would read the same newspaper or watch the same TV programs. With the bazillion bits out there in web stuff, the overlap that you have with someone else is rather low. And at some point, will some people pull a Knuth, and just back out of the whole thing, giving themselves complete time to themselves away from everything. Knuth is, at heart, a mathematician, and so having time to himself is critical. Email, to him, is so much spam, unlikely to create something of value to him, and likely to waste his time. It's no wonder he stopped reading it.

But would people cut off their RSS feed, and not be hooked up to opinion and news all the time? Would they feel mighty guilty if they didn't hear the latest? Check their email? Talk to their friends.

As people get addicted to the different kinds of information from RSS, maybe some people would rather sacrifice email than RSS. It may be soon when people do indeed say RSS is more important to them than email.

French Open Update, Part 3

Nadal went on to win the second set, and had been holding serve throughout the fourth, up a break. However, due to one lucky drop shot, Federer was able to break to tie 5-all and hold for 6-5. Nadal is trying to force a tiebreak. Nadal hasn't so much won as Federer has had nearly twice as many unforced errors, especially on his backhand.

It looks like we're headed to a fourth set tiebreak.

And...Nadal wins it in fourth set tiebreak, 7-4 in the tiebreak. Federer continued to make errors, including dropping two points on serve. Federer could never get back on track. Had he played a low error match, it may have worked, but the wheels came off, and this wasn't to be.

Nadal has continued his mastery of Federer, and still shows that head-to-head dominance leads to head games. Federer certainly could have won.

All in all, not such a great final. This isn't like Seles-Graf where the win wasn't always inevitable. You felt that if either was down, they would play great points to scrap back.

Oh well, maybe next year.

French Open Update

Nadal turned around the second set, winning 6-1, not so much because he played a lot better, but because Federer seems like he's making lots of errors. The stats show that he's made something like 20 unforced errors on his backhand to one winner.

The crowd is now doing the wave, which persists in Europe even as it has faded as a fad in the U.S.

The third set has been a bit closer. Nadal is serving up 5-4. Despite being down 0-40 and 0-30 in two games, he's held serve nine straight times.

As people like to say, the third set is key to win in a best of five set match.