The Prisoner

When I was in high school, I knew this girl, a year older than me, named Janet. Janet's family was over-achieving. Her brother had been one of the top finalists in the Westinghouse science competition (now Intel sponsors it). Their whole family had gone to Princeton (dad, all the kids). For a year or so, she and her family had lived in Massachusetts, then came back to Tennessee.

Our high school, unlike some nearby high schools, lacked a debate class and debate teams. (The following edited for clarity, as per Al's suggestion). When Janet returned, she helped organize a debate club, where she was president. As she was the only one who knew any debate, this made sense. That is also made sense that she probably started the club to pad her college applications wasn't so clear to me then, but makes some sense to me now. At the time, I saw it as an opportunity to learn to debate, learn to speak in public. I was awful at both.

High school debate has been around a long time, and so typically, former debaters teach these courses and field teams for competitions. These are "real" debates. While presidential debates are hardly anything of the sort (they are Q&A sessions, with liberal amounts of spin thrown for ill measure) often relying on emotion rather than reason, these debates favor sounder forms of reasoning.

The format is this. Each year, a topic is picked. Students then research the heck out of them. Books with plenty of facts are made available. Budding lawyers see this as a kind of training for a future career (mock trials fit in this category too). Typically, two people to a team. Two argue for the topic, two against. There's a time limit to present an argument, present a rebut, present a rebut to the rebut, and once more. Then, both sides present closing arguments.

Since the format is timed, debaters sometimes learn to "spread", which is to speak awfully fast, a la Jon Moschita (he used to do the FedEx commercials).

I had forgotten this, since it was so many years ago. I can't say I was even a good debater, because I was pretty nervous speaking, and couldn't produce cogent arguments on the fly. Even so, I thought it would help me with speaking (it didn't).

Rocket Science is a film that's loosely about debate, though it feels more like a Wes Anderson film. While comparisons have been drawn to Election about an ambitious girl who needs to be class president, and the civics teacher who opposes everything this girl stands for, Rocket Science is not that malicious.

Indeed, it's a kind of fantasy, about a painfully shy guy, who stutters, whose mom kicks out his dad, then begins dating a Korean American judge (the Asians are a bit too caricatured for my tastes, but it does show the diversity of our society). Ginny is the object of his affection, a debater whose successful partner suddenly freezes one day (diversity rears its head, as the opposing debate team's male representative is Indian American) during the debate championships, and she seeks, in this repressed kid, a new partner, perhaps serving as Professor Higgins to Hal (the pressed kid) as Eliza.

Much like Wes Anderson, music plays a big role in this film, as do Hal's awkward moments (exaggerated to effect).

And I'd have a full review had the bulb not been dying, and the theater manager come in to say he'd have to replace this hot, hot bulb, requiring at least 45 minutes to cool before it could be replaced.

And why was I watching this movie?

I had wanted to see it, of course, but I hadn't expected to see it then. I was being held prisoner by the car dealership. Not exactly literally, but close enough. I was in for routine servicing, which means they were not only going to charge an arm and a leg, but also ask if you wouldn't mind giving up vital organs while you were at it. I'm sure, somewhere by my name, is the word "Sucker", as in, offer any expensive service, because this guy will take it.

And I end up taking it because I think that any time I spend in preventive care is better than dealing with it unexpectedly in the shop.

But everyone knows the dealer charges at least 50% more than a regular mechanic, if not more. Odd that they have five people up front, who seem perpetually busy, but doing what? They don't repair a thing. They are there to essentially convince you to get more servicing. And man, do they always seem busy for a job that shouldn't require that much inattention to customers.

They have little incentive to do what's in your best interest, but at least they aren't so egregiously awful as to recommend everything under the sun.

And yet, because I don't really want to find another mechanic to do fixing, I let them do the work.

And even though I came in at 7:30 and figured I could be out by maybe 9, I had to stay til noon. Amazingly ridiculous. The only saving grace is that it's right in downtown Bethesda, and there are other things to do in the meantime.

Including watching Rocket Science.

Right now, I'd have to say car dealerships are down there with, I dunno, torturers? as the least desirable people on the face of the Earth. I would love if the government would send in people to get car repairs and for every useless repair, the mechanic would get fined. Indeed, I think people should go through someone that does diagnosis (much like a doctor) and someone else that does the repair.

It's honestly too bad that places like Honda and such who could do a lot to make the experience nice and honest, simply does what everyone else does, which is to take their money due to their ignorance.

The Law of Desire

In the deceptive trailer of Primer, you are lead to believe that the main characters have created a wish fulfillment device. They ask "what is truly wanted"? Power, wealth, reputation. Hidden in this is a time travel story, one so low-key and low-tech, to focus on the vices of man once he discovers he can travel back and change things.

Once I moved on my own, which has been a few weeks, I began asking those questions, though in a more mundane way. Before discussing how I answered those questions, I am reminded of a friend, who, with his roommate, decided to purchase the house he had been formerly renting (an unusual setup, to be sure). Up until then, he hadn't done anything too special with the place. They didn't own it.

Something about owning your own place drives some to improve it. Something about not owning it makes you decide there's no reason to improve it. Once he had the place, they started sprucing up the place, trying to decide how to make it better. Even though this would involve both effort and money, it was their place, and it was worth it, if for no other reason than to increase its resale value, thus balancing a desire for more with a pragmatic desire to see it as an investment.

Until recently, I had always had roommates, which is really to say, I had housemates/apartmentmates, because I haven't had to share a room for over ten years. And they always had dishes and utensils and furniture, so I rarely needed it for myself.

Once I had my own place, I realized I lacked a lot of simple things. I had no dishes. I had no utensils. I had few cups. I didn't have a garbage can. And once I realized I didn't have those things, I began to wonder what I needed. For example, my friend suggested that I definitely had to hang my LCD TV off the wall. It wasn't a regular TV anymore. Hang it up!

Of course, my thought was "Will the wall support it? What if my expensive TV fell down and cracked?". And, even before that, I had to make a decision, did I want a better TV? What made a better TV? I used to have a TV, but got rid of it, and so I didn't even have a television. However, without one, my DVD player would lie mostly useless, as would my Wii.

And a garbage can. Should I get a plain Jane one? There are ones that are cheap, but they don't have a cover. Or I could really shell out bucks for the Simple Human cans that cost like a hundred bucks. They look great. They cost a lot for holding garbage. Should I care?

What is wanted? And more importantly, why?

We live in a culture where we rarely question why we want, only what we want. Ask people to take Buddhist ideals, and you find that it's too tough for many to say no. When we're young, we want food, we want sweets. I saw a mother and daughter having a discussion. The daughter wanted this or that, and even (despite her age) questioned why her mom wanted this or that. As kids, we desire. As parents, we try to reign in kid's desires, even as parents themselves desire too.

Of course, when basics needs, food, shelter, water, all require money, then we're already spending that on "essentials", so why not spend more on things that make us happy? And companies, of course, thrive on convincing us we need stuff to make us happy.

And this is so ingrained, that I still think about what next to purchase.

Still.

Club Players

Our family used to get Tennis magazine when we were kids. This used to be the tennis magazine, though tennis, unlike, say, football, encouraged its readers to play.

In particular, there would be regular segments where American players, like Tony Trabert or Stan Smith, would offer advice to play better tennis. Despite the tennis boom of the 70s, which encouraged the average person to play tennis (up til then, most people had thought of tennis as a sport of the rich), advice was always aimed at the "club player".

At the time, being young, I thought club player meant "not-so-good player", which was partly true, but still reflected the fact that a real tennis pro would still often make additional money on the side teaching people at special camps, for folks who joined clubs, i.e., people who were rich. And why not? Was Tony Trabert and Stan Smith likely to teach kids for free at a public court?

You have to realize that while rich people played tennis, tennis players weren't rich until the mid-70s and really until the 80s when a top player could make a million dollars a year. Players from the 60s and before were amateurs, and pro careers consisted of exhibitions. The Open Era finally moved the big tournaments like Wimbledon to pay pros to play, which meant you could make a living playing tennis, and a pretty good one at that.

Indeed, so good, that top players never have to interact with the average "club" player to make money, so good is the money you make from endorsements alone (at least, at the top ranks).

Thus, while club players meant "players that weren't that good, that weren't pros", it's implied, even in the 70s, that this was the typical tennis player, someone rich, someone who could afford club fees. Even by the 70s, this was no longer the picture the average tennis player in the US, and it was something the editors of Tennis magazine should have realized.

By the way, Tennis magazine was oddly disconnected from the pro game. The publishing schedule typically meant the magazine was printed months afterwards, making any sort of timely reviews untenable. Worse, they probably couldn't even send a reporter to write meaningful reviews of a tournament. Even big tournaments like the US Open merely had previews. The reviews were a pale comparison to Sports Illustrated. You might imagine that they could do really heavy in-depth interviews, exposing people to new players, and so forth.

Not really. The magazine probably could only afford one reporter who probably spent time schmoozing with the players, and not really paying close attention to the tournament that they were allegedly covering. Even now, I doubt the magazine has improved that much.

Pretty sad for a flagship magazine of a sport.

Fall Guy

Summer's nice. People seem happier in the summer. T-shirts replace long sleeves. Shorts replace pants. Sandals replace shoes. Time to put on shades. People head to the beach, to camping.

But summer's hot. Real hot. I like it just as you can tell summer's over. Today seemed just that kind of day. I had woken up early. 5 AM. Watched some TV. Then, I got hungry, so I decided to find a breakfast place. I knew one place, the Silver Diner, on Rockville Pike. But as I drove down, I thought of trying out The Original Pancake House.

A few years ago, I began going to diners, which usually "specialize" in breakfasts. They often have the virtue that they are open around the clock. The Original Pancake House doesn't fit in this category, as it only opens in the morning up to the early afternoon. For that matter, they aren't like Dunkin Donuts or Kripy Kreme or McDonald's or Starbucks which often open at 6, and some of these places, even earlier. They open at 7, which was good enough for me.

And being Sunday, not a work day, and a bit early for church, there were few cars on the road. It was overcast. It was a bit nippy. It felt a bit like a trip I had to San Diego last year, where it was still February, and despite being California, it was still a touch chilly.

Although I don't want every day to be overcast and cool, it's a nice feeling.

A nice feeling indeed.

Almost Movie Review: Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix

Reminder to self. Don't watch a movie when you have a headache.

Although I took some pills and had some food, and although the film had very little in camera motion, the kinda thing that gets me nauseous watching films, I had the same feelings watching the latest Harry Potter installment, which meant I only saw half the film before I left.

Too bad, because it seemed like the best of the Harry Potter films. The Harry Potter films really benefit from one idea, which is the characters age, and therefore there's the idea the characters mature. Watching, say, Star Wars, you don't get this sense at all.

In particular, you don't feel these are ten year olds, but teenagers. More than the previous films, this one puts Harry in close up, and he's angsty, isolated. Where you felt Harry, Ron, and Hermione were going to summer camp in the first film, here, Harry's just moody, and the other two don't seem to be able to figure out why.

The director handles this by isolating Harry from Hermione and Ron. I also get the sense they wanted the characters to be a touch more British than usual, pronouncing words less American.

The key character in this film is Imelda Staunton playing Dolores Umbridge in a wickedly slimy way. She smiles, but wants to put people in their places, and all you can imagine is that you wanted her blasted to bits in the worst possible way. She pushes all the buttons that kids hate, from the smug authority, to the fake smiles.

Well, I'll have to catch the rest of the film at some other time when I'm not having headaches and such, but my initial impressions was that it was the best so far (perhaps not saying much), mostly because of the evolving Harry and his maturity (or lack thereof).

Movie Review: John Tucker Must Die

While I'm getting complimentary movie channels, I get to watch films I wouldn't normally watch. One of them is John Tucker Must Die which is really an awful title for what the film is about, which is essentially a variant on Mean Girls.

Just as background, John Tucker is the star basketball player, and as such, he gets to be with any girl he wants. Played by Desperate Houswives' Jesse Metcalfe, he's every girl's fantasy, saying to each girl whatever they want to hear. Metcalfe is cast, presumably for his good looks, but also because he's not half as slimy as the character he's meant to play.

He simultaneously dates three high school girls (he's in high school too), which is noted by a fourth one who watches the action as a waitress, before she too gets involved. The three, who come different cliques (one's a head cheerleader, one's a braniac, one's a vegan), find out about one another, and plot revenge.

Despite everything they try to do (from saying he has genital herpes, to putting estrogen in his muscle builder pills, to getting him to wear a woman's thong) seems to backfire. He's clever enough to fight back from humiliation.

While the film centers around the women, especially trying to decide whether Kate, the waitress protagonist who's going to be remade by the three jilted girls to be the "perfect girl" that will dump John Tucker, is really going to fall for John Tucker or not, and whether, indeed, John Tucker is going to fall for Kate.

You have to say this film is charming without being particularly good. The girls are somewhat caricatures, coming up with a plot that no real girls would try. The lead guy is almost too oddly clever to be believable.

There's a subplot where her lab partner (is it John Tucker's brother? does it matter) has a thing for her, and you think the two might get together, but there's too much with the main plot to actually treat this seriously. There's also the subplot with the mother who dates one jerk after another, even though it's treated superficially and comically, and its primary point is for Kate to realize she's never seen a healthy relationship, and that perhaps as sensible as she thinks she is, maybe it's not been that healthy.

It's enjoyable in the way Mean Girls is enjoyable, which likable characters, but perhaps nothing much deeper than that (it's a bit more clever than other films of its ilk, but overall, not that great).

Movie Review: Die Hard

Yes, that Die Hard, not any of the several sequels, most of which are inferior to the original.

Made in 1988, a year after Lethal Weapon, this action film reflects the times it was made. Hair styles resemble those from the early 80s. But more importantly, despite its action roots, Die Hard has elements of modern America from the 80s (and the 70s, really).

In particular, John McClane is meeting up with his wife. They appear, at the very least, to be separated. She's a successful businesswoman, and he's a tough cop, who isn't thrilled with her career, nor her desire to keep her maiden name. His wife works for a Japanese multinational company, her boss being Japanese, who's portrayed as the noble boss (though he's alive for only a few minutes).

The comic relief character, who plays Holly's insufferable colleague, seems all hopped up on drugs, and plays an acquisitions guy, again, comically referring to the business of the times.

Like Lethal Weapon, African Americans play major (though not the main) roles, from Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) to Argyle (the driver) to one of the special Agent Johnsons (there are two) to Theo, who plays the computer wizard (the only terrorist that isn't killed).

Admittedly, the white and black characters are caricatured (except for a few folks, including John McClane) from the very white reporter, the drugged up business colleague, the driver, even, to some extent, the nerdy computer terrorist. In this decade, it seemed important to put African Americans in key roles in action films. I'm sure the movie industry felt they couldn't put a non-white American in a lead role, but they were perfectly happy showing interracial harmony.

Even so, while films would have African Americans playing prominent roles in big budget films, members of other ethnicities didn't ever fare that well. One clever idea that both Lethal Weapon and Die Hard both use are the sensible African American, and the crazy white guy, playing against stereotypes (say, Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours or Beverly Hills Cop).

After watching this film for the first time in a while, I realized that the relationship between John McClane and Al Powell (the cop) is practically homo-erotic. During their dialogue, Powell says he loves him (admittedly, in the way, a fan loves their fantasy football start player), and is there to support him. Powell admits a sad incident in his life (killing a kid by accident), and when McClane finally succeeds, he comes out, with Powell smiling, as if it's really Powell that McClane has been doing this for, rather than to help his wife. It's shown far more lovingly than his meeting with his wife.

There are a bunch of elements that make this film work, none the least of which is a star performance by Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. Rickman plays the slimy German terrorist (he's British, folks!) and would use that role to lead him to others (these days playing a recurring role as Snape). As much as this made Bruce Willis's career, it really vaulted (relatively speaking) Alan Rickman from nowhere.

There's a lot of clever thinking, from the way McClane and Gruber meet each other and Gruber pretends to be an American, then reads a name off a directory, and eventually is handed an unloaded gun.

Sure, the action sequences are a bit much, but it's pretty clever, much like Goldfinger's fiendishly clever idea (to make the gold unusable in Fort Knox, so that it raises the value of the rest of the gold). In this case, Gruber wants to steal money while making it seem like a terrorist act (an idea that would become more relevant some 13 years later).

There's no sense that the Gruber is going to be completely evil (most films like bad guys who is not only bad, but completely devoid of any sense of fairness). He appears as if he's perfectly willing to split the loot (even as many of his sidekicks get killed off).

And perhaps one of the better ideas is the idea of John McClane as the action hero everyman, who tries to do his best, given the circumstances. Given his superhero survival abilities, there's always a sense he's struggling, he's in pain, and that he's never sure things are going right. He's insecure, at times, requiring his buddy Al to talk him through, to make him do the right thing, and eventually admits that he didn't treat his wife that well.

I had seen, for example, Lethal Weapon, which, to me, doesn't hold up at all well, leading from one stupid thing to another, in particular, how much they try to batter the idea that Mel Gibson's character is simply crazy.

As unbelievable as some of the action is, often telegraphed so the audience knows what to think and what to see, Die Hard still pushes the right buttons, perhaps none so inspiring as Beethoven's Ninth being played over the opening of the vault, once the power has been cut (to be fair, it's completely ridiculous having this vault in a place of work--heck, if it's a Japanese company, put it in Japan!).

Even so, still fun after all these years.

Caring About Cars

Cars hold a kind of nostalgia for Americans. In the 50s, these huge behemoth vehicles were considered the closest thing we'd come to flying, going to space. A machine that was an extension of ourselves, our freedom. Indeed, George Lucas, if anything, still marvels at his days of youth, when drag racing cars provided a rush, the kind he tried to duplicate in American Graffiti, and yes, even The Phantom Menace.

Since the 70s, when oil prices drove gas prices in the US to a dollar a gallon(!), manufacturers came up with ways to make cars more aerodynamic, lighter, smaller. Cars from a decade early might not even make 20 miles to the gallon, while their modern counterparts nearly double that.

But for all the innovations of cars, it's shocking how simple problems have no answers. People simply don't address them.

First one, and this one's a shocker: headlights. For years, I mean years, if you left the headlights on, and left your car, your battery was dead. It happened so often that people needed jumper cables to get a jump from a friend (and not the kind that involves the back seat) or a helpful stranger.

The biggest solution to this problem? Cars that beep at you when you fail to turn off the lights as the key is removed. Has no one, I mean no one, ever considered having lights that turn off when the key is out? Oh, I'm sure the answer is a bit of paranoia. If lights would automatically turn off automatically, who's to say it won't happen when you drive, accidentally? And that might cause an accident.

In essence, the automobile industry has traded off one problem for another, and doesn't seem to have any real solutions to this problem.

The second problem: heat. Every summer, people enter their cars, which roast like an oven. Every winter, it's freezing inside. I suppose there's not so much that can be done in the winter, but can nothing be done during the summer? Is there not some way to ventilate the car?

There are some problems that have better solutions. Once upon a time, it was awkward to move a car seat forward and backwards. That seems to be solved. Removing tires is still a pain, made just difficult enough that women generally feel helpless. There's a funny male/female divide. Clearly, if the task was too hard for men, then no one would (theoretically) be able to do it, but there are some tasks (removing tires) that require just enough strength, that many women are dissuaded. Surely, a sexist bias, I think.

There are other basic things like this that happens in other areas. Windows, for example, has an issue with deleting a file or directory if you are using that file or directory, but it's too stupid to tell you what application is using it. Sometimes you simply have to shut down everything to properly delete the file. Rather than solve useful problems like this (or the lack of true soft linking), Windows prefers to have snazzy interfaces. Thanks guys.

The White Couch

Many years ago, when I was an undergrad, or perhaps an early grad student, I saw a book, innocently titled, The Red Couch. This book was basically what the title said it was. It was about a red couch.

This red couch was brought all across the country. People of all sorts were asked to sit with it. From farmers to city folk. From poor to rich. From famous to obscure. The red couch was put on a boat. It was near a mountain.

Much like the garden gnome sent on flights in Amelie, this red couch, though inanimate, seemed to go through adventures, an artificial man-made creation, starkly red, set against natural backdrops all over the country.

I didn't think much of it at the time, the cleverness of the idea.

In the living room that I live, for the past five or six years, sat a large white couch. It was still in pretty good shape. David Hovemeyer, developer of FindBugs, a tool for finding bugs in Java code, would often spend nights sleeping on this couch. Another Dave would sleep on it as well. I spent a few days here and there.

It was probably six feet in length, and being less than six feet, I could sleep on it comfortably. I thought about bringing it to my new place, but it was pretty large, so I took a smaller loveseat instead.

Tonight, I returned back to house, to pick up a few more things. A father and son were coming by to pick up the large couch. The son was heading to Virginia Tech soon, the site of such tragedy last year. This couch, which had spent its inanimate life in our house was now making a journey down south, down to Blacksburg. It will see more of Virginia Tech than I've seen.

Perhaps I'm a bit nostalgic to point this out. I mean, for most, it's a couch. I just got rid of a bed I had that belonged to a friend, which I inherited (so to speak) from. I realized it was a crappy bed, but it was good for the time I had it. I still have the mattress, but it was kind of useless.

I have to really hand it to Jess for seeing that in all the stuff we'd accumulated over the years, that someone, somewhere would want our stuff, especially if we gave it for free. Several couches, a large dining room table, odds and ends all over. It's not all gone now, but a lot of it is.

It does make me think, from time to time, how much I simply buy things. Some people are very restrained. They don't need much. They don't want much. They are ascetic, spartan. On the other hand, I see something I vaguely like, or think I'll need, and there it goes. I've bought it. The lesson I've (kinda) learned over the years is that you must use the thing you buy as soon as possible. If you leave it around, it ain't getting used.

But as I'm undisciplined, I have stuff, and lots of it. I've gotten to some stage where I can get rid of stuff, but it's not easy. I'm hoping having my own place will do it. But it's a lot of stuff, and already, it occupies much of my open space, though I see that I haven't tried to organize it and make more space.

The white couch, I suspect, have it better. It is inanimate. It moves on. It lives its inanimate life in a new state.

May you see a new set of adventures.

Pressing Matters

I've been into garlic presses ever since the Frugal Gourmet (Jeff Smith) recommended the Susi garlic press (made by Zyliss) lo those many years ago. I had maybe 3-4 of these garlic presses. One of my former roommates once used it to prop something up in a pan and caused the garlic press to turn some odd shade of purple. But then, he did a lot of weird things. He'd make oatmeal, found it too hot to eat, stick in in the freezer, and completely forget it was there. He'd heat something up on the stove, and get bored, go to his room, and read until the pot was burning the food because he completely forgot he was cooking something. This happened not just once, but several times.

Recently, Cooks Illustrated rated garlic presses, and while the Susi press had been winners in years past, the newly declared winner was the Ruhn Kikon Epicurean garlic press. Now, this garlic press isn't exactly cheap. A relatively cheap garlic press might cost 7-8 dollars. The Susi press maybe 15 dollars. This one is 35 dollars.

Even so, it's really neat. The one huge problem with the Susi garlic press was cleaning it. It had a plastic insert you had to use to push the garlic pieces out of the holes. If you lost this piece (and it was easy to do), you'd have a hard time getting out the garlic.

Ruhn Kikon has a particularly clever solution. Most garlic presses require you put the cloves in a small bin, with the holes in the bottom. This bin is tiny, so it's hard to reach inside to clean it. The clever solution? Find a way so there's not a bin.

To give you an analogy. Think of a hallway. At the end of the hallway, there's a door. The door has large holes drilled through it. Imagine a large clove of garlic, big enough to fill the hallway, being pushed through the door with the holes. The garlic extrudes through the holes. But your fingers are huge too. They fill up the hallway, making it tough to clean the hallway.

Now, if the door would open up, then you could reach more easily reach the holes and clean up the press.

Although the mechanism isn't quite like that, it's close enough. Basically, the part with the holes swings away from the side walls, and makes it easier to clean. I still have to try it out mind you.

Oh, I got this mail order via Amazon through a company called The Handy House which surprisingly is about 40 miles north of here.

I had thought that it was lost somewhere along the way, and sent email to see what was going on. I had been used to sending stuff to my company where the receptionist usually lets me know it's arrived, and I picked it up. Instead, being US Postal mail, they did the "obvious" thing, which was put it in my "mailbox", which I rarely check since very few things end up there.

In any case, Ruthy, the person in charge, was very helpful, and was willing to send me a new one if I couldn't find it, but there was no need for that.

On the downside, I got one of the camera tickets. Apparently, I went through a red light and was caught. That kinda sucks.

Puff N Stuff

I had heard some pretty good reviews for a little known indie film called The Puffy Chair. It was said this was a more realistic Little Miss Sunshine.

I happen to like Little Miss Sunshine because the characters aren't so realistic. Greg Kinnear's character, in particular, is a bit exaggerated, but perhaps the entire family is.

What would happen if there was a road trip where the members were a bit more realistic, less amusing, and realistically dysfunctional.

In this case, the film starts off with a guy who wants to go visit his dad and give him a "puffy chair" he found on EBay as a birthday present. They had a chair just like it when they grew up. Initially, he doesn't want to take his girlfriend on the trip. He's meeting up with her when a friend calls, and he prefers to be all pal-y with him, much to her dismay. She can't stand that he spends more time wanting to be with his friends instead of paying attention to her.

He agrees to bring her on the trip. They drop by to see his brother, where they expect they will say hi, and that will be that. But he decides he wants to go along too, and the brother reluctantly agrees, as does his girlfriend, even though they expected to be with one another by themselves during the trip. This already ruins what personal plans they had, and you can already see the friction of the entire situation.

Anyway, after 10 minutes, I couldn't watch anymore. Not that I thought it was so bad, but that I didn't really want to see a realistic portrayal of a family about to implode. It could have been good, but I simply wasn't in the mood to watch it.

I'll probably watch it again later on, but more likely through something like Netflix.

Red Wines for White Wine Lovers

This is a note to myself for the following webpage, which I heard a few weeks ago on Splendid Table where some woman talks about food.

In it, some wines are listed for those who don't like red wines so much. The list includes:

• Mont Pellier Pinot Noir 2005. About $10.
  
• Rosenblum Zinfandel NV. About $10.
  
• Wolf Blass Shiraz 2005. About $10.
  
• Domaine Berrod Beaujolais-Villages 2006. About $11.
  
• Mommessin Beaujolais-Villages 2006. About $11.
  

Mostly a reminder to myself.

Fashionistas

I was watching the Today show this morning for a few minutes. There was an insipid segment on fashion, where women in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s were wearing various fashions. I found this rather despicable for several reasons.

First, the women were all thin. Heaven forbid that there would be a plus sized women wearing fashion. They all have to be thin and look a lot younger than they purport to be.

Second, of course, is the fashion itself. On the one hand, I suppose I don't mind people wanting to look good, but fashion pushes itself to an extreme. In other words, certain clothing are popular this year. The notion being that you need to keep up with your clothing, dumping old clothing each year, spending lots of bucks for trends that last a few months.

Thanks, Today Show for encouraging this to the world.

Quality Waste

Companies want you to buy stuff. But if they can help it, they want you to buy more expensive stuff.

Once upon a time, a decent television cost about three hundred dollars. Now, everyone wants you go get a large HDTV. 19 inches gave way to 21 inch to 25 inch. Once HDTV came around, the numbers went to 27 inches, 32 inches, 42 inches, 50 inches, and 60 plus inches. Indeed, 42 inches or more is pretty typical (you'd think they'd go metric just to make the number even larger!).

But other thing have gone up in price. A few years ago, Dyson came out with a vacuum cleaner that cost several hundred dollars, somewhere near 400 or 500 dollars back when 200 dollars was pricey for a vacuum cleaner.

Want to know what has gotten pricey? Simply Human made a trash bin for 100 dollars, when typical ones costs 20 dollars, tops. It was metal. It was attractive. Was it really worth 100 dollars? Probably not. But everyone else realized, well duh, they could make a 100 dollar trash can too! And they did too.

Indeed, you can now imagine anything moderately cheap and make it high quality and sell it for at least twice the price. The key? Make sure people already want it. Beds? They have beds that cost two thousand dollars or more!

Frying pans? Knives? Yup, they are pricey too!

What are things that are still pretty cheap? Hmm, well, I bought a flatware/cutlery tray. Still pretty cheap, but who buys this often? Refrigerators? Washer/dryers? Sure there's room to be more expensive. Typically, it has to look good too, so industrial design is important.

I'll tell you what I want though, and I certainly don't want it pricey. Light furniture. I bought a few bookcases from IKEA, and they weigh a ton. They had a great bookcase that was really, really light. Too bad they ditched it. The other key is being able to easily disassemble and reassemble things. Sadly, IKEA (nor anyone I know) has furniture that comes apart easily and weighs next to nothing.

Some things, I realize, people don't really want to spend more. Computers, for example. Why spend more?

But there's a few products that someone, some company is willing to jack up the price, and people are willing to get on the bandwagon and get it.

Surely You're Joking

When I was a teenager, my dad had various books lying around. One was a bestseller, of sorts. It was titled Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. The book was actually written, or more precisely, transcribed by Ralph Leighton, who was the son of a colleague of Richard Feynman.

Who is Richard Feynman, you might ask? He was a Nobel winning physicist, though he himself hated the fact he got the award, not so much because he didn't deserve it, but he felt awards were meaningless. He did work in quantum electrodynamics and invented the so-called Feynman diagrams.

He probably would have languored in obscurity, except to hard-core physicists, were it not for this book.

Part of the appeal was his common man upbringing, and his knack for looking for adventure. Whether it was his desire to visit Tana Tuva, a country his father said was no longer around, where Mongolians do throat-singing, a style of singing where it sounds like two voices are being sung, when it's only one person.

He hung around biologists back when they were figuring out DNA. He helped on the Connection Machine, which contained some 64,000 simple processors. He wrote books on physics, and helped us look at physics in a different way. He played the bongo drums, painted art, learned to read Mayan writing.

Throughout his life, you see his child-like curiosity. It's likely he inspired many people to a career of physics. Even for those who didn't choose physics, he may have helped redefine what a scientist does. He simply wanted to have adventures and wanted to learn.

What's not so clear was how brilliant he was. Reading Surely, You're Joking, you find that he is curious, but not how he thought. I'm sure he didn't have any idea what he did. Is it one's ability to sit and think and think and think? Certainly, even as his father lacked scientific training, he tried to get his son to visualize things, and that may have been crucial in his development.

I can't say that Feynman has inspired me to new heights even approaching what he did, but I can say that reading about Feynman was formative in growing up, in some way. I wonder if I hadn't read this book whether I'd see the world differently or not? Of course, if the answer is yes, it makes one wonder what other books would have to say, even though it's been more than twenty years since I read this book.

More Sunshine

And yet another comment about Little Miss Sunshine.

I'm sure I said this in my original review, but as I rarely go back and re-read my old stuff, I don't know for sure.

Basically, except for the mother and grandfather, this film questions whether we should try to achieve goals in our lives. The father is a motivational speaker who can't get his career on track. The son wants to fly jets, but ultimately can't because he's color-blind. The uncle (Steve Carrell) wants to be the top Proust scholar in the world, but everyone keeps saying he's second best. The daughter wants to (sort of) win a beauty contest, though she's somewhat clueless enough not to realize what it really takes to win.

In a nutshell, the film points out that we all fail, and sometimes, we shouldn't compete, at least, not if it means our entire self-esteem is built around some notion of success. In the end, there's family, and family's there to take care of you.

As an aside, I was reading some review about Ecan Almighty and how Steve Carrell has become the new Jim Carrey, not so much because they are the same personalities. Far from it. Carrey has mad antics, while Steve has more of an everyman quality, and it shows in particular, in this role, which he underplays some, mostly because he's not generally the kind of person to go Carrey overboard.

Dysfunction Function

For the first few month of DirecTV, I get a complimentary set of movie channels. After watching it a second time, you realize just how dysfunctional this family is.

I pause for a moment for Justin's sake. This is a re-review of Little Miss Sunshine.

The film starts off with Frank who has tried to kill himself. He's sent to his sister's family. Her sister, who appears to be the most normal, mostly doesn't cook for her family (this is seen as a shorthand for people who've lost some basic family values).

The husband (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who preaches the power of positive thought, even as his career has not turned out well. They live with his father (Alan Arkin) who is a foul-mouthed, criticizes daughter and son, but at least seems to love his granddaughter (Olive) and helps train her for a beauty contest. Finally, there's the Olive's brother, Dwayne, who has kept silent for a year, basically a goth kid who wants to join the Air Force and fly planes.

At some point, the film becomes a road trip where the family wants to get Olive to a beauty contest, and while this is purportedly a comedy, it's a decidedly down comedy. At one point, they stay in a hotel, and the grandfather passes away. They take him to the hospital, and the hospital insist they take care of paperwork and thus they can't leave the body while they head to California, site of the beauty contest.

They steal the body, then their vehicle (a VW van) is falling apart (it doesn't start until they push it to start) and the horn is stuck, intermittently making a horn noise, attracting the police, who they think will find the body. But as it turns out the grandfather has porn magazines and they've placed it on top of body, and the cop, so fixated on it, doesn't miss it.

Then, as they ride some more, Olive tests her brother and they discover he's color-blind and can't be a pilot anymore. This is where he utters his first words "F***", and then curses off his entire family.

Indeed, as you describe the plot, it sounds more and more outrageous (they can't seem to get to the hotel, because the roads are funny, then when they arrive, they are told they are too late too sign up, but finally, they do sign up).

In other words, it's one disaster after another.

So why does it work? Ultimately, despite all the disasters going on, the family decides with all its dysfunctions that they support one another.

The title of the film is about a beauty contest for kids, and beauty contests generally don't fare well in films, and the film goes both way with this. On the one hand, there's disdain for the other shallow contestants. On the other hand, it is Olive's dream to perform.

Even the competition, which she has no idea about (and neither does her grandfather), where she does her rendition of "Superfreak", ought to be a point of embarassment, becomes a moment of defiance as well as family support, ultimately, the point being that they may do things weirdly, but they're still together. It's a particularly odd scene, with some families disgusted, and some finding it just as fun as everyone else.

The film finds its way with little touches from gags that continue throughout, such as the van that needs push-starting, to the horn noises that never quite work, to the basics of beauty pageants (or at least making some fun of it), to road-tripping, to hotels. And while you have no idea what will happen to this family, road-trips often work as a bonding experience, and so ultimately, if it works, it works as that.

And that's a bunch of spoilers!

No Wires Holding Me

When I think Internet, I think wireless Internet. Unfortunately, the phone companies have co-opted this word, and use it to mean mobile phones, which they call cell phones, which use wireless technology.

But I think of using wireless Internet. I've used wireless for, oh, maybe 5 years now? I moved in with a buddy, J.J., and he set it up. Then, I moved to Geekhouse, and they already had it set up. They had wireless when I was teaching too.

Let me tell you, it's nice. With the mobility of laptops, you want to be wireless. With the lack of mobility of desktops, wireless is an option you can forgo, though even there it can be nice.

The problem with wireless is: it's wireless.

If I don't need a wire to get connected, than anyone with a wireless card can get connected too.

Indeed, many people who set up a wireless router often fail to set up any security with it, because, surprise, surprise: it ain't easy to do!

I got Internet from Verizon for two reasons. First, it's a little cheaper than Comcast, even if Comcast has better bandwidth. Second, I've used it before, and been fairly happy with it.

Verizon supplied me first with a wireless adapter, which is a DSL modem plus a wireless router in one. Convenient.

Except, I had already bought a wireless router and wanted to use that. So I put in for a DSL modem, so I could use my router.

Except, you would think, setting this up would be easy as plugging in the DSL modem to the wireless router.

And it's almost that easy, except it isn't.

First, I called Verizon and asked them how to configure the Linksys router. I know. It's not entirely fair I do this, but there are some parts of the router that require some information from the ISP.

Strike one.

Already, this makes things complex. Linksys lists five different configurations you may have with your provider. They suggest you talk to the ISP to find out which. That's bad. I shouldn't have to know that at all.

I called Verizon, and they said I had PPPoE, or some such. They gave me my user name and password. That didn't seem to do the trick. Still, they were helpful.

I called Linksys. They were pretty helpful too. They sat with me for 30 minutes as we eventually figured out that I couldn't even get to the Internet on my wired connection. That is, connecting my laptop via Ethernet to the router, which itself was connected via Ethernet to the DSL modem, which was connected by a phone line to the phone jack.

That didn't work.

Eventually, the woman helping me figured out that the problem was that the Westell modem I had used the same IP address as the wireless router. Seems like all wireless router type devices use the same IP, which I don't recall off the top of my head. So, she had me configure the router so that it had a different IP. Once that was happy, the two components weren't conflicting with one another, and I was able to bot get to the Internet on a wired connection, as well as wirelessly.

Oh yes, when I talked to Verizon, they told me that I needed to set the DSL modem up as a "bridge" whatever that means (I should read some networking book for dummies). Didn't have to do that at all. (Strike two--shouldn't require a different mode).

And then, it wasn't necessary to set up PPPoE (I used some automatic DHCP, which is the default configuration). Note: the manuals suck in this respect. They could have said something like "If you use Verizon, you can just use the default setting, but you'd want to use the others if...). But again, they fail to explain this.

Ideally, they would explain why I need half a dozen options on everything, then how to go about finding the answers, and especially, how to find it for my setup. Ideally, I shouldn't have to do any of this!

In a perfect world, I attach the DSL modem to a router, and it just works!

Honestly, that's what they should all strive for. Certainly, if you had a wireless adapter, that would likely be what you'd want, right?

OK, so there should be one additional step. Once it simply "works", you should be able to configure the name of your router and pick a password.

Of course, I have five different options for this too. I have WEP, which I have to say, is painful. Then, there were four variations of PSK, two personal, two enterprise.

WEP goes through a phase where you pick a password, then it generates keys, then you type in the keys to get connected. Except these keys read like gibberish, so I can't properly remember them, and furthermore, the more secure one requires 26 of these hex values. It's maddening.

And I didn't have to do that before. Before, I typed in a normal password, and that was that!

Turns out there are two forms of entering passwords: WEP, the annoying (and I'm told insecure) way, and WPA, which of course, linksys doesn't even write in their manuals. Only when you hunt up the webpages, do you discover that the PSK options listed are really short for WPA-PSK. There's PSK and PSK2, which most people say is just WPA and WPA2.

Anyway, I set it up for one of these, entered in the password that I could remember, turned off wireless on my Mac, set it back up, punched in my password, and voila, back to being connected.

Now, I have a vague sense that I may not have set it up optimally. Certainly, like any piece of technological literature, the Linksys documentation doesn't tell you why there are so many different options, nor does it try to explain how to decipher it, nor take you down a likely path. And honestly, they should work with places like Verizon to come up with a plug-n-play option.

The one, somewhat-cool thing? Configuration on the router is done by connecting via Ethernet to the wireless router itself, then opening up the browser to a particular IP address, and then configuring it via web page manipulations. It's crude, but kinda clever, given that the average person doesn't necessarily want to open up a console to talk to the router, and type in commands that way.

Anyway, that took maybe an hour to an hour and a half of effort, and really, both Verizon, and especially Linksys were really quite helpful.

And to be honest, I was quite happy that it was all set up. This is the one kind of weird expense that the next generation of folks are finding it hard to live without. Oddly enough, they're willing to sacrifice the "must-have" technology that most people still crave: cable (or satellite) TV.

State of Grace

3m 32s

Click here to try the quiz.

Fifty, Nifty United States

I did the quiz in 4 minutes 6 seconds. I dropped the graphic, since this one interferes with the other one. Bad HTML from the guys who did this.

I probably could have done it faster if I could see which states I hadn't named. I recognize most all of them.

Science Fiction Films

Genre films have generally not fared particularly well. Westerns, once popular, are terribly unpopular now. Mysteries, once popular, are rarely seen. For a while, fantasy films fared poorly. Two series have helped revive fantasy: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Harry Potter. Before that, you'd be hard pressed to find a really popular fantasy film.

Science fiction films have been there since the silent days. Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, envisions a city with skyscrapers and cars filling up highways, a prescient view, even if the film itself is a bit odd, about a woman who fights for some kind of freedom for the downtrodden, and a robot that's built to resemble her, or someone's wife.

Despite the long history of science fiction films, there are few that are considered great. Despite its slowness, people consider 2001: A Space Odyssey a great SF film, made all the more intriguing by its lack of real characters, except possibly HAL. Up there is Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, which might be as much horror or suspense as science fiction. There's also Blade Runner, still perhaps the best of Ridley Scott's films.

There are those that have been popular. E. T. the Extra Terrestrial and Star Wars tops the lists. There's also The Matrix, Alien, Mad Max, The Terminator, and so forth.

Most SF films are so different from science fiction stories that they almost don't fit in the genre. For example, despite the prolific technology in Star Wars, it can be seen closer to fantasy. Alien was more interested in the horror of a relentless alien being.

Philip K. Dick has seen a bit of a resurgence. Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, Minority Report and a few others are films that have been made.

Sometimes, a small film like Shane Carruth's Primer shows that an SF film doesn't need lots of special effects.

Science fiction writers, being genre writers, often lack certain strengths, usually characterization. They have plenty of ideas, and some know a great deal of science, but otherwise, the characters are meh.

I once read a short story about a man who has injected himself with, if memory serves, some sort of nano-robots. The problem? They are starting to grow intelligent. After a while, he no longer needs food, as they can basically photosynthesize. He realizes he may no longer be in control, because once they figure out what's going on, that they live in a person, they will take over him. Stories of people losing control to technology have been as old as Frankenstein.

Another short story involves a guy who's a genius, part of some group of super-geniuses, who realizes he's completely paranoid. He knows somewhere, somehow, out there is someone just like him, and he has to find him and eliminate him before he is eliminated. There's not a great deal of science (except once he realizes his opponent has bested him), just paranoia.

This year, the best science fiction so far has been Sunshine, and yet, it doesn't dwell much on the science, nor much on characters. Still, it presents a compelling view of travelling to the Sun, which is a story, that Danny Boyle points out, has not been seriously treated (there was, he notes, a throwaway travel to the Sun in Lost In Space).

The Matrix deals with virtual reality, which is something more akin to Philip K. Dick novels where, perhaps due to his own experimentation with drugs, was near and dear to his own experiences. Many films of that era deal with such issues.

Of course, there are classics like 1984 of future totalitarian society.

Sometimes SF tries to speculate what will happen to society, how it will change, what problems will be faced. Sometimes, it's just to have a different venue, and have some special effects wizardry. Sometimes, it's other genres like adventure, horror, placed out in space.

Space films rarely are about the same kinds of topics as more "serious" films. How often do you set a romance in space, where space is somewhat incidental? A great book, Forever War, based on Joe Haldemann's experience in Vietnam, is not only a story about time, war, aliens, but also, a love story. But, to my knowledge, it's never been made into a film.

Indeed, many SF books that have been considered great haven't been made into movies. Isaac Asimov, widely considered a great SF writer, has never really had his books made to film, and I say that given I, Robot. His books tend to be talky and brainy, and less than cinematic.

They've been talking about making Ender's Game into a film. It's not terribly science-y as these films go, but it does extrapolate on the idea of a future where kids become geniuses in war.

SF writers and fans often criticize films for making films lacking imagination. Part of it is budget. Part of it is, perhaps, that films are not a good medium for SF. A good SF film should really be a miniseries, long enough to get you to understand the world that is being presented. Most films have a very little time to get you interested in the characters or the film. A series would give you time to follow what's going on.

Surfin USA

Sometimes I'm frightened by how little I know about the field I profess to be in, which is computer science.

It's a strange discipline, really. The kind of knowledge you need to know to be considered proficient at computers is rarely taught in schools, and you have to pick up elsewhere.

Once upon a time, and this was pretty recent really, I had no idea what an Ethernet cable looked like. And I'm not talking ten years ago, but like 2-3 years ago. Which isn't to really say that I had no idea, only that it was not intimately familiar to me. Now you might wonder, why on Earth would I not know about that.

Until recently, which really means until the last ten years, personal computers were expensive. Until computers broke the 1000 dollar barrier, it was considered an expensive luxury. Usually, computers were priced around 1500 to 3000 dollars, but for the common person to buy a computer, a cheap computer had to be around 700 dollars or less, and now, if you want to go bare-bones, you can get one for 300 dollars, and that's really good enough for most people, who only plan to surf.

But until recently, I had no need to get my own computer. When I was undergrad, lo those many years ago, they had plenty to go around. At the time, they weren't even networked. And when they were, I had no idea how they were hooked up.

And when I reached grad school, well, they had computers all set up there too. There was no need for me to figure out how they hooked it up to the Internet. That was some IT guys job, not mine. I just worried about logging on and logging off.

And even when I started to teach, well, there was a computer on my desk, so I had no need to get one for myself, which, at the time, was still pretty expensive.

Eventually, a friend suggested I get a laptop, and he suggested a Mac, and I bought an IBook. It was kinda expensive, being around 1200 dollars or so, but I got a discount because they were releasing one of the early Mac OS X's.

In those days, which was like 2002 or so, wireless cards were still not entirely standard. The few students who had laptops (and those numbers were growing) had a pluggable wireless card. Macs were innovative, in that the card stuck underneath the keyboard, out of the way, unlike other PC laptops where they jutted out, likely to break. Users had to remove them manually when they were put away, lest they be snapped like so much graham crackers.

The wireless card, which Apple dubbed "Airport", cost another hundred dollars, but wireless connectivity was a must have, because getting Ethernet and finding a connection was not that convenient.

Thus, I had no need to touch Ethernet, pretty much until I got a job, and there was more hardware than I've ever really dealt with.

I remember when I was teaching computer hardware, and I wanted to "build" my own computer, so I spec'ed out the parts, and paid for it. Total price? About 1300 dollars. This included a monitor, a motherboard, a case, a hard drive, a floppy drive, even a computer desk. Sad thing? I never used it. Not even once. Well, just once to set it up. I eventually let a friend borrow it, and that was that.

Still, I became aware of things that no computer class still teaches you. Such as USB, Firewire, what the typical amount of RAM was, the typical hard drive, the typical clock speed of a PC, and so forth. All these were numbers I simply cared nothing about. Why should I care? They seemed like so many random specs, like people who obsess over the acceleration of a desired sportscar. Why should I care about clockspeed? Why should I care about RAM? The computer did what it was supposed to, so I didn't care.

But it was one reason I was curious about how to build a computer. Though expensive, it was one way to learn the pieces.

And do they teach that to you? No. Name a course that talks about Firewire, USB, Ethernet. Is it an introductory course? No. Is it a course in computer organization? No. I know, because I taught that plenty of times. Indeed, for the non-techie, there's an exasperating amount of crap that you must learn, each technology being replaced by new ones.

Why are computer science majors expected to know all of this? Because they own computers!

Then, there are things people learn because they play computer games, or play with their TV, such things as component cable vs. HDMI. If you don't play video games of have an HDTV, these things are unimportant to you. For years, all anyone cared about with a television was an antennae, or a cable, a plug, and a channel changer. Now, your typical HDTV comes with a gazillion connections, as much to play video games or display photos from your digital camera, as it is to watch television. And you know what? Obsolete in five years. Some new technology will come out, supersede the current stuff. DVDs, which marked the replacement of the horrible VHS tapes, are now being threatened with replacement by HD-DVD or Blu-ray. It's back to Betamax vs. VHS once again.

So I don't feel like an idiot calling tech support to get my Internet set up, and fortunately, they make it easy, and in any case, I had to call them up to get it activated.

Eventually, it will be much like the phone service, I think (unless cities are high speed wireless all the time). You call to activate, you plug in, and voila, you are done.

And that is that.

So I'm back on the Internet again.

Hooray for me.

Fresh Eyes

Sometimes, when you stare at code too long, the assumptions you made, the decisions you made, which made sense as the time are hard to challenge. Rather than get into too much depth, here's an analogy.

At one point, people sat in front of what would now be termed, a computer. This computer was huge, and there was only one of them. And so a very limited number of people could use it.

Once someone had the bright idea (or more likely, several someones), then people could sit in front of a keyboard, possibly in a remote room, and essentially send their keystrokes to a remote machine. That machine could handle several users at once, by giving each user a tiny slice of time.

Users were said to use "dumb terminals", which basically used a computer as a kind of telephone to a computer. A key press was typed, the characters sent across a wire to the computer that would interpret it, then send back an echo of the key pressed, plus results.

Soon, people figured everyone could have their own computers, such as personal computers. Then, you can think of the Web as creating a remote computer, by which the browser is the local dumb terminal.

Often, there is the desire to put smarts near the person on the "computer" they sit in front of which alternates with the desire to put the computer remotely and having the local "computer" merely relay messages to a more powerful computer elsewhere, which is shared by many people.

Such was the case that happened today. Was it better to do a big computation now so that future results could take pieces? Or was it better to do smaller computations, whose sum total might take longer than the big computation, but be quicker. Tradeoffs go different ways depending on which way you go, and one way, which may have been dismissed a while ago may require revisiting if things have changed.

You never know til you try, right?

That's the thing with programming. There's so many ways to do things, so many tradeoffs you can make.

Remember, a bad solution in the past, might become a good solution of the future.

Genius Departed

Three men died in the last two days. None were particularly young. Bill Walsh, former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, considered the innovator of the West Coast offense, a style of play that emphasized short passes and timing routes instead of running plays, passed away a day ago.

Two directors, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, and Michelangelo Antonioni of Italy, also passed away.

This is perhaps, as most things of this nature, a matter of coincidence. Their names are well-known, and yet many others, far lesser known have also departed.

There's not that much more for me to say since I'm not particularly familiar with the film work of these two men, though it's making me curious to check it out.

Catitude

Flip Your Lid

IKEA does something rather peculiar. In fact, it's downright infuriating. They sell these plastic boxes called Samla, which you would think come with lids. And they do come with lids, but you pay extra. Not just a little extra but around 1/3 extra. So a box that looks like it's 4 dollars might be 6 because you want a lid.

What's the point? Why make it appear cheap then tell you, oh, it's really pricey because you need a lid too?

Unbelievable.

Movin' On

I haven't had to move in quite a few years, and since then, I've acquired even more junk. Yesterday, I had the "big move". This is where you get a bunch of friends to help you out. However, there are several keys to making this all work.

First, although you are getting lots of friends, you want to minimize the time overall, and the amount of idle time they have. They are doing a lot of heavy lifting, and that's what they should be used for. Thus, you want to avoid having them pack for you. Almost anyone you meet who moves will see this is "obvious". First time movers and folks who hate to plan ahead don't like this. They see a bunch of people, and would like friends to help pack.

Packing is laborious and slow. It simply is. You have to have several weeks to plan a move, unless you have next to nothing, which is ideal.

Next, when you pack, try to label stuff. Put a big number and/or letter, like A1, A2, etc. Maybe "B" for bedroom or books.

Also, I prefer many smaller boxes over few large ones. Depending on how strong everyone is (or the boxes are), big boxes with heavy items are bad. The box can't hold them, and the people can't lift them.

If you can, decide where you want everything to go. You can choose to label where you plan to put it, e.g. dining room, bedroom, living room. That's for those moving.

Although I had a reasonable amount packed, it was still not enough. Also, move things to a location where it's easy to get the stuff, which usually means you need a clear spot where to get things.

Also, if you have stairs, you may want to do a "fire brigade". Having people walk all the way up several flights of steps is tiring. If they only go one flight, then pass it to someone, this will be ultimately less tiring.

Have refreshments. I suggest doughnuts, water, Gatorade. If you can help it, have a large fan somewhere, that someone can stand in front of to cool down (unless you move during cold weather).

If you have good movers, they will move faster than you can manage. This is why it pays to be organized.

If I had to do my move again, I would do that. I would also tear apart items like bookshelves and box them or label them separately.

I tend to avoid awkward items. Large items like bookshelves, sofas, beds, and drawers are where the hard work is. If they need to be disassembled, do so ahead of time. Figure out somewhere you can place parts because you'll be hard pressed to find them again. If necessary, have large bright colors on the really important boxes, so you can access them quickly at the other end.

The best moves are people with nothing. The idea nothing person has the following items. Small table, small couch and chairs, clothes, a TV, a coffee table. I have plenty of books, and that's a big issue.

Also, if you have a chance, move awkward stuff ahead of time. I moved probably 40 containers ahead of time, and still that only put a small dent into things.

Oh yeah, it's good to get lots of people, if you can help it. Too few, and you will tire them out. And if you can, start on time. I had budgeted four hours for the move. It took two, because I had lots of people (plus half hour to drive over).

If it's hot, turn the AC way up on both ends. The money you expend will lead to happier movers.

And, typically, no matter what happens, there's still crap leftover, so the first move may not be the last. Ideally, you take EVERYTHING, and dispose on the other end. It may not work out that way, but it's helpful.

Finally, if you can, get rid of stuff. Some people are too attached to everything they have. Ideally, they would be told, everytime they move, get rid of half your stuff which will be tossed out.

Oh yeah.

Rental moving trucks totally suck.

More Comments on Sunshine

I read Wikipedia's entry on Sunshine where they explained the plot details.

When you watch a film, you don't realize the energy that goes into making it. Danny Boyle wanted people to live together, read books about the space mission, visit scientists, try to understand the science behind the story, and so forth.

(Spoilers ahoy!)

There's a summary in Wikipedia of the story, and from it, I realized I somewhat missed part of the story. The captain of the Icarus apparently acted like some religious leader, like some Jim Jones, and convinced the crew, somehow, to commit mass suicide. He somehow survived, though his skin was mangled, presumably by the sun, in some fashion, as he came to believe that the Earth did not deserve to survive.

But Danny Boyle makes an odd directorial decision. This captain is always shown as some blurry effect, as if he's dead or has evolved into some higher being, and that seems to fall outside what the film has set up as credible. Forget whether the science actually makes much sense. It's trying to give the plausibility of making sense.

Perhaps if the captain was filmed as is, or with only slight disfiguration, rather than this blurry effect, you might, just might, buy what was going on.

But since there wasn't a great deal of time spent on his character, he is added for what appears to be no good reason, when the film is doing a pretty decent job without his character essentially trying to kill everyone.

One idea does work out well, which is the fascination with sunlight. Two characters really get into it (the doctor, and the captain), and it is some kind of attempt to explain what is going on with the other captain. It's too bad that the execution of the idea just doesn't work out.

You have to feel frustrated for such movies that are on the verge of being really good, but end up not being that way.

Review: Sunshine

I have this problem.

Sometimes I get too curious.

I want to read about a movie, so I read reviews. Most reviewers can't help but spoil something or another about a film, which is a problem if a film relies on surprises to make it work. I suggest you don't read reviews if you don't want to know much going in.

So I read a review by Mike D'Angelo on Danny Boyle's latest called Sunshine, and he basically spoils something.

But he is right. The film, for the most part, is far more intelligent than its trailers let on. A key example is in the trailer, one guy (played by Chris Evans) says "If the Sun dies, we die. Everything on the Earth dies. There is no more important mission that this.", or something inanely obvious.

It's the kind of tripe dialogue that goes in movies where either the writer or director thinks we are total idiots, and thus need something terribly obvious like this, or because they want a moment where some character can yell something out, and that's the best they can do.

Except, when it is uttered, it makes a lot of sense, and the advice not to listen also makes sense. In particular, Icarus 2 is a mission sent to implant a bomb in the Sun to reignite it. It's called "2" because a previous mission sent seven years earlier had mysteriously failed, and there was only one more chance to get it right. But as the mission moves forward, there is a distress beacon from Icarus, which has managed to survive all these years.

The crew is deciding whether they should rendezvous with the previous ship, which is nearby or not. Chris Evans, who plays headstong Mace, then utters the aforementioned line, arguing against trying to rendezvous with the other ship. Another crew member, Searle, the doctor, gives a counterargument why they should make it.

For a while, you think Sunshine will draw more inspiration from Apollo 13 where brains saves what appears to be a disaster. Alas, it draws from two other sources. Most heavily, it borrows from 2001, from the look of Icarus, to the voice of the computer (cleverly, they chose a woman's voice, though it lacks the dispassionate menace of HAL, which would have perhaps been too close in imitation). They use exploding doors to propel people.

Unlike 2001, the film wants to have characters, though character development isn't the important part of the film. Of the seven main characters, two are almost insignificantly minor, one has a bigger role. The main character is the narrator, played by Irish Cilian Murphy, who plays a physicist that has created the bomb to reignite the sun. Michelle Yeoh plays a botanist of some sort who is in charge of making sure there's enough oxygen and food. There's the previously mentioned doctor. There's a woman, Cassie, and I suppose Chris Evans, who plays Mace is the second most important character.

The other source is the one everyone loves to draw from, which is Alien, where space is menacing.

Science fiction films have rarely been about mind-altering ideas like SF books have been. They are either adventures or horror, or some mix of the two, with an occasional comedy (like Hitchhiker's Guide) thrown in for good mix.

This film most reminds me of Event Horizon, which started off eerie and creepy, and ended up ridiculously stupid. Alas, Sunshine does the same, except it is far smarter, and creates a much greater sense of awe due to the mission. And the stupid parts, while astoundingly idiotic, still make for some excitement at the end.

The writer or director really struggled mightily to figure out an ending for the film, and came up with something so crazily bad, it's hard to believe.

But up until then, it's fairly compelling stuff. Sure, they fall for the usual science problems. Ships rumble. Outside space is freaking cold.

There are also problems with characters, who, with a frickin computer as their help, still make life-threatening mistakes.

The film looks pretty gorgeous, though. I wish they had more downtime to talk about their mission or had certain personality traits that would make them take a risk that means their lives.

Ultimately, this film would have been far better served in a miniseries format. They could have done several things. First, they should have spent a good deal of time on Earth, probably shortly after the failure of the previous mission. Second, they should have delved into the characters more, possibly interesting in deciding who goes and who doesn't. Then, they should have had their mission, but jettisoned the plot-point at the end, and possibly replaced it with something else.

Even though the characters aren't particularly deep, there is sympathy in what they are doing, and so, at a simple level, just caring how their mission turns out is indeed a success for me. It's more intelligent than most SF movies, which is to say, a bit above average.

Certainly worth watching, even for the mess of an ending.

Run To You

Bryan Adams is Canadian, and yet wrote songs that seemed quintessentially American, as if belted by John Cougar Mellencamp. Until you realize that, yes, Canada is America too! And "United States of America" just isn't that great of a name for a country. Germany, Germans. France, French. Japan, Japanese. United States of America. Americans?

But I used one of his songs "Run to You", which seems like a guy cheating on his wife, because of this article.

In it, there's a quote from Jack Kerouac, who I suppose I should read more about. What little I know is likely to be inaccurate. I figure here was a guy that was on the road, essentially hitchhiking and distilled his experiences, the freedom of not being tethered to a job, to a location, roaming the Earth (well, the US) and capturing a sense of adventure that came to represent what people wanted.

It's not surprising the sense of madness, of running, of going anywhere, doing anything, is compelling. Americans, especially this President, feel the need to extol the virtues of democracy and freedom. And yet, what is freedom? What does it mean to be free?

A friend said he recently watch Fight Club, presumably for the first time. I saw it about a year or two ago for the first time as well, though, by that time, its message of male emasculation, and desire to live and not be trapped by having that IKEA house (by the way, I still need to build my IKEA furniture--and Fight Club had it wrong! IKEA names are only one Swedish word, not two!).

That link serves as a touchpoint for me, because I had gone on a vacation by myself for the first time, off to Seattle, on the West Coast. Some people travel all the time, having been, with wealthy parents bankrolling the way. Their memories of jaunts to Europe, of irreverent evenings, of folks speaking a different tongue, are imprinted on their memories.

The diary, such as it is (being on Kuro5hin, after all), takes this sense of wild freedom, of simply dropping it all, and going, going, going, and realizing how much we escape through words. We read, and we are inspired, and instead of doing the things that the words are compelling us to do, we are compelled to write, to use the same words that move us, and craft our own words, words that imitate, words that evoke, and give birth to our own vision of running.

This was written, a week or two after I had visited Seattle, and at the time, I'm sure I misunderstood its significance, probably attributing more than what it meant at the time, though there's something fascinating about it being the only diary entry for this person, a solitary moment of creativity.

In many ways, it's typical of the Web, when people were suddenly inspired to creativity, crafting their web pages, putting their content up for the world to see, spending a few hours on a lonely afternoon or evening in a fit of activity.

Then, after a 15 minute of fame moment, they went to their lives, as ordinary as ever, and left their "under construction" sign back up, realizing it's hard to crank out creativity on a regular basis, especially when inspiration is the payment, not hard cash.

So occasionally, due to the history mechanisms of sites like Kuro5shin and Slashdot, I can occasionally read this entry.

Do you spend your days madly, wildly, without thought, without reservations, without inhibitions, without anything but life, pure sweet life which sweeps down through your feet and moves you and fills your throat with laughter and your ears with music and your eyes with beauty? Can you dig it? That's life, it's right there, it's going by, it's that train that's flying by you and you gotta run and jump on and ride it like the wild ride it is, whooping and hollering until your voice gives out and your fingers are sore. The wind whips through that train and makes you shiver and tear up and hug yourself, but it's tears of joy and a cold that doesn't chill you but lets you know you are human. All your logic and all your reasoning and flying behind you like the wind that's putting violent, mad waves on your shirt; you know it's still there but you can't pay any attention to it now. All you can do is cry out for joy, because the train is going off into the sunset and you don't know where it's headed, but you know you want to get there fast, fast, fast, whereever it is, and see it all, and drink it all, and have it all, and then make sure you jump on that next train going through because that's what it means to live. It don't matter where that train started nor where it's headed, but all that matters is that you're on it and you see everything rushing by in a frenzy of enlightenment and rapture. You can't hang on to it forever and even if you could it don't run forever, but you just want to hang on as long as you can, as long as your hands have some feeling and your lips have some singing you'll hang on, hang on, until you have to let go and then with all your strength left and all your soul you jump off and fly through the night in a mad, frenzied blur of motion and your spirit itself is leaping forth, letting out one last crazied, passionate, heartfelt cry until you vanish into the sweet, enveloping night.

And so the words, perhaps better than trite, perhaps better than that, resonate more for me than it might others, because it is a moment in time, capturing a sense of the past and nostalgia.

As Bryan Adams song was about a man who runs to a forbidden love, this running is to a period of time, to words, to a memory or an impression of a memory---a metaphorical run.

And occasionally, I find solace in this run.

Rocket Man

William Shatner is the rocket man!

A Matter of Taste

Sometimes I think, in fact, I feel I know that the programming languages we have now don't quite do what we want it to do. Ideas don't transmit themselves so easily through code. Beyond a certain length, the ideas behind what is going on is replaced by a morass of code.

Code is both a kind of expression, perhaps even a poem, lyrical, beautiful. No, it's far too purposeful to reach that. At what point, does the mundaneness of purpose win out.

Ask yourself the following questions. Does it bother you if a class has more than 20 methods? 30? Do you say to yourself "Boy, that's ugly", or do you not even blink twice. The class is what the class is. If I need to add something, I add it. If that is what the solution requires, I won't try to make it "nice".

How about method length? Does it bother you that it's 400 lines long? That it can't fit comfortably in two screens? Or three? Or ten? Or do you simply keep writing because to break it up into functions would be hard. Passing parameters is "hard". You prefer to leave your thoughts uncluttered by having all variables accessible everywhere?

Does it bother you that you class does two things? Three things? Ten things? That you tie this object to that object to the next object? After all, that's what the problem seems to require. Why not do it that way?

In many ways, writing a program is like writing a story with lots of constraints. You want a boy, and a girl. OK, maybe you make them related. Oh, now you need two more boys, and two more girls. They'll all be related. This will be like the Dukes of Hazzard, where you had five cousins and uncle and not a married couple in sight with the exception of Boss Hogg and Lulu.

Think about it. Bo Duke. Was he dating anyone? Nope. Luke? Nope. Uncle Jesse? Nope. Any of the police staff? Daisy Duke? Relationships are complex, especially since most episodes were devoted to cars leaping skywards on fake ramps, and general shenanigans.

Some code makes as much sense as the Duke clan.

Does cut-n-paste code bother you? How often do you find yourself preferring to cut-n-paste rather than consolidate a function?

Ultimately, most of us as coders, myself included, don't read enough code, don't read enough commentary about code, and so we code blind, doing what we think makes sense, whether it makes sense or not. We learn through trial and error, repeating errors thousands of others made. It's as if people taking a creative writing course had never read anyone else.

I don't buy the idea that avoiding the study of others will make you somehow more creative. For every person who can break the trend and produce something truly original, a thousand churns out utter tripe, and would be far better served by studying others, and mimicking the best they can. History shows that this works far better than trying to be completely original.

And in programming, there's no need, most of the times, to be truly original.

All it requires, sometimes, is a matter of taste.

Road to Nowhere

Last year's Tour de France still held some appeal to Americans. Sure, Lance Armstrong had retired in a sport he helped popularize in the US. That the popularity hinged on his citizenship and was therefore fleeting didn't stop many Americans who otherwise would never give cycling a second look, a second look.

OLN covered the Tour for Americans. More than any other sport, cycling allows fans to get up-close and personal. Fans line tiny local roads that wind their way through rural villages so close that they can knock a cyclist off their bike. This is a sport that's truly European, as American paranoia would have no fans within a hundred feet (er meters) away. Indeed, Eddie Merckx failed to win a Tour because a rowdy fan punched him.

Floyd Landis became a bit of a hero, an American most had not heard of. He was something of the anti-Lance. He seemed like a good old boy, not particularly photogenic (but then, neither was Lance), warmer to crowds than the bullish Lance. While he held the lead for a bit, he lost many minutes with only 3 days left, only to come back the next day and make up all the missing time, and hold his lead until the final.

That was before there was some testing, and Landis was accused of doping, trying to enhance his performance. Although a second test also showed evidence of doping, Landis continues to fight to this day to clear his name. One consequence was Landis did not bike this Tour. With his hip that needed impending surgery, Landis was willing to oblige.

In the intervening year, frequent rival Jan Ullrich, who could never quite beat Lance once he started winning, retired.

This year, no American looked to be the favorite, but perhaps it's all the better. Alexandre Vinokourov, who had been a strong contender last year, had to drop out, with accusations. Tour lead, Michael Rasmussen was also excused from the race. The two names together have made this one disaster of a tour.

Perhaps no sport so scrutinizes its athletes as does cycling. Even doping tests for baseball don't have the immediacy of cycling, where results are found as the arduous competition is still in play.

Of course, Americans don't care, once again. The NBA is dealing with scandal as a referee has claimed to fix games to alleviate gambling debt. The Feds are after Michael Vick for dogfighting. Baseball has to come to grips with Barry Bonds, who's on the verge of breaking Hank (Henry) Aaron's home run record, with the taint of steroid usage.

Sport is all about competition, but at the highest levels, people look for an extra edge to overcome deficiencies in their physique or training.

But no sport seems as close as cycling is to self-destruction, and at its biggest event. A tragedy, it is.

Cornstarch! In Japanese!

Yes, cornstarch!

The Future's So Bright

Danny Boyle's latest is about to hit the theaters. Danny Boyle, in case you didn't know, directed such films as Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, Millions, 28 Days Later. He has a pretty good visual style, and perhaps is similar in style and success to Brian DePalma.

Boyle has recently directed the film, Sunshine. I won't spoil the details that much. I will only point out that there have been abysmally few movies in the science fiction genre that can compete with 2001. As slow as the film is, as mediocre as the acting is, the film reaches for profundity while it asks the question "where do we come from" with an answer that doesn't resemble those given in Judeo-Christian-Islamic texts.

Kubrick did something absolutely amazing, so amazing that no one dares copy it. He made a film where the characters were barely that at all. Did you like any of the characters in 2001? Hal becomes the closest thing to either a rooting or hating interest. The rest are bland, bland, bland. But the effect of this is completely unreal when it comes to the final scenes that are surreal, to say the least.

Many directors have made some attempt at 2001. There were some movies about Mars, that didn't fare so well. The Russian film, Solaris, is apparently the closest. The remake by Soderbergh isn't even really a remake, though it does hint on science fiction, and of course, on relationships.

2010 tried to compete, but made an interesting decision. They wanted to have real characters. They couldn't help it. How could they possibly make a film where the characters didn't matter?

So Boyle is likely to do the same in his film, Sunshine, about the Sun which is dying much sooner than expected. This is the second mission that is attempting to reignite the sun. Of course, given how important this mission is, you'd think that there would be spacecrafts sent out all the time to make this possible, rather than some Black Hole story of one craft sent out years ago, and lost, and a second sent out to complete the mission years later.

Instead of the black hole as menacing, it's the sun that's menacing. Obvious lines are spewed out about the fact that if the sun dies, then so do we, the kind of lazy exposition that is supposed to pound the impact to the lowest common denominator audience (us), as if the crew members didn't already realize how important this mission was.

Even so, the reviews have been pretty good, if not amazingly outstanding. We're not wow'ed by special effects like T2 or Matrix. No one seems to claim that it breaks new ground in SF. As profound as some SF writing has been, it can reduce to other genres, typically, space fantasy, space opera, space adventure, and rarely about the heady topics that SF writers address.

So hang on for a week, put on your SPF 1,000,000, and a nice pair of shades, because, baby, the sun's gonna be a bit bright.

The Future

Pack-a-touille

You know one thing I really don't like about myself. I'm a pack-rat. Not as bad as the worst, but bad enough. And the thing I pack the most? Books. Not only is it an expensive habit, it's a pain when I have to move. It's perhaps a rare perfect storm when there are two of us in the house that have tons of books, but to credit my housemate, she's probably read a good deal of her books, and if need be, her books would fetch more than mine would.

It's not that I read (or more precisely, buy) trashy stuff that no one else would buy. No, I buy stuff that goes bad quickly. I buy books on technology. Thus, I have a book on Windows Millenium (useless) and on XP (still OK) and on old versions of Java (useless). And I'm not often content getting one book on the topic. I need like every book on the topic. There's some kind of weird insecurity going on there, I have to admit.

How many books do you think a person needs on Python, a programming language? 2-3 tops, right? Perhaps some specialized Python books and one intro one. I'm sure I have a dozen on the topic, half of them intro.

What I'd really want, oddly enough, is a bookstore that I could just go to at anytime, that would never throw out books. I don't actually need the books at any point in time, and I'd like to get rid of them once their usefulness has declined.

But the painful part, as I mentioned, is moving. Let's say you have hundreds of books, as I do. You can box up maybe 15-20 books in a box. That's still, say, 50 boxes, if you had 1000 books, and I'm sure I easily have a thousand, possibly even two thousand books.

Insecurity, I think. If I don't know it, I want a book to tell me about it. I wouldn't mind using the web so much but there's something funny, don't you know? People seem to write far better stuff when it's for a book they intend to sell then when they will make no money off of it. Dave Thomas is a great writer of Ruby books. But does he want to make no money off it? Were people willing to lavish him with computers, food, and anything his heart desires, maybe that answer is yes. But for now, the books allow him to make direct and indirect money.

I was talking to the wife of a friend, who admonished me by saying that libraries have plenty of books for free! I decided not to engage her in debate saying that libraries don't have my books, and are likely never to have my books. They are so specialized, that it would be like having books on the classification of different Amazonian insects.

I suppose I wouldn't even mind if it was cheap, cheap, cheap to get someone to do all the heavy lifting, but in reality, it isn't. You can get some friends to help out, but they want to do it in one short burst of a few hours of time. They don't want to continuously help you like actors in a Stanley Kubrick film, who, in case you don't know, was famous for working on films for years, and getting actors to do a hundred takes.

It's so bad that I think I couldn't even sell the books for a dollar a piece, thus making the poorest return on my investment, but still better than nothing.

It's depressing really.

And so it goes.