Dutch Treat

What seems like a period piece, set in World War 2, is a treatment of a topic that most filmmakers wouldn't touch, and yet, it's more common than one would expect.

Set in the Netherlands, Jerome (pronounced Yeh-room) is separated from his mother and must leave Amsterdam for a safer place, along with many other kids. They are sent to a rural, religious town, where locals adopt the kids until the war is over. Jerome has made a friend who he hangs out with at the water.

From this, you already get a sense that 13 year old Jerome might like guys, as he likes his friend, and the older son of the family he lives with. The story is done surprisingly subtly. The issue of whether he's gay or not is simply not brought up by the family, who may have thought that he's so young, and the concept so unbelievable, that they can't conceive of it.

Midway through the film, the Netherlands, which had been occupied by Nazi Germany are liberated by the Allies, in particular, Canadians. One Canadian in particular, Walt, looking a bit like Charlie Sheen doing Tom Cruise from Top Gun, seems to like Jerome a lot. The Canadians speak English throughout, and indeed there's a fair bit of English spoken.

Let me take a brief aside. If you watch foreign films (this one Dutch) and there is English, it's often the case the English sounds a bit off. The intonation doesn't quite flow, maybe because it doesn't have to.

Indeed, the film is bookended by the older Jerome played by the only actor I recognize in the entire film, Jerome Krabbe, doing choreography of a modern ballet that reflects his experience growing up during the war.

It's true that the average person doesn't know who Krabbe is. He was cast as the bad guy in The Fugitive. That was a bit of unusual casting, to find a Dutch actor when an American might have done. I've also seen Krabbe in The Fourth Man, a weird dream of a film by Paul Verhoeven, he of Robocop and Basic Instinct fame, when he was still making films in native Holland.

The story is a bit nostalgic, and although the film is set during the War, any evidence of ongoing war (bombs, soldiers in battle) are missing. Indeed, the story is focused on the rather bland ongoings of Jerome's life.

When the Canadians liberate this quiet religious Dutch town, many of the male soldiers are hanging out with the local women. This is not a topic that you see very often in films that are ostensibly about way. In this backdrop, Walt hangs around with Jerome, giving him candy, going to the water with him, teaching him how to dance, telling him how he really didn't want to go to war, telling him how special he is.

At various times, you feel someone is going to say something, whether it be other members of Walt's troop, or the stern religious father where Jerome stays, or even Henk who he has to share a bed with because the family is poor. None of that happens. There's one seen where they are almost caught, when one of the Dutch girls appears to have been made upset by one of the other soldiers and comes in to talk about her feelings to the two guys.

On the one hand, you have to admire a film that doesn't take the obvious plot point to have a confrontation of an older man and a teenage boy. The film isn't indeed trying to say the teen has been exploited. It hints at a sexual relationship, but doesn't dwell on it in depth, just enough to show it exists. It's also careful to show that Jerome would have been gay, was already having some feelings about it.

It also shows that in a conservative culture, perhaps the thought that someone is gay (the term sissy is used, though it's translated) may not have been seriously entertained. This lack of confrontation does rob the story of some drama.

The relationship isn't that well established, unfortunately, perhaps because Jerome seems too much like a kid, which is fine, in the sense that these relationships can work out that way, and the film tackles a tough idea with a soft touch (the subject being, is it OK for an older man to have relations with a barely teenage kid), rather than the one explored by, say, Beautiful Girls where Timothy Hutton's character falls for teen Nathalie Portman, since she seems much older than her early teens. But that film could be said to be a (realistic) copout, having a teen that seems adult-like being the object of desire.

Indeed, For a Lost Soldier despite not presenting a particularly compelling case for why Walt and Jerome fall for one another does at least treat the subject as not overtly hideous as many other films would do.

Walt eventually disappears without a trace, when the Canadian forces leave, and Jerome is distraught until his mother comes back for him. He tells her he wants to go to America.

The bookends are a bit odd. Once the flashback is over, you return back to Jerome as an adult (the director does play a cinematic gimmick having the older Jerome talk directly to the younger Jerome, something I saw in Thom Fitzgerald's The Hanging Garden), he's become a choreographer, presumably somewhere in Canada. The dance represents his youth growing up (how that got funded is somehow not addressed).

The dance part is a bit odd, strangely juxtaposed on a nostalgic period piece, and the film ends with the possibility that, all these years later, maybe Jerome can find Walt again (though, one imagine that either Walt is dead, married to a woman, arrested for his desires, or in a loving relationship with a man). It ends hopefully, though realistically, you just can't imagine it would be.

In this sense, the story resembles Mysterious Skin, but where that film shows the corrosive effects a pedophile for two young kids, one who remembers this period of time rather fondly, this one has a much milder sense of any potential damage. Indeed, were it not for the relationship at the center of the story, it would have been rather bland, but effective story of living in the past.

Despite the rather deft touch by the director, this is just the kind of film that you couldn't make in the U.S. given the conservative culture that the U.S. has where gay marriage is even a hot-button topic. It's been said that you might not even be able to make this film in Europe, but the Netherlands is perhaps the most liberal of European countries, and the Dutch have often made their share of controversial films.

It does go to show that many times, people demonize subject matter because it seems inherently wrong, and can't imagine that people would seriously do certain things. Indeed, such topics as sado-masochism is not really taken seriously in film, and is almost always played for odd spectacle. Pedophilia, a topic you'd imagine would be far more controversial, is the subject matter of a lot of films, while sado-masochism is the subject matter of nearly none. Can such a topic be intelligently treated?

As an addendum, I looked up the guy who played Walt, an actor named Andrew Kelley. He's only been in two films. This one, and one called Sorceress that is a collaboration between Canadians and the Dutch. Kelley seems to have that market cornered.

He Got Game

This was the final that everyone was hoping for. Federer. Nadal. Federer has never lost in a Grand Slam final. Nadal has a 5-1 record over Federer. Federer has won the last three Grand Slams. Nadal has won 59 consecutive mathes on clay.

Federer took a 5-0 lead in the first set, on a bit of a surprise tactic. I'm used to seeing Federer hit powerful shot after powerful shot, bullying an opponent. Against Nadal, Federer has lofted precision semi lobs up the line, surprising Nadal by pulling him out of positions and hitting weak shots which Federer has pounced on. Nadal managed one game, but fell back 6-1.

This didn't seem like a promising start to the match, but just when Federer's strategy seemed to be working well, the second set has seen Federer make more errors, leading to Nadal being more confident with his shots. With a break in the second, Nadal now leads 4-1.

More to come.

Funny Games

We spend most of our lives interacting with people. Excluding a few people who imagine themselves to be Thoreau, who famously left society to live in the woods by Walden, and then wrote about it, most people interact, some more successfully than others.

We can think of this interaction as a matter of what we, as humans, do. If we're being friendly, it's to be friendly.

Or, we can take this as more cynical, that relationships are some kind of game. The rules of the game, if there is any, is to convince people we want to like us to like us. At the very extreme is trying to convince someone to like you enough to date you, or possibly more.

There are those, who see from a distance, the jock or perhaps a leading thespian or student council president who seems to woo women and lament that life is not fair. These people aren't any nicer. Heck, they may even be asses. Why do women fall for these guys? If they only knew better.

Wouldn't it be nice if these women could be convinced by some kind of reasonably show of skill. Say, music.

So it's interesting to point out two songs that cover roughly the same territory, although one is far more obvious about it than the other. Jonathan Coulton's Soft Rocked By Me and Mike Birbiglia's Guitar Guy at the Party both convey the use of music to try to convince women to sleep with the singer.

In both cases, music is seen as a slimy way for a guy to be convincing to women, a pretense at sensitivity, when there's an ulterior motive.

In both cases, Coulton and Birbiglia seem to indicate that this is a bad thing. Coulton, in particular, say he's disgusted with this effort, because the guy is creepy. And yet, does this not describe what some folks try to do. Where's the line between creepy and pathetic and perfectly fine? How many people might say, we get along fine and all, but if I don't have sex, then I'm outta here.

There is an important theme in Coulton's songs, which is the geek that desires a relationship, but is somewhat incapable of obtaining it easily. Code Monkey is basically about a computer geek who's a simple man with simple desires, but is unable to effectively communicate with the woman he wants to go out with. Skullcrusher Mountain also has a similar theme, with the geek being replaced by a megalomaniac.

How many people treat relationships as a kind of game where they say and do certain things to achieve a certain effect, even if it's counterintuitive.

For example, there are some who suggest that men, when trying to go after women, should not be very nice. To be too nice is to be too needy, which usually signals a lack of desirability or weakness. Thus, one should be occasionally, well, maybe not mean, but certainly not placating.

This strategy was apparently applied to Guy Kawasaki who used to work for Steve Jobs. Jobs would praise him, but then also tear him down. His need to please Jobs came from this bit of manipulation. Coaches are well known for playing mind games to achieve their goals, trying all sorts of tactics to encourage players to play to their potential.

Is this a reasonable way to act around people, to alternately be nice and mean to them? I think people want to believe relationships are honest, that such deception to achieve a goal is not necessary, that such behavior should not be condoned, and yet, I suspect people who employ this strategy and see it work would argue the proof is in the pudding. They did it, and they get results.

Now, I've written this mostly from males seeking females. Women, alas, tend to have it harder because men assume they have to do the work of getting women to like them, i.e., they have to make the first move. It gives a sense of purpose and initiative, but many guys are cowardly making that move.

Why don't women make the move? Well, some women do indeed make the move, but it seems like far fewer women do this than men. Is this culture or is there something inherent in men that make them make the move.

We're a product of our desires and our general inability to get what we desire most of the time. Most of us lack the kind of emotional restraint to be Buddhists, to minimize our desires to the point where they are unnecessary. It's such a foreign concept that many dismiss it out of hand.

So while we desire, we suffer, and some of us decide that the way to success is learning to play a game based on alleged rules of human nature.

Is Math Necessary for Computer Science?

Computer science is a weird major. Most people who major in computer science believe computer science is about programming. Indeed, the first few courses are spent programming, which often amounts to at least two years of programming. When you ask a second year student about grad school, they imagine that graduate students, having had years of computer science must write huge programs, like hundreds of thousands of code. They'd be surprised to learn that some grad students hardly program at all.

In fact, many professors would argue that programming is not what computer science is at all. Indeed, programming is merely a tool to solve problems, and it's the problems that can be solved by computers that they care about.

Computer science research divides into many categories, which are fairly broad. Among the topics: databases, networks, theory (cryptography, algorithms, theory of computation), programming languages, human-computer interaction, computer science education, software engineering, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, graphics (including scientific visualization), vision (could be grouped with AI), systems, numerical analysis.

Even programming languages is not the study of how to program, but what features are most interesting in programming. Areas of research including various paradigms of programming (functional programming, logic programming), compiler research, compiler optimization. It's not so much about how to better programmers.

Software engineers could do this, although they are sometimes interested in the process by which real software engineers work, and want to characterize this.

Since computer science originated in mathematics, indeed, the idea of a computer far predates the computer, there's a sense that computer scientists should have training in math. Usually, a few courses in calculus are required. It's not that calculus is used so often, because it's not. Computer scientists often use discrete math (logic, set theory, etc) rather than continuous math.

However, since the reason for calculus stems from its prevalence in all of engineering and physics and chemistry, and since the sciences and engineering are still a large part of a university's technical major, there's still strong need to teach calculus, and thus lots of resources to do it.

Still, computer scientists note that there are kids who program who's skill at math are rather weak, just as many chess players aren't that good at math, though somehow being good at math has some correlation with the ability to learn and master chess.

Some universities and colleges, especially those that aren't academically strong, have decided that it's not so important for computer science major to have strong math skills, as they fall into the trap that knowing how to program doesn't require much math.

And while it's true math isn't essential, it does teach a person who gets good at it, the ability to abstract, and that's important in computer science as in any topic. For example, to know how efficient an operation is, you need to know that something happens N times, not 10 times, not 100 times, but some abstract quantity N.

This level of abstraction is often daunting for folks that aren't good at math. And by good at math, I mean real math, not adding, subtracing, solving algebraic equations, but being able to understand proofs and be able to manage simple proofs. There are people who claim to be good at math, but what they're probably saying is that they are good at computing.

In essense, the relation between doing computations in math, and being able to prove, is somewhat analogous to being able to program, and being able to think about programming and apply it to real world situations.

Now, there are people that are plenty good at math that don't make good programmers. That's because programming has started to get increasingly difficult, and requries odd skills that mathematicians would puke if they heard it. There are magic numbers and incantations and special rules in programming that make no sense except that's the way they work. In math, with a few axioms and mathematical maturity, a person can reason a lot of math.

Einstein was able to figure out the mysteries of physics by thinking his thought experiments and using his formidable math skills to come to certain conclusions.

However, programmers have to deal with programming languages, and the rules that someone or some committee decided about language behavior. Now, these designers may have had many good reasons for why they did things a certain way, but that way was not inevitable.

But, even beyond the nitpicky aspects of the language, there's now the entire environment that surrounds it. You have to learn an editor, or an IDE, plus a debugger. You have to learn how to use tools like memory leak tools. You have to learn how to install the latest version of the compiler or editor. You may have to work with a third party library that's not well written, nor well documented. You may have to learn how good programmers do certain things, but without the obvious benefit of a book. A book may tell you how a language works, but now why Bjarne codes this way or that.

And, then there's version control, continuous builds, agile development, the waterfall method, learning which off-the-shelf tools you should use, learning what the community at large is doing, deciding whether you should learn Ruby on Rails or C# or not. Is strong typing good or not? Where do I look on the web for solutions for problems similar to mine?

These skills don't require any math, but instead, require the desire to keep up with an ever changing field, and that's important too.

But, to get back to math. Without a firm understanding of math, can you deal with abstraction in math. Here's an exercise to try. You have a character array, filled with white space and commas and periods. Write a function that returns an array of Strings, that contains all the words. For example, "Come here, Watson, I need you!" should produce an array that looks contains "Come", "here", "Watson", "I", "need", "you".

How hard is that? If you're good at programming, it's easy, though tedious (no strtok or split, though knowing that is useful too). But to beginning programmers, the thinking required to do that can be incredibly hard. They have no idea how to wrap their minds around this problem. They don't even know how to start.

Even when you explain how to do this, there are those that just don't see how you even reason in this way. It just seems amazingly difficult. And this stuff is easy. Imagine you wanted to show them how a compiler works. Or how to ensure that certain expressions type-check correctly. Or how garbage collection works. Or how to implement certain algorithms.

Some of the most fundamental stuff in programming requires algorithmic knowledge, and my friend, that requires math. It's true, some kinds of programming, require no math background at all. You can be, I imagine, a decent to great system administrator by mastering all sorts of details on UNIX commands and writing Perl scripts. The skill set needed by a good sysadmin do not necessarily overlap those required by good programmers which do not necessarily overlap those who would make good theoreticians.

I think the problem ultimately boils down to this. Programming seems easy. There aren't any difficult constructs (well, if you stay in a C-like language), at least, it doesn't seem to require deep math, and yet, it is hard. And tedious. And error prone. Even the ability to find bugs is a skill that programmers have, but theoreticians find totally tedious.

At the very heart of mathematics is proof. You can write extremely rigorous proofs assuming nothing but axioms. But we'd get very little math done if mathematicians had to prove in this laborious way. They tend to say that certain statements are true because someone proved it before, so they don't belabor it. They want you, the human, to figure out the gist of what they say, and getting pedantic about details that aren't illuminating is not that important.

Programming, by contrast, is that tedious. Every little step has to be spelled out in a formal language, and that language isn't even constant. Someone comes up with another language, and your "proofs" are no longer in vogue. There are better ways to do it, and so you must learn to think in this new language, and learn how the best do it, and try to be productive there as well.

Even as diverse as math is, everyone pretty much agrees how a proof should look, and thus, everyone has a solid commonality between them. This is not so in computer science where human-computer interaction researchers often use as much psychology as computer programming, where theoreticians in computer science may laugh at them and database people for doing what they mockingly refer to as "engineering", which is beneath them, not permanent, not delving into the truths of the universe.

My short answer is yes, you need math to be a good computer scientist. Computer science is more than just programming. It's reasoning and problem solving, and math has provided us the best way we know to tackle reasoning and problem solving in a rigorous fashion.

Here's an Apple, Sony Boy

Sony has recently opened stores called Sony Style. You'd be foolish not to think the reason they opened the store was because of the success of the Apple Store.

Still, in their zeal to imitate, they wanted to differentiate themselves, and the question is whether they've succeeded. The employees all wear this headset that looks like they are working for McDonald's, that allow them to communicate with one another. I suppose this creates a sense of cool. But it's a chilly kind of cool.

I went inside one of the stores today with a coffee. I was told to step outside with the coffee. I mean, I suppose I could have been clumsy enough and destroyed one of their precious computers. Still, the Apple Store never seems to react that way. I've brought in food and coffee to the Apple Store. Not one word has been said. I suspect they figure I'm an adult, and the likelihood I'll trip and destroy something outweighs the fact that I'm told I'm incompetent and shouldn't be standing near expensive electronic equipment.

And then there's the headset/microphone. On the one hand, it looks really silly. And even if looked "cool", it's the kind of cool that's distancing and possibly intimidating to a customer. Do they want to see someone that is cooler than them? Does grandma want to see someone that looks like they should be on a dance floor, and not someone that seems friendly? I understand that looks are not everything and can be deceiving, but impressions can count.

The Apple Store has knowledgeable people, but they all try to make people feel at home, and try to be friendly about it. And that's really important.

Now I will point something out that's negative and yet also positive. Apple has a Genius Bar. Generally, it takes at least 20 minutes to diagnose a problem. That means lines can form really quickly, which can be irritating. That there are lines should say something about Apple's quality. However, given that there's nearly nothing comparable at any other store, most people would presumably rather wait then have to send their Ipod in for repair.

Admittedly, what people really want to do is to have Apple say "we'll just replace it with the latest", which would, alas, encourage all sorts of bad habits.

Another thing that's bad about both stores is the way they push additional care. They say "do you want additional care at this additional price?". It's very much like pushy car rental folks. They always ask if you want additional insurance. You know. For peace of mind. Of course, why don't they simply make it part of the price, and give you no choice? If it's really that important? Hmm. Oh, their competitors don't do it. They have no choice. You see, we have to be unsafe because our competitors are unsafe too. But, you see, we'll remind you about this.

Car rental folks are alas far more annoying than Apple or Sony which insists on the same kind of insurance they're unwilling to provide as part of the purchase price, because by golly, Dell does the same thing, right?

Apple has another annoyance. Alas, it's a problem that arises from something simple. Most stores have checkout lines. Nothing gives you the sense that you are part of a crowd ready to push out than a line that people are waiting at. Even though it provides nice cues, it is the experience people dislike a lot.

So, Apple has this rather ambiguous stations where there may or may not be a line, where maybe you can ask someone something or not. I was having a ProCare session. Now, this isn't held in a special location away from the hoi polloi. It's right at the Genius Bar. Thus, customers, unfamiliar with the Pro Care wonder why the "genius" (bandied a bit too loosely) is hanging out for so long with this one person. They're waiting in line, because, well, there are no cues not too.

Why not have a special location for the ProCare sessions? This would even encourage those who have it to feel a bit special to be at this location. I can see reasons why not, but even so.

In the end, Apple must have figured something out about customer service that Sony hasn't picked up on. The Sony folks appear to have decided to look stylish and mod and have their folks look hip, but probably train them minimally on how to be nice to customers.

Somehow the Apple Store does it better despite some of its own annoyances. And, they seem to attract pretty bright people, at least, compared to the usual people that get hired that know very little (say, people working at fast food, that couldn't tell you what's on a menu, or identify what the items are on the menu).

Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but Sony has a bit to go to know what to imitate. It ain't the cool that they should imitate, but friendliness and helpfulness.

Cuban is Squarin'

Mark Cuban has a blog. It's a weird blog at that. It attracts two groups not known for hanging around the same blog. There's the sports fan, or possibly, the Mavericks fan, who is net savvy enough to check out what the owner of Maverick's has to say.

Cuban famously blogged about NBA officiating, saying that officials should be rated and only the best ones should be allowed to officiate. For anyone that's followed tennis, especially in the 80s when McEnroe would whine how bad the officiating was, this lament sounds rather familiar. The NBA raised awareness of the blog by fining Cuban for his criticism of officiating, a no-no in NBA circles ("thou shalt not criticize the officiating").

But Cuban, being a netizen, a blogoscenti, also likes the geek stuff. He recently blogged about the pervasiveness of click fraud which he thinks is underreported. This phenomenon of getting robots to click on links to raise the amount of money a site can get (companies pay for the number of clicks there Google ads receive--thus leading to a market where fake websites with real links are set up, then clicked and clicked to earn money).

Because his comments on the geek world are interesting, and because there's enough of a geek population that likes sports, he's able to attract a diverse crowd, making his blog one of the more popular blogs out there.

I've noted this before, but happen to note this while reading an article on how Google's AdSense has caused gobs of fake webpages to go up in the name of click frauders looking to make an extra buck. This article references Cuban's blog, though as a link, not by invoking the man's name.

The average NBA watcher probably doesn't read blogs. Most sports commentators still get their information from newspapers and conventional sources, if only because the best writers tend to write for pay. Those that blog intelligently about the subject without pay must do it because they love the subject (and they won't get the inside scoop, without doing some real reporting). They don't know this side of Mark Cuban.

As I've blogged before, Cuban ought to have a competitor. Paul Allen was cofounder of Microsoft and owns the Seattle Seahawks as well as the Portland Trailblazers. However, he's kept a low profile. It's certainly possible, even a man as associated with the modern state of computer technology as Allen is, that he doesn't care about blogging or all this new fangled technology. It's easy to decide, at some point, it's not worth being cutting edge in all this, to take a break, and spend the vast sums of money building monuments to Jimi Hendrix.

Croissants and Cafe

I've only been following the French Open by results, and then, only rather casually. There was once a time, back when I was in junior high school (what they now call "middle" school) where I used to watch all the tennis I could, on television.

This is where cable was wonderful. The major channels--ABC, NBC, CBS, show some tennis, but not a whole lot. Between NBC and CBS, the two would cover Wimbledon, the French Open, and the U.S. Open, but usually on weekends.

Weekday coverage of the French used to be handled by ESPN, the U.S. Open by USA network, and Wimbledon by HBO. ESPN used to cover the entire of the Australian Open, the forgotten Grand Slam, at least, by Americans. This has changed (HBO stopped carrying Wimbledon, and there's more limited coverage of the French).

I wouldn't see Wimbledon, alas, since our family didn't get HBO, but we'd get pretty much everything else.

With cable, I could probably watch the semis and finals of maybe 15-20 tournaments a year. Most weekends I would watch if I could.

This was during the 80s and early 90s. Back then, there were still pretty good American players. Connors was starting to fade, but played well for much of the 80s. McEnroe was at the top of his game in the early 80s, but faded after Lendl beat him in straight sets. McEnroe took some time off, much like Borg, but was never the same again.

During this time, players like Edberg, Becker, Graf, Evert, Navratilova, Sanchez-Vicario, Mandlikova, Clerc, Vilas, Wilander, Mayotte, Sampras, Chang, Agassi, Courier all played. In particular, American tennis, both men and women, were at the very top of the game.

This is not the case now, and tennis interest has plummeted. The best men's players, Roddick and Blake, aren't quite ready to leap to the level of top 5. Roddick, in particular, can't seem to tame his shots, unable to play smart tennis, and to stay mentally focused. Agassi had, from time to time, been able to achieve this, though against a good player like Sampras, he could panic.

Blake has improved, but has no shots that are particularly scary. He's not a good enough volleyer (no one is these days) to win that way, nor a consistent enough rallyer, nor a hard enough hitter. He's very solid, just not outstanding.

People would love Blake to make that next step up. He's the kind of African American that people like. He's good looking. He's well spoken. sort of the Derek Jeter of tennis, rather than the Barry Bonds of tennis. Really, we can have a player like Blake, because of what Ashe went through. No longer do African American tennis players have to think so hard about civil rights issues, and Blake less than most, since, unlike Tiger Woods, he's not become an icon in his own sport.

This weekend, the women are playing. I don't even recall if I watched last year. I certainly don't remember who won. These stats used to be on the top of my head. Right now, it's Kutznesova against Henin-Hardenne. Oh yes, last year, it was Henin-Hardenne against Mary Pierce who had played great to get to the final, but then sprayed balls everywhere in the finals.

The women's finals for the French Open have often been disappointing because one of the finalists just got nerves and would just play poorly. When there were the great champions: Evert vs. Navratilova, Seles vs. Graf, you would expect high level of play from both of them. Women's tennis has produced some streaky players who would play great one day, and awful the next. Men's tennis has far fewer of those players, especially on clay. Even a "bad" finalist can rally at length, and not make too many stupid errors.

Still, when the women's final does feature really good players, it can be more exciting than the French men's finals, which is often laborious as players punch and counterpunch.

This year, the men's finals is worth watching. It's the dream final between Federer and Nadal. This is perhaps as exciting to Americans that don't watch tennis as a Danish player and a Korean player in the finals of a world badminton championship. Who are Federer and Nadal?

Part of the lack of interest is jingoism. Fans prefer watching Americans. True, neither Seles nor Graf were born in the U.S., Seles did most of her tennis training in the U.S. and basically tried not to talk up her Yugoslavian upbrining. Still, even sports commentators don't watch tennis with much passion, and barely follow who's who. They like Henin-Hardenne's name because there's two (names) and they can say it Frenchified (she's Belgian, but they speak a form of French there).

Federer has been spoken of as the greatest player that's ever lived, which is amazing, given that people were saying that of Sampras (despite Sampras never winning the French, nor reaching the finals), and Sampras was only playing a few years ago.

Federer serves hard, hits the ball off the ground hard, and volleys reasonably well. He has what Sampras lacked, which was a real ground game. Sampras learned to hit well enough off the ground that he could contain Agassi on a hard court, but on a clay court, Sampras was just, eh. Top clay courters could push him around all day long. This isn't the case with Federer. He can stay in rallies with the best of him. Even so, clay is his weakest surface, though not by much.

Nadal is the Agassi of Spain, or perhaps more like a Vilas. Long hair, flowing, running around. He's number 2 in the world, has recently broken Vilas's consecutive streak on clay, and more than that, he's beaten Federer 5-1 when they've met in tournaments and while most of the matches have been on clay, two have been on hard courts. Nadal won a particularly close match the last two times winning in fifth set tiebreakers, 7-5.

It used to be Nalbandian, an Argentine, had a mental edge on Federer. Nalbandian himself is quite a good player, just behind Federer and Nadal. He used to beat Federer when they were juniors much like Chang used to beat Sampras. However, Federer has recently realized that he can beat Nalbandian, and has won many of their most recent meetings. To be fair, Nalbandian has reached the finals of Wimbledon in 2002, and the semifinals of the other three Grand Slam events. He's quite a good player, and it was no shame for Federer to lose to him.

But Nadal seems to have the mental edge against Federer. Don't underestimate this. When matches are close, the player that has won the close matches often pulls it out. Players who lead head-to-head somehow feel great confidence and play better. A classic example was Sampras vs. Agassi. Sampras usually won their matches.

One year, Sampras had played rather poorly. He hadn't been winning tournaments. But Sampras focuses better than any player for a single tournament. He played really up for the US Open, and Agassi had recently gotten back to the top of his game. (This was in 2002). Still, when they met in the finals, Sampras met Agassi, the feeling that he knew he could beat Agassi and the Agassi knew it lead him to a four set victory.

We'll see how this turns out for Federer and Nadal in tomorrow's match. Nadal should be supremely confident, yet, Federer is also playing quite well, reaching his first French final. Hopefully, a great match ahead.

Back in the RSS

A while back, I was using Bloglines mostly because Justin said to use it. To be fair, Bloglines is one of the better web based blog aggregators, and so it wasn't so arbitrary of a choice. However, I wasn't the sophisticated surfer I am now.

I was blogging of the myriad locations I surf, and realized this was starting to be rather large. That made me think I should check out RSS aggregators again.

Let me tell you, there are lots. And lots. And lots.

Everyone and there web-surfing mother has an RSS aggregator.

There seems to be roughly two distinct styles of RSS aggregators. There are those that emulate Outlook, and those that emulate Yahoo.

Outlook has a distinct three panel display for email. On the left side is a number of folders. One is your Inbox. The rest are folders you create (there's .also Sent Mail). When you click on one of the folders, the middle column displays the email within that folder, ordered in reverse chronological order. The top is labelled with "Today", then below is "Yesterday", then is starts going back a few days, then "Last Week", then "Older". It breaks up the long list based on time.

The right panel which usually takes about half the screen is the display of the contents of the email, whichever was selected from the middle column.

An RSS aggregator using Outlook as a metaphor, has RSS feeds on the left column, instead of folders. In the middle is the list of articles for that feed (instead of email). In the right column is the RSS article, and typically a link to the full content. Some RSS aggregators can display the page in their software (if it's a web, they can use a frame, if it's an application, they might leverage off an existing web browser).

Bloglines doesn't quite use the three column method. It uses two columns. When you click on an RSS feed, the right side lists all the articles, one after another in row after row after row. It's like looking at multiple pages in Word, except each page corresponds to a summary of the article.

To that end, I am using Omea. Omea looks like Outlook, and I'm used to that view. It also keeps track of email addresses, bookmarks, etc., although I don't use them. Even though I don't care for Outlook as a mailer, I'm used to it after over a year of staring at Outlook email.

However, I also use a web RSS feed, and that's in the Yahoo style. Indeed, it is Yahoo, or My Yahoo. Go to news.yahoo.com. It's been recently redesigned, but it breaks its content in small rectangular boxes with five or six headlines. This is similar, say, to something like techmeme.com.

One reason I like the Yahoo style is because it looks familiar. Again, Yahoo's way of laying things out isn't quite what I like, but it is familiar.

My Yahoo lets you create multiple pages, and lay things out, sort of. There are one or two narrow columns and one wide column. Nearly everything goes into the wide columns. I have no idea what rule Yahoo uses to decide which things go in which columns, and they don't seem to clarify.

So, I have one page with my Sports RSS, one with Tech, and I'll probably even have one devoted to O'Reilly.

Some RSS aggregators (many, indeed) allow you to put RSS feeds into folders. When you click the folder, it intermingles articles from several feeds together. This is a bit unnerving to me. I tend to visit websites and thus I am getting only one site's content. Over time, I may get used to intermingled content.

RSS aggregators are a bit like multi-chat client. You generally get the basic features of chat, but the idiosyncratic features of each chat client often do not make it into the product. Still, multi-chat often makes up for deficiencies of chat clients. Many clients do not let you log in more than once, because they wonder why you would even have two SNs. But many people do. AIM recognized that, but Yahoo and MSN do not appear to think that way, and seem to favor one login.

I'm using yet another aggregator on my Mac. This is on the recommendation of Chris who uses Vienna, an open source aggregator. It can display articles within the application since it uses the Safari display engine. I don't think it's quite as good as Omea, but it is clean, which has its advantages.

I'd like to see something Reddit-like. Rojo is trying to do something like that, but I'm not feeling it from Rojo.

Now, you may think I know something about RSS because I'm blogging at length about it, but most of the aggregators I tried I've only looked at since this weekend, so basically, three or four days of mucking around with all sorts of aggregators. I know more and more will come around.

I am also looking at playing with wufoo.com. It's a website devoted to making forms. It's one of those Web 2.0 like places. Lots of fade effects, and so forth.

Then, there's the Google spreadsheet that just came out. There's also a competitor that's been out a few months longer called EditGrid. Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how they fare against Google. Google puts up a major challenge to Microsoft. Once they have a Word competitor (admittedly, Microsoft wants to roll their next-gen Word and Office products, with enhanced UI). Can they make products that cost nothing and make Microsoft really sweat?

Google has taken such an odd aim at Microsoft. How could search knock of Microsoft? It didn't. But it lead to ads. It lead to other free products. The spreadsheet, though, has to be one of those features that is going to be big. I'd say the other big one will be a Powerpoint competitor. Apple has Keynote which is supposed to be a lot better than Powerpoint.

There's a research presentation software called Slithy based on a Ph.d thesis from a guy at University of Washington, Seattle. He used Python and OpenGL to allow animations in slides, using a programming language. That should appeal to me, I think.

Ah, that's the software industry for you. It must drive average Americans crazy. While car manufacturers try to make more efficient cars and newer designs, they don't add unknown features that users would say "uh, what's that for?". But software does that all the time, and the alpha-geeks lap it all up.

I remember at ETECH, a guy asked "Has your RSS feed become more important than your email?". That's pretty heady stuff. While email deals with the mundane task of getting stuff done for work, the RSS feed is attempting to keep you informed at all levels, in an efficient manner. I'm beginning to see why some people feel they must have their RSS feeds.

I still rely on places like reddit to have the large number of geeks find interesting reading for me. There's always going to be that kind of viral community thing, where you let people who have more time than you find stuff that is of hopeful interest to you.

The French and Jackie Chan

Jackie Chan's films became popular because he would do real stunts. Rather than mimic Bruce Lee style kung fu where martial arts would be taken somewhat seriously, Chan used a more Buster Keaton style, where martials were used as humor and cleverness rather than danger.

Chan has had few imitators, but now they are movies coming out. In 2003, a movie called Ong-Bak came out. Tony Jaa was the lead. The story was allegedly weak, though the stunts were exciting enough.

More recently, District B-13 has come out from Luc Besson, the director that brought you The Fifth Element (I think he produces, not directs). There's also been a video of this Russian guy running around that was in the top 100 Google videos.

The name of this new style of running and jumping is called le parkour whose English "translation" is "urban running". It typically features a guy running on rooftops jumping around. Here's one that was used in a BBC commercial.



By the name, you know it's French. (I keep think of "Le Tony Parkour", but this would only be modestly funny if you know about basketball, and the San Antonio Spurs in particular).

Here's an Apple, Sony Boy

Last night, shortly after work, I took the trek into Virginia to Tyson's Corner Mall. This mall is so large that it's in two parts, one across the street from another. Although I was at the main mall over the weekend, I hadn't been to that mall in quite a while before that. Montgomery Mall, while not as nice, is so much closer to where I work, that I don't consider heading down to Virginia much.

I used to go there all the time when I rarely drove on the Beltway (I drove so little in high school and college, that I never got a sense of where anything was while driving. This driver's internal navigation is something most people seem to develop as a matter of course of driving. I'd get lost very easily, not have a sense of where I was going, and that bothered me a lot.) Tyson's was 495, exit 46 (I wouldn't remember the exit, but it would say Tyson's on it), get in the left lane quickly, and head into the parking garage across from Bloomingdale's.

I used to park there all the time. Amazing.

Yesterday, I wanted to get closer to Hecht's because I wanted to try out this Indian restaurant called InFusion, which would make you think it's a fusion restaurant. I suppose, in a peculiar way, it is. They serve some Chinese food. But it's only like two items. They're an Indian restaurant in pretty much every other respect. A bit of false advertising, but the food is good.

My main reason for going to Tyson's was to head to Sony Style. This is, I'm sure, Sony's answer to the Apple Store. But man, where is it located? Deep in the depths of Tyson's bowels. From Hecht's, it's about as far away as you can get (although it's even further from Bloomingdale's).

In fact, I didn't even recognize that part of the mall. It must have been a new addition since the last time I checked that part of the mall out. I had to walk and walk.

Anyway, once I found it, it was mostly what you'd expect. Sony stores ought to do well, because they carry a much greater product line than Apple. They not only have computer and MP3 players, but they also have cameras, televisions, walkmans. All sorts of stuff. And yet, the place was fairly empty. To be fair, it was almost 9 PM on a Monday night, and it's buried deep.

But I think there's several reasons why Apple stores do so well. First, the Genius Bar. Something's always breaking, so you get a few people in there, no matter what. Second, their product line is so small, that any new product gets fanfare. Basically, they have their high end laptop, low end laptop, Ipods, and desktops. For such a small product line, people know what they are, and follow it religiously.

Sony, on the other hand, has a great deal of products. They carry a dozen different digital cameras, if not more. It gives people choices, but no one remembers one from the other.

Ah, that was the main reason I wanted to go. I wanted to get a close-up look at the DSC-W50, the 6 MP compact camera made by Sony. In the past, I haven't liked Sony for two reasons. First, they use their own memory stick. No one else uses this but Sony. It's the Betamax (invented by Sony) and VHS all over again.

Second, they were known to not be very good about repairs (basically, you have to buy a new one).

Two things. First, I don't think I care anymore about the memory. The price is in the same vicinity as other memory cards. Second, digital cameras are cheap enough that you just get something new if the old breaks. It's like VCRS once they got cheap. It's so expensive to repair, that you just don't bother. You get a new one.

So that's how I thought about it.

The reason I wanted to check it out is because Canon cameras have a feature I just can't stand. When you turn off the power and turn it on again, it goes into auto-flash mode. I almost always want to take pictures without flash. But Canon thinks users are stupid, and that they'll forget which settings they left it on. Well, they should have the option to let power users like me turn that default off.

Second, Canon cameras have this annoying orange light which it uses to determine how far subjects are away. It shines it on the subject, and the cameras can more accurately detect distance. But it is annoying for the subjects, and makes it plenty obvious you're taking a picture.

I thought about the Casio, but they recharge using a dock, which makes it a pain. Sure you don't lose your battery (easily), but then you have a bulky dock to use to recharge. So I zapped the Casio.

I just wanted to make sure the Sony make could remember the flash setting and didn't have a dock. Turns out it's 6 MP, at $250, which is cheap for this kind of camera. Like PCs, cameras have gotten more powerful for the same price. The W50 also has a huge screen (2.5 inches, to my 2 inches). Older cameras have 1 inch screens and are tiny. Manufacturers realized customers wanted big, big, big screens.

But alas, they are sold out. I mean, really sold out. They aren't at the Sony store. They aren't at Newegg. They aren't at Zip Zoom Fly. I hope they get some soon, but this doesn't look good.

Oh yeah, it's June 6, 2006 (6-6-06). Nice.

Gore as Lecturer

At its crux, An Inconvenient Truth is a lecture, much like any college lecture, except it's not. I want to spend a little time discussing the documentary as a lecture.

Some college lectures are entertaining. The reason? The content is not too hard to follow. A good history lecture is a story, and you can enjoy it without having to worry about dates and such that you might care about writing a final essay (hopefully not, as dates make for boring essays).

The more abstract the topic, the harder it is to be entertaining a lecture. It's possible, but either the audience needs to be savvier about what's being taught, or the entertainment comes from material outside the actual content, say, from jokes. If Richard Feynman is discussion Maxwell's equations, well, there's only so much he can do before he has to delve into math. Which isn't to say that that can't be entertaining or informative, but only to a select audience.

Al Gore seems like a good student. He had good grades. He likes science and technology. He gets others to explain things in ways he can understand, then passes that information to others.

To be effective, Gore does a lot of tricks. First, he has a ginormous screen (I learned this adjective from Lance). It is frickin huge. And wide! Really, really wide. It's basically a screen for a wide film.

Second, he uses his graphs effectively. Rather than, say, have a graph that's stuck on the screen, he has it slowly animate left to right so you can clearly see the trend. But it's far more effective as an animation.

He pulls out interesting videos, from a Simpson's clip, to rarely scene footage of the Earth rotating as one of the Voyager (or was it Pioneer) heads away from earth. Not only do you see this, he tells you that you are privileged to see it, as so few others have seen it. Now that's clever. You're being brought into the brotherhood (or sisterhood of the travelling pants).

Like a preacher, he hammers certain points a lot. For example, how bad is global warming. He's already shown you that carbon dioxide emissions have been going up. He shows images of ice cores from the North and South pole where they have shown that CO2 levels have never been as high as they are now, and the relative temperature differences. But he continues to repeat this point in different ways.

He shows glaciers from thirty-forty years ago that once were massive but are now tiny. He shows lakes that were once monstrous, but are now nearly gone. He shows what happens if Greenland completely melted, how it would raise world water levels high enough to flood Manhattan, much of Florida, much of the Netherlands, how fresh water injected into the Atlantic can prevent the cycle of water from circulating possibly inducing an ice age.

Over and again, he says are you skeptical? How many scientists in peer review journals say there's no global warning? None. Yet, policy makers with no training in science cross out reports because it makes them look bad. That can't possibly be the truth, right?

Gore uses humor (really!). He talks about the balance between money and global health. He shows a picture of this balance with gold on one side, and the Earth on the other. He says "mmm, mmm, mmm...gold!". It's wonderful. Love it! Gold on one side, and on the other side....the entire Earth!

At one point, he gets into a cherry picker to show you a chart that goes up and up and up. It's a dramatic way to make a point, especially on a large ass screen like the one Gore is using.

His lectures have been kept up-to-date. Despite giving this talk, by his estimation, a thousand times, he has scenes of Katrina, and numbers that show typhoons and hurricanes are at an all-time high, and maybe events like Katrina are not rarities but a direct cause of global warming. That's powerful stuff. Our everyday actions of going to and from work of just living don't seem like much when compared to the entire Earth, and what about those developing countries? Aren't they far more polluting than we are? Gore doesn't simply recycle his old talk. If there's something relevant right now, he adds it to his presentation.

But the kicker is this. It seems like we're doomed from his talk. How can we possibly do anything that matters to fix problems. Yet, he says we can. Perhaps the least effective political stance you can take, but one has the impact to change the Earth. It makes other concerns seem petty. And, yet, it doesn't. There are companies that would rather destroy the Earth to make an extra buck. They deny it's happening, and as long as their isn't conclusive proof, it's time to make money.

It's true, Gore isn't going to delve into heavy science and solve equations, and that his lecture is to stir people to action, but isn't that what the best lectures do?

If you want to learn something about lecturing, sit and analyze what he does to present the material.

(To be fair, this is a presentation, and the drama works because he doesn't take any questions, something I wouldn't advocate. But it works more dramatically if he simply presents everything).

RSSing again

I've decided to use an RSS feed thingy again. I used Bloglines last time, but couldn't really deal with it. However, now that I visit enough sites, I'm giving it another try.

I'll tell you why I don't like using RSS feed aggregators, in genral. Each website displays its content in its own distinctive way. I've gotten used to that. When I go the washingtonpost.com I know what I expect to see, how I expect the layout to look. RSS feed aggregators only work with text, so every website I see looks exactly the same.

Another thing I like about visiting a website is that the content doesn't disappear. News aggregators tend to favor reacting to what's there right now. For example, suppose I look at the RSS feed for Washington Post. There's ten articles. I glance at one of them. I leave. Oh, but now it thinks I've read everything. Well, I haven't. Real websites don't make their content disappear like this.

They should follow a model that's closer to reddit, where I can check things per RSS entry. Either yes, I've read it, no I haven't, or I don't care to read it. If I don't check it, then it should be there next time I visit.

RSS aggregators base their behavior on news readers which tend to behave the same way. This may work well for many, but it doesn't work well for me.

I may have to go around and try a bunch of them, or just do what I normally do, which is to visit site after site.

Oh yeah, I tried rojo. What a mess. It puts all the subscriptions together in one big mess. There's no obvious sense that I have clearly decided to subscribe to different things. I added, for example, Joel on Software. Where was the tab for that feed? Missing. Thanks guys.

Of course, most of these places have no obvious documentation. This has become the wave of the now. In the past, few things needed documentation because the operations didn't change a whole lot. An iron basically behaved the same way, regardless of where you got it from. Software, of course, must offer you a hundred undocumented variations, forcing you to go around and tinker and ask "Why the hell did they add this feature? What made them think that I wanted it to do that? Why is an obvious feature missing?"

I've just downloaded Omea, which is a desktop reader. It looks OK. It vaguely resembles Outlook, which could be worse. So far, it looks the best, which is sad, because it means I've grown accustomed to how Outlook does things.

I'm going to check out this other photo website, and see how I like it.

(This, too, I find irritating. There's now so many websites that I have to investigate to see which one I like. It's a pain, I tell you).

Monster's Balls

Ah, viral videos. These are the videos that go around when one person thinks "that's a cool video, someone else ought to see this". Before the Google video and You Tube and now its myriad gaggle of imitators came around, people would send around jokes. Now they send viral videos. It's rather amazing how fast they go around.

There was a video going around by a guy named Chris Bliss, juggling to a Beatles song. It doesn't hurt that the audience is amazed at what he's doing.

But ask yourself, when's the last time you watched juggling seriously? You probably think of clowns juggling three balls.

I'm odd in this way. My brother is really into juggling, and even though I never caught the bug, he'd bring home DVDs of people at juggling festivals. So I know what good juggling looks like.

What Chris Bliss does is to move his body, especially his head, in this jerky fashion, which is a bit unusual. It's not that Bliss is a bad juggler--it's just that there are people who can do so much more. The first clue that should tip you off his how many balls he's juggling, which is 3.

Until you get to about 5 balls, you're not even in the neighborhood of good juggling. To be fair, he makes 3 balls look quite good, but mostly with rhythm, not with complexity of moves. I was watching the various videos by Dan Lucal, most of them are his humor routines. However, he has a few juggling routines, and he's up around 5 balls.

Really good jugglers do at least 6, and sometimes 7. The record is 12, but that's with very few catches. As you go up in number, it can be difficult to control it for long periods of time. At 6 or 7, jugglers can go a moderate amount of time without dropping. Above that and it's rather incredible to keep it going for even 100 throws. The number of balls really makes it difficult.

Occasionally, jugglers come up with ways to juggle that are innovative. They may not be that hard with practice, but just the insight to think of this kind of juggling is amazing. For example, here's a guy who's juggling inside a cone. It looks positively weird. It is tough? I don't know. Maybe it isn't. But it took a warped mind to think of it.



Here's Jason Garfield's response to Chris Bliss's juggling. He choreographs it to the same music, indeed the same recording of music, that Chris uses, even to the audience cheer. The key to notice is that he uses five balls, and that he has more variety in the kinds of tosses he makes.



His moves are a bit more standard for a juggler, a bit like watching cheerleaders dance, it's not nearly like watching a dancer dance, the same can be said for a juggler doing routines. Another analogy is watching ice dancers dance and ballroom dancers dance. Ice dancers are skating. This limits what they can do in terms of dance moves. Ballroom dancers have rigid bodies and smile like synchronized swimmers. It's somehow very artificial looking, but extremely stylized and distinctive, and that distinctiveness makes it look different from most people who dance.

In effect, Bliss's choreography is not exactly in the juggling but in his body and arm movements, which are not exactly typical of jugglers.

It's funny how top jugglers are offended by Bliss, perhaps like top jazz musicians can't stand Kenny G (to be fair, he doesn't claim to play jazz).

You Can Call Me Al

Sometimes there's a power in documentaries that you just don't get in fictional films. Earlier in the day on Saturday, I decided to watch X-Men, one of the few blockbusters I had wanted to see, though with no great urgency.

Let me quickly review that. While it was basically enjoyable, I couldn't get into the main love story of Phoenix going nuts and Wolverine trying to save her. Perhaps, like so many comics, the X-men movie tries to juggle a myriad of plots. To its credit, it's not hard to fall all of its strands, but it does dilute the story.

The main plot(s) involve a "cure" for mutants, which, upon further reflection, seems idiotic. What would the "cure" for being human be? Stop talking? Stop walking? It makes it all the more obvious that being a mutant is being human plus some super-power, most of whom, except possibly Rogue, seem rather beneficial/cool.

It reminded me of the commercial that pokes fun at this where a plain guy has been asked to join a super force, and the rest of the team is skeptical, wondering what superpowers the guy has. He can't do a bunch of things, but he is able to create a bottle of beer out of thin air (too bad I can't remember which one). The rest of the team is awed, and one of them asks to be his roommate.

On top of this is Jean Grey who's apparently got a split personality, Ice Man who seems to have a thing for Kitty Pride, while Rogue is jealous and wants to be human, this guy named Worthington, who's son is mutant named Angel (and despite the ads, is a virtual non-character), who is trying to cure the mutants, the legal wranglings of Beast (voiced by Kelsey Grammar).

I've always found it peculiar how everyone goes on their daily lives with mutants so powerful, and the military somehow, without fear, decides it can combat the mutants effectively. I suppose they don't like the idea of mutants as leaders, and posit that mutants, with their awesome powers would simply sit aside most of the time, while the military plots to contain them.

Ah, so the cure is this kid, who can take away mutant powers. You'd think this would lead to a Phoenix-kid showdown, but the kid's far too bland for that, especially when the story demands Wolverine take the lead.

Overall, fun, but hard to buy the main scene of Wolverine wanting to do what he does out of love.

OK, let's get back to Al Gore's documentary.

Al Gore was a representative in Tennessee for eight years from 1976 to 1984. He became senator in 1984 and stayed there until he was selected as Vice President by Clinton in 1992.

Gore's dad had been senator of Tennessee. His dad was quite a bit more liberal than the son, opposing the Vietnam War. His dad was eventually voted out of office when it was felt that he was not serving the state's needs. Indeed, Gore, Sr. perhaps felt he was more senator of the country, than of Tennessee, even though he lived several months of the year in Tennessee.

This had a profound effect on Gore, Jr. His politics moved somewhat towards the center, as did various Democrats when Republicans were able to make one key idea stick: liberalism equals wimps (similarly, feminism equals lesbian nazis).

The South is a funny place. For a long time, it voted Democrat, but that's because they were hard hit by the Depression. Heck, they were hard hit by the Civil War. Due to the agragrian economy, they didn't reap as much as the north in the industrial revolution. When FDR paid for plenty of programs to restore the South, many were grateful, and voted Democrat for many years to come, essentially between the 40s until 1980.

Ironically, it may be Jimmy Carter that eventually turned the tide in the South. The United States had been reeling from the Watergate scandals of Nixon. Carter, a darkhorse, had appeal because he promised he'd never lie to the American people, and that appeal seemed to resonate.

Carter, a man of the South, was also a born-again Christian, a phenomenon that was practically unknown to the media at large, who were generally, rather secular. Not only did voters vote for Carter because he was from the South, but because he shared religious views of many Southerners.

But Carter was unusual. He was a liberal. Being religious often means conservatism. Not rocking the boat. Listening to elders. Liking things the way they are. Carter, being a liberal, supported the right for women to choose. This did not line up with the way born-again Christians thought.

When Carter's popularity plummeted with rising oil prices and the relentless pounding of the media about American hostages taken by Iran, which was on the news the entire last year he was in office, and the failed rescue mission due to weather and equipment problems, Carter was seen as a failure, even as many things were out of his control. Americans wanted to see a powerful President willing to show the United States was powerful, and it was Reagan that gave them this image.

Indeed, the image Carter was portraying of the South was something the prideful Southerners didn't care for. Reagan was able to adopt an image that was perhaps entirely fabricated. He would be the cowboy, wearing a hat, being a ranch hand, even as his background was in sports, in sports radio, and acting. It was a myth foisted on the public, and they bought it.

Those Christian conservatives, who decided Carter represented them badly, were ready to go to a party who's values seemed to match their own, and the backlash meant the South moved closer to voting Republican, at least, with enough numbers that Democrats could no longer count on a solid Southern block.

It's during this era that Gore was representative and then senator, and he was one of the centrists like Clinton. But unlike Clinton, Gore had one issue that's always meant a lot to him, and to understand that is to look at his background.

Gore has always been fascinated by science and technology. Famous for saying he had invented the Internet (more likely, he had been involved in government funding related to the Internet). Gore spent much of his life in Washington, DC. living in a hotel as his dad served in the Senate. Although he spent some part of his life in the South, perhaps, like his dad, he saw himself of the nation, not of Tennessee, even though he learned the lesson from his dad, that you need to talk to the people, to create the image that you care about their needs.

Even before Gore was Vice-President, he championed the cause of global warming. Even for a Democrat, this is not a topic that's easy to support. It is so forward-looking as to be difficult for rich and poor alike to support. The poor want services provided to them, or to be left alone (or to be given protection, like farmers).

An Inconvenient Truth is partly the presentation Gore presents during his tour, partly his own history, growing up with a Senator for a dad, having to deal with the near death of his son, and the death of his sister due to lung cancer. Gore had been criticized for mining these tragedies for political clout, and to be fair, these two stories are toned down.

If Gore has learned lessons from running for President (twice), it's to be more relaxed talking to people. His shrill urgency in the 2000 campaign should have been the more relaxed persona he was giving, to show that he was calm, cool, in charge, and that Bush was hardly prepared to be President.

Many people see this documentary for its subtext, for the rehabilitation of Al Gore, and it's hard not to see that that's what the documentary is about, and yet, it's fascinating enough as plain old text.

Gore wants to save the planet, and he's doing it by trying to convince people to join in. How many politicians do this? I mean, seriously. There are green candidates, but none with the kind of clout Gore has.

One thing about Gore and Clinton. Both were bright men. Clinton was likeable, but simply could not control his libido. His relationship with Hillary must be one of the oddest marriages in political history, although they are certainly, I'm sure, far from the oddest at all.

Gore, by contrast, should have had all the benefits of Clinton and none of his baggage. Gore is smart. He's loyal to his wife. His wife tackled a rather conservative issue of warning labels on CDs. They have lovely daughters. He doesn't have a Monica Lewinsky issue ever. He had even been voted for quite often in his own state of Tennessee.

But Tennessee is odd. It flip flops. One year, it votes moderate Republican Lamar Alexander when he walks across the state and shows he's a man of the people (when he ran for President, trying the same tactic, he was seen as a poseur, as a gentleman trying to dress up in local duds), and then votes for jolly Ned McWherter, a Democrat.

One year they have two Democratic senators in Jim Sasser and Al Gore. Another, they have two Republican senators in Bill Frist and Fred Thompson. The Republicans pulled a neat trick there, being able to use the flip flop nature to push Gore's own state away from him. This was partly Gore's fault, but partly the fault of the Democratic party which didn't take this into consideration. Tennessee in the Gore column would have meant that Gore would be President, not Bush.

While Gore was Vice President, he kept a moderately low profile for these issues, although he did write a book called Earth in the Balance just before becoming Vice-President, where he put his views on global warning in a book. He kept mostly quiet about this issue for many years as it wasn't great political capital to spend on this issue.

Once he decided not to run for President in 2004, he continued on with his tour.

But let's look at what Gore presents. Ignore all the stuff about why he made the film, whether he had ulterior motives. This is a fascinating topic, truly made all the more fascinating because this should be political Kryptonite. Gore must present science in a way that should portend gloom and doom, and do it in a convincing enough way to get people to change.

How many politicians (even Kennedy), truly ask the people to be the best they can be? Most are plenty satisfied telling people to live the way they want. Work hard, play hard, spend, spend, spend.

If you want to see it in another subtext, look at Gore's lecture as a lesson in how to lecture. How do you present information in a way that makes sense, that makes it urgent to those listening. The director is careful however, not to simply make it a lecture, even as that would be fascinating unto itself. People just don't want to be lectured to in a movie theater.

He crosscuts the lecture with Gore commenting on the issue, with Gore pondering, with him on one endless journey in the airport after another, and yes, he is made more human, as you're drawn into this cautionary tale, and wonder if Gore is reporting this accurately, we're going to be in trouble.

He keeps the material topical by referring to modern disasters such as Katrina. I defy that there's any politician at the level of Gore that is doing what he's doing. He's one of the few that's daring to tackle a subject that is as grand as human survival itself. Name one other politician willing to do this.

You can see the documentary in at least three ways. First, as a lesson on global warning. Second, as a lesson on how to give a good presentation. Third, as insight to Al Gore, and a rehabilitation vehicle. I believe the film stands on its own for the first two, that to read too much into the last is a disservice as a review.

Heck's

Hecht's does this weird thing. They tend to price things a bit too high, but make everything on sale. There's that old saying "it's not how much you spend, it's how much you save". Hecht's must be founded on this philosophy. Things are either on sale or really on sale.

I wanted to get an electric toothbrush since Justin recently got one. Of course, Justin got his for free. I was going to get a fancy one. The one I got was originally priced at 80 bucks, but I got it 60% off. Now, I don't believe it cost 80 bucks, and indeed, it looks like it may be discontinued. It was wrapped in this unforgiveable mess of a box, but it was cheap. I may buy the cheaper one for 20 bucks (after the discount).

The problem was trying to get the discount. I got in line and it wasn't moving. Hey folks, if you have stuff to return, then there should be a special line, because you guys take forever. And when there's a line, cashiers, call someone else to help out.

Fortunately, I'm a patient guy. I did walk to the cashier at the linens section, and they tried to scan in the product (no luck) and kept entering the bar code and having to log in a few times, before saying they couldn't take the discount (which oddly wasn't in their system, though it was 60 bucks when they typed it in, 20 dollars off the alleged price, and probably close to its true sell value). I walked back, and got in the other line, near where the product was being sold.

A woman was trying to get a refund on picture frames with no receipt, and that was talking forever. Then, another woman wanted to see if she could get a Kitchen Aid mixer on sale, even though none were out, and she wanted the guy to call up one of Hecht's sister site. Meanwhile, another two cashiers finally showed up.

The sale, again, failed to register on the machine, so I had to walk the cashier to the discount, and then he punched it in. I also wanted to get a silicon spatula, originally priced, I think, at 14 bucks. But alas, it had no barcode on it, so the guy had no idea what price it was. He eventually grabbed a random spatula and sold it to me for probably less than it was worth.

Let's just say the quality of service and the quality of setup seemed all messed up.

That seemed to be the theme of the day. I went to watch X-Men, which I'll blog on later about, and was going to get diet coke. I know. Don't buy food or drink at a movie theater. It's a ripoff. I'm a weak guy. What can I say?

Now, I had been standing in a line beside another buy who wanted diet coke too, but he had been told that there was no carbonation left, and he should get a bottled version instead. I decided to pretend I didn't hear this discussion and order it anyway. As they started to fill the cup, the guy got mildly upset, because clearly the diet coke was carbonated and working.

Ah, so most of the people helping out were these high school types. I guess this qualifies as summer jobs for Montgomery county kids. They all seemed awfully young, and I thought that they thought that this was a nice enough job for a summer. I wonder what they thought about the older guy (who was probably in his 20s) who was doing this for a real living. Did they think "poor guy"? Maybe not. But I'm sure none of them thought this would be a permanent career option for them.

By the way, for as much as they put Angel in the previews for the X-men, he's barely a character.

I just went to check IMDB for Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart's heights. Turns out they're both right around 5'10". Films do not like to have people with significantly different heights. They don't want a guy who's 5'7" hanging out with someone 6'5". This was something I looked up for Dallas 362 where IMDB reports Scott Caan's height at 5'6", while his co-star was 4 inches taller, though they show them as comparable height in the film.

Anyway, I think I'll take my toothbrush home and let it recharge.

New York, New York

Did they finally fix up Blogger so that it would use the rich syntax highlighting that was missing like forever?

I'm typing my first blog on my new Macbook. It's pretty sweet, though the laptop is heavier than I expected. I suppose it's not so bad that it's sitting on my lap. I just got in on Friday, but due to me rushing off to the Jonathan Coulton music thing Friday night, then having to wake up and head to the Amtrak to catch a (rather expensive) train ride up to NYC, then having dinner at a Southern style "soul food" restaurant where I ate pig's feet (turns out I used to eat this as a kid, Chinese style--who would have thought this was a Southern delicacy?).

Two things. Pig's feet are a pain to eat. It's like cartilage or fat wrapped around unseemly bone. There's just no polite way to eat it. Second, you probably couldn't convince a non-Southerner (or non-Chinese, since we'll eat anything) to come within ten feet of this concoction. It's probably repellent enough to ward away all but the most brave.

I wasn't able to set up my Macbook until I reached New York, and then, not until Sunday, the second day I was there. I'm now completing this entry a week later, which is unusual, because I often don't get back to doing this stuff ever.

Sunday was spent walking all around eternity. To be honest, I have no idea where I was in NYC most of the times. I was on the subway. I was on the bus. I was walking. We passed by H&H, which is apparently the most famous bagelry in NYC. We were walking around Chinatown, SoHo, the upper West side.

Although I joked about going there, we did not go to the Statue of Liberty. And apparently, we weren't near the former site of the twin towers. I was apparently in the subway underneath Fog Creek somewhere.

One of the first things I noticed about the subways in New York is that it's far more cramped than DC. When you get off the subway, you could almost fall forward and hit the wall--that's how close up they are. The walls have these tile like patterns that resemble tidier tiles than bathroom tiles. Subways also reek of urine, though not as bad as some places I've been.

Because New York is bigger and the subway system older, their subway system is correspondingly bigger, and, to me, not as well laid out as the DC Metro. However, they do have express trains, which would be nice in DC.

For whatever reason, subways in NYC also have musicians and performers where DC metro does not, at least, not inside. There may be a few hanging outside the MCI, er Verizon, Center, but not within the facility itself.

Most people seem to use a Metro card, which is this thin flimsy plastic thing. Unlike the DC metro, the NYC subway is one fare to all destinations, payable on entry. That's neat too, as I find waiting in line to exit something of a pain.

The nice thing about Chinatown is how cheap the stuff is. I suppose you'd go there to get two things: Peking duck and pork buns. But we didn't get the duck, but did get the buns. As 85 cents, they're cheap. Throughout Chinatown, there are people outside hawking their goods. I don't know if I've ever seen lychee that often, nor people willing to paint my name (which I didn't get done) in Chinese-style calligraphy.

I also went to Dean and DeLuca for the first time where I had beef stew, some kind of knish, and some kind of diet cherry soda. I know, some combination. I also had iced coffee.

On the Saturday, (the day before all this walking), before Saturday night soul food, I ate at an Italian deli, where New York rudeness was at hand. I wanted ice coffee, and they asked how I wanted it. This is odd. Every other place would give me ice coffee, and I'd figure out what to do with it. The woman wanted me to decide between cream and milk, sugar and sugar substitute. Rather than say it in a cherry voice, she, of course, had to be pissed off. New York impatience is heralded throughout, and you know what, these people don't care.

That evening, we went to the soul food place where I had pig's feet, as I mentioned before, as well as collard greens and macaroni. Not exactly healthy food, but that's fine.

I had wanted to go to the Apple Store, which had just opened up in NYC. It stays open 24 hours a day. I had thought about getting a backpack there, but once we got there, even though it looked significantly cool (the cube structure and the floating white apple), the actual store was eh.

Really, what the NYC Apple Store ought to do, though they'd be so deluged, is to discount stuff, say, between the hours of 1-3 AM by 20%. Heck, if they always discounted it around the clock, people would really pile in there, and it would make it a kind of mini-Mecca, as the place to go if you want to buy your Apple stuff cheap. But no, it cost the same there as any other Apple store.

I was disappointed with the backpack selection. They could have had more to pick from, and had significantly less inventory than expected. We wandered inside for maybe an hour, if that.

Sunday was spent foot walking and on public transportation. Saturday was in a car. Chris drove around, and I discovered the true New York pastime which everyone participates in. No, not Yankess baseball--many folks don't care about that. Not Knicks basketball (especially not Knicks basketball). It's route planning.

Suppose I want to go to Montgomery Mall, which is just outside DC. I'd take the beltway, then up 270, on Democracy, and voila, I'm there. I'm not sure there are many variations that are worth their while.

However, in New York, there are plenty of ways to get where you want to go. Since it's so large, most people don't remember optimal paths, so any time there's more than two New Yorkers in the same car, there has to be prodigious discussion about how best to get where you're going. You can cut across that street and head down. No, you can come under. No, I was planning on going this other way, doesn't that work?

I had hoped to get to Fog Creek on Monday, but Monday was Memorial Day, and just as I had it off, so did the Fog Creek cognoscenti. Maybe that was a good thing as I would have had to decipher the train system or something to get there and get back.

I had wanted to go to a real coffeehouse, but alas, the closest thing was Starbuck's at a Barnes and Noble. That's culture in the Bronx for you. Even there, every seat was taken up. These places assume that people will share a spot but most people were set up one to a table, and planning to sit for a while. We headed back to Chris's which was good as I forgot to pick up the bagels (there's bad news about that--I forgot to eat it, and had to get rid of it---sad).

Didn't do much on Monday except talk, mostly about ideas about how to go teaching, as Chris has said that he feels he needs to reach out to his students more, given the lack of real programming skills they seem to have, and the fear the department has in actually failing anyone.

I don't want to sound cruel, but from the sounds of it, if these kids weren't much further along, they wouldn't have real careers in programming. You need some proficiency writing loops in programming, and it's almost the equivalent of being able to dribble in basketball. These kids aren't short of making 360 windmill dunks, they're short of being able to play the game at all.

Part of the problem, it seems, is that they lack the knowledge of where they need to go. They're not used to the idea that they need to code frequently, and spend hours in front of the computer, and really, get things to work. This can be frightfully tedious. I recall one kid who said he spent twenty minutes looking for an error. Any serious coder would laugh at that, many who've spent days trying to track down a bug, only to have been on the wrong trail.

As teachers, we need to imbue a sense of what it takes to program. Some of it is time. Some of it is knowing what to look up. Some of it is reading and tracing code.

I've always thought it would be good to provide sports analogies. Gilbert Arenas is the star player for the Wizards. He's known as something of a gym rat. After games, he's often practicing an hour, two hours, or more. The biggest difference in basketball and programming is that, at some level, it's obvious what to work on. The goal (partly) is to get the ball in the basket. Sure, there's other things, like footwork, knowing the basic rules, knowing basic strategy, and so forth. Those are all important too, but it's not exactly a secret.

Take any class in programming, and you'll see how little time is spent debugging code. We just don't know how to teach it. But it's time we figure that out if students are going to be any good.

Anyway, to get the sports analogy, I'd tell students if they thought, say, Michael Jordan got as good as he did without spending hours at the basketball court. Yet, how often do they spend programming each day? It's true that new programmers need more guidance, and so we need more drills for new programmers.

I have a bunch of obvious ideas when it comes to teaching intro programming, and I suppose I should blog on it sometime.

Anyway, my train was scheduled to leave NYC at 3ish, so I was dropped off at the train station. I hadn't taken the train in maybe 6-7 years, probably since the last time I visited Chris, which was when he was at Yale. We were heading off to Alex's wedding in Toronto, and I was going to drive with him from Yale there. That was a longish drive, taking about 12 hours one way.

When I got on the train Saturday around 10:30, I had left my place at 9:30. I then thought I might miss the train. I live near one end of the Green Line, and the train sits there for quite a few minutes before leaving. It didn't move until 9:40. I could have taken a long way to get there, by staying on the Green Line for many stops, then switching to the Red. That seems absurd, but I was wondering how often the red line picks up at Fort Totten vs. the other spot I would have picked it up (most likely Metro Center).

But I figured that long way was at least 6 stops longer, so I got off at Fort Totten, and two minutes later, got on the red line. I was at Union Station at a few minutes after 10, for a 10:20 trip. At first, I thought I had to get in line, because the kiosk, which look like ATMs, appear to be for buying tickets. Turns out, you can pick them up there too. Fortunately, I asked, and a few minutes later, I picked up the tickets.

Ah, tickets.

These thing suck, especially on trains, but even airplanes. First, you get this large stub, which the ticket taker takes, and leaves you a tiny stub, which I'd imagine would be easy to lose. I'd rather have the large one.

Trains still use this old-timey way of checking tickets. For example, only when I got aboard did sorta check IDs. And then, they have this narrow slip of paper, which they punch a hole out of, and place in the metal wedge just above where I'm seated. The slip of paper has a bunch of three letter codes, that I have to guess at. Apparently, on the way up, RYE, refers to New Rochelle, despite not having a "Y".

I'm surprised what an outdated system they use.

First, the tickets use same sized fonts. This means the train you get on is written as some other useless information.

There's two pieces of information you need. When to get on the train, and which gate to get on, and I suppose the train number. These should be prominent numbers. They are not. You have to hunt and peck to finds these numbers. It's amazing they don't use a nicer printed that can put important things in big print.

They should have a bar code scanner for these things too. And they should ditch the slip of paper. Instead, they should scan your ticket, which should then print up a new slip, with your name and destination on it.

The only nice thing about taking the train is that there's no security, so there's no long waiting. The one place we had to wait for a while was at New York Penn Station (which is, alas, one stop from Newark Penn Station--thus, one should change their name, since it's awful...call it Newark Jersey Station, or something else, for heaven's sake).

Riding the Amtrak a second time, I realized that these are nearly as expensive as airplanes, but there are two things that make it somewhat tolerable. First, Memorial Day traffic is supposed to be bad, so I could easily add two hours to the trip if I got caught in traffic. Furthermore, I'd have to pay attention the whole time, where I could sorta sleep on the train. Second, the overheard of getting to and from the airport tends to make it more painful as it adds time that I simply don't care for.

I got back to my place around 8ish. Dave came and picked me up. Our house was hosting our annual Memorial Day cookout (something that's likely to end this year, as no one else is likely to be up for the cookout). By the time I got back, the party was sort of finishing up. It lasted maybe another hour longer, but some people were leaving, and I was kinda tired, and wanted to play a bit with my new Mac.

I don't know what I think about New York. It has a different vibe to it than DC (or more properly, DC suburbs). I can see, given the way the subway system works, why people walk so much (since all trips on the subway cost the same, it's only worth going on there when you have to go very far).

Reading Code

Most computer science departments are paranoid about copying code. The problem is that it's so easy to do it. There's now any number of ways to copy code from email to IM to ftp. There is some software to check for some kinds of cheating, but not everyone is aware of it.

It's a shame that about this paranoia because people really need to learn to read other people's code besides their own. In an English class, where a teacher would read each and every person's essay, as there is no automated way around this, catching cheating is straightforward enough. Too bad you can't convince computer science deparments to think like this, to keep the number of students down so that every person's code could be read.

Although reading code is not a new idea--some computer science teachers have been advocating this idea for a long time, there is a problem. English classes have the benefit of good writing being available and studied for a long time. In addition, critiquing writing has also been around for a long time. Those who teach writing know what to do because they were trained this way.

For a computer science department to talk about code would mean that those teaching it would need some idea of what good or bad code looks like, and that's tough. Without having a communal history of what makes good and bad code, a person is likely to criticize code that is fine, in some context, and to not know about newer idioms in writing code that may be in somewhat common use among the "best practictioners" in the field.

The solution is to start creating public repositories of code with annotations by many readers, something akin to ancient Hebrew texts that are commented on by a variety of Talmudic scholars. I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet. The quality of code should vary from very good to simply awful.

The benefit would be to make programmers more aware of aesthetics of coding.

Admittedly, there's more to coding than simple aesthetics. That's a topic I'd like to explore at some other blog entry, in particular, how testing can make you a better coder.

Captain's Log

The old fashioned way to tell what's happening to your program is write a print statement. In Java, as in C, there are two ways to print that statement. You can print it to standard output, which might buffer the output, or to standard error, which should not.

How long would it take for you to explain how System.out.println works? A few minutes? Tell a person that each object as a toString() method. If it's been overridden, it prints something reasonable. If not, it looks like a fancy pointer.

Nice and simple.

These days, people tell you that the way to write debugging statements is to use a logger. A logger may be one (typically) more classes. The most popular one in use for Java is log4j. Loggers have the notion of an appender. This is what's used to send data to the console, a file, a database, or whereever. Most people use the one built in.

A good book on loggers ought to explain why this monstrosity was invented. Most of them don't. They assume you want to use loggers and start delving into details. The writers have often used loggers for so long that they don't spend much time justifying why it is the way it is. They don't complain about how it could be better, or why this sucks or that. Instead, they figure you have to use it, so they talk about it.

There's enough people who find doing something complex rather than something simple aggravating, that a compelling case had better be made to use something that could fill up a 200 page book when only two or three pages would be needed with the system before.

log4j uses a weirdish notion of inheritance, treating "classes" as a kind of path. Thus, if you have foo.bar as some package and a class that has the package foo.bar.FunStuff and assign it a logger based on its package plus class name, it will inherit the logger attributes from foo.bar. Were you to create a package with a longer name like foo.bar.baz.AnotherClass, it can inherit from this.

In addition, the loggers use various warning levels to set filters on. log4j has something like 5 different warning levels. Which level a logger uses depends on an external file (usually) which is either a Java properties file or an XML equivalent.

Already, you can see that it's kind of messy.

I'd rather use tags to identify "loggers". Thus, when you write an output, you can have a list of tags like database or gui or some such. The output would then listen for the tags. Thus, you could have a console output that listens for gui and only prints that out. I might jettison warning levels and use well-known tags instead.

One of the more hideous features of log4j that defies explanation is the addivity feature. If you don't set it to false, your root logger will often print certain things twice. Books have to explain how to get rid of this, which ought to indicate something is wrong.

One of these days they should have something better than these loggers. They attempt to solve a problem, but the overhead seems unimaginably crazy, and when you explain it to someone who's only ever used simple print statements, they're likely to cringe at this overengineered solution.

Alas, like Ant, everyone uses this in Java, so we're left to deal with this, or be seen as hopelessly simple-minded.

Mark Twain

Say the name Mark Cuban to any sports fan and you'll hear he's the loudmouth owner of the Dallas Mavericks. He's the John McEnroe of NBA owners, complaining about officiating. He made his fortune through the dot com bubble, and now he has a team. He's the most visible owner in the NBA, by far.

Cuban made his fortune in the dot com era and thus he knows something about the computing industry. Indeed, he blogs about it. His topics include some basketball, some stuff about sportswriters, but he also comments frequently about the web economy, making it fascinating to follow even for people who don't care anything about basketball.

The amazing thing is when he finds the time to blog so regularly. Presumably, being a wealthy owner opens up time, as he may or may not have a regular job. I was going to say that he's the only owner in the NBA that's as savvy in a second area, but I forgot that Paul Allen, former cofounder of Microsoft owns the Portland Trailblazers, but he keeps a very low profile. You rarely hear his name in the news, where Cuban seems to relish the limelight.

Take a look at the blog. It's worth a few minutes to hear his ideas.

Candid Camera

I've been thinking of getting a new digital camera, even though I don't really need one. I've bought three so far. My first was a Minolta that my friend Justin picked up for me from Japan. It was red, had a periscope-like lens, and was fairly cool in a number of ways. Alas, Minolta is ditching their line of cameras, and favoring their copiers. The digital camera market is really really crowded.

This camera was a tiny, tiny camera, small enough that I could carry it everywhere. I didn't appreciate this although Justin had said a small camera would mean I could actually take more pictures. I remember I used to have a Nikon 2020 then eventually a Nikon 8008. These were huge beasts and you had to remember to bring it with you everywhere. They took nice pix, but really, I would only use them once or twice a year, say, to graduaations. I just didn't use them all that often.

With the Minolta, I brought it everywhere, and took pictures whereever. It was convenient.

I bought two more cameras, Canons, both of them. Canons appear to be the most popular camera line. Even though Canon and Nikon duked it out in the SLR market, with Minolta and Olympus way behind, and the German brands (Hasselblad, Leica) far too expensive for the average enthusiast, the digital camera market brought lots of companies that were never into cameras.

Kodak, never a serious SLR contender, decided to join the fray. But so did Casio (who make watches and calculators), Panasonic, Sony. There are probably easily tweny different companies making cameras, cranking out one camera after the next.

They mostly divide into two categories: ultra small and full-featured. Even the full-featured divide into lots of manual features and SLR-replacements which can be several thousand dollars (well, two).

I bought an A-80, which is 5 MP, and at the time, one of the top-of-the-line in the "A" series of Canon cameras. But it's too large too conveniently carry. I just don't use it nearly at all. I also bought an SD-200, which is now really at the bottom of the SD line. It's 3.2 MP. These days, 5 MP and 6 MP are becoming increasingly common, and at a price that you used to pay for 3 MP cameras.

I've learned MP aren't critical. They eat up memory, and I don't need fantastic quality. Still, as the numbers creep up, I'm tempted to move up to 5 MP.

Here are the features that I like and dislike since using the Canon SD-200.

• I don't like Canon's focus light. This bright orange light is a pain.
  
• I like that Canon is popular. I can find replacement parts easily enough.
  
• I like Canon's large display screen. The Minolta was tiny, and one reason
  I changed.
  
• I dislike Canon's inability to remember the flash setting when I turn on and
  off. My Minolta would remember I didn't want flash.
  
• I like Canon's ruggedness.
  
• The battery life could be better.
  
• I like tiny cameras.
  

I'm thinking of getting a Casio EX-Z600. Alas, it's missing a viewfinder, although many cameras are now ditching this feature, as few people use it (it's good if it's really sunny, and there's a lot of glare on the screen). It's price range is decent (under $300) but I need to see what features it does and doesn't have, and really ask if I want yet another camera or not.