Aardvark

I've been, on-and-off, following Joel Spolsky's blog for a few years now. I first became aware of Spolsky when I read (or at least bought) his book on user interface designs, which came out in 2001. Since then, the way to read about his musings is in his blog, JoelOnSoftware.com.

Joel's pretty opinionated about how you make a great software company, which is no doubt, highly influenced by his time at Microsoft. You can tell that the "Microsoft Way" pervades everything he does at his company, Fog Creek Software. In a nutshell, the goal is to "hire the best". If Joel had his way, out of 100 potential programmers coming out of college, maybe 1-2 should ever be hired.

To give you an idea of this, imagine you're in college, seeking a computer science degree. Four years of studying algorithms, implementing operating systems, using databases, and simply playing around with software on your own time, because, hey, that's what geeks do. Surely, the classes you take in computer science are not enough to make you "the best". You must invest time outside of class learning the technologies of the day.

As you make your way to senior year, you have maybe 50 people in your class. Out of which, maybe 1-2 seem like really bright guys, the so-called superstars. They make A+ on their exams, and seem to everything. And maybe that one person, just maybe, is good enough to be hired at Fog Creek.

Or at least, that's how Fog Creek wants it to be.

Let's just see how difficult it is. To give you a better picture, imagine you've been hired as a football coach at Podunk University. You've been hired to start up a college football program, which is a huge undertaking, since you're starting from scratch. You want a successful program, so you want to recruit the best high school talent across the country. After all, you can't win, if you don't have talent.

Can you simply go out and get that talent?

Of course not. There's plenty of other universities with huge budgets, years of success, and established relationships with local high schools. You'd be competing against Florida State, Penn State, USC, Notre Dame, Michigan, Miami, and all the other powerhouses, trying to convince Joe Blow that he should come to your college to help you become a quality football team.

What assurances does Joe have that you can pull this off? Why should he take his chances on a college starting its program from nothing, with no proven history? It might be different if you were, say, Bill Parcells, who's succesfully coached the Patriots, Giants, Jets, and now the Cowboys, and you were bringing your staff with you, and could assure this young kid that you have NFL credentials, and it will pay off by being coached by the best.

Thus, one way to start from nowhere is to be someone.

So that's step one for Joel Spolsky. If you're Joel, you need your name out there. That means you need to do something that makes people care about what you say. First step for Joel. Write a book. Of course, to write a book, you need to be knowledgeable enough about an area to write something, but let's say he is.

Good, book gets you some fame, but it's not enough. Tons of people write books. It's not a way to distinguish yourself. It helps to get people coming back to you, time and again, to hear what you have to say.

Step two. Blog. Now, I read Joel's blog, but he has a (kind of) rival. Adam Barr, who also worked at Microsoft, then left, then came back again, has his own blog: proudlyserving.com, a website named after a book he wrote about his experiences at Microsoft. Adam's opinion about MS is more evenly balanced, probably because, unlike Joel, Adam doesn't run his own company.

Barr's blog, lately, has been tough to read. He's spent more than a few entries blogging about Monad, the scripting language that's supposed to come out with Microsoft's newest OS, which was nicknamed "Longhorn", but is now being formally dubbed as Vista. I couldn't care two whits about Monad. I mean, I think it's cool (at least, I think), but if I'm going to casually read his blog, I want it to be either less technical (talk to me about the computer industry, how to make great software, etc), or pick some technology I care about (say, Ruby on Rails).

Joel, on the other hand, doesn't fall into this trap. He's not going to blog about the minutae of Windows APIs, because even the geekiest of geeks just doesn't care. Even if this kind of knowledge is crucial to making great software, it makes for awfully pedantic reading. Even technical blogs can't be too technical.

Sometime between steps 1 and 2 is picking a place for your company. And this is big. You think you can pick any place for your company? You can't. Even Microsoft, located in Seattle (Redmond, if you want to be picky), has problems getting some people to go to their company. Why Seattle? Why not New York? Why not California? This is a common lament of some people who think Seattle is some kind of backwater.

Microsoft, of course, doesn't really have to suffer this problem anymore, because, let's face it. They're Microsoft. People would (almost) go there if they were located in Idaho. (OK, that's not true, but the name value really overcomes those who would rather be in New York).

It's not that you can't find talented programmers who grew up in rural spots, it's that the people who most like rural spots, or at least, non-metropolitan spots, happen to like their own rural spots. You get a person who lived on a farm in Iowa, and they're not going to want to head out to some place in Wisconsin, or Alabama. They happen to like their hick town over yours, thank you very much.

Amazingly enough, you can convince someone from a hick town to go to the big city, because they'll, at the very least, think that it's good for their career, even if they hate the city, and basically, if they've been cooped up in small town, USA, they may not even know they really hate the city (it's just that that's what they're used to).

That means Joel has to have his company in California or New York City. He likes New York City, so that's where it goes.

Now there are plenty of people who can't stand the City, especially, they can't stand the folks who call New York City, the "City", but that outweighs the bunch who don't care, or actually love it.

I mean, Joel could have based his company in, say, Atlanta. Now, there's a large metropolitan city. But Atlanta is in the Deep South, and people have all sorts of negative images about the Deep South, especially those from the "City". That's OK, because those in Atlanta hate those in New York.

Point is, Joel can't locate just anywhere if he believes in getting the best talent.

Next step. What software to write.

Joel's mainstay at Fog Creek is FogBugz, a bug tracking system. These days, it's not PC to say you have a bug tracking system, because you want to do two things in such a system. Bug tracking is number 1. Number 2 is feature tracking. You want to add a feature, and you want to track it to completion.

Ultimately, this is a great first product. On the face of it, it sounds lousy. After all, plenty of these systems exist. But do any of them really stand out? Is Bugzilla really that good? It's not hard, if you do it right, to make yourself stand out as a top notch content tracking system.

But it's great for another reason. When you're working in a company that needs to do its own software management, you have to convince everyone to use the system. What better way than to make the system and then, as software guys term it, dogfood it. Dogfooding is this notion that, if you were making dog food, it would be so good, you'd eat it yourself. Now if that idea repulses you, think about how people write software. There are times where folks write software that they wouldn't use, because, like dog food, the thought of doing so would make them yak.

You make your own tracking system, and then you use it. That's incentive to make it the best system you can, because you're having to use it.

But it expresses a more common theme for the kind of software that Fog Creek wants to write. The idea for most of their software is dirt simple. For example, they also have a system for publishing your own webpages. I mean, come on, this isn't rocket science. (Hmm, I really want to use some other term besides rocket science, because, frankly, it's so 1960s. I should say, it's not string theory, which would at least be plausibly difficult).

Next step. Corporate environment. Spolsky just moved into his latest digs. He wanted extra nice rooms/cubicles, a place that looks cool to go to work. He has to make his place look really cool. Microsoft, for example, prides itself in lack of cubicles. It believes that, with the trend to cubicles, having an office is just the kind of throwback that people need. There's a flip version of this which is having no cubicles at all, where everything is open air, so you can just yell out at people as you need to.

Joel wants to get the best talent, but it occurs to him that he may already be losing talent as the kids come out of college. Computer science majors aren't known for their outgoing, risk-taking natures. They want stability. They want money. Big companies can afford them both of that. However, big companies often snatch kids as interns. Once you like to work at some place as an intern, then that sense of familiarity makes it all the easier to convince the person to stay full-time.

Joel realizes without a great way of attracting interns, he's not going to get the talented kids he wants at his company. The blog goes part of the way there. It's attracting him some notice. Good kids are applying. But he wants to take it to the next level.

What to do? What to do?

Ah, let's have the kids build a product from start to finish. Great, great. Those who come will get to see the whole software development cycle crushed into the tiny time-frame of twelve weeks. But is that enough? OK, we need the kids to blog about the experience. But is that enough? Let's have a documentary!

I read about the documentary on the blog, and am one of the several thousands who pre-order it. It just came in the mail like two days ago, and I'm eager to watch.

Let me tell you my expectations. I am expecting to see how software is developed and managed at a company like Fog Creek. How do they do things differently from, say, the company I work at? What are the keys to hiring the best, and then what are the keys to getting them to perform, and what would happen if they couldn't hire the best? Do they use agile methodology? Are there code reviews?

Realizing that they are software engineers and not filmmakers, they hire a company called Boondoggle Films to do the work.

I'm about half way through this documentary, when I realize there's no way they're going to talk about what I want them to talk about. There just isn't enough time. Instead, it's a geek promo.

Here are the keys. Sell New York City. Sell the geek qualities of the kids. Sell the party qualities of the kids. You know that the kids feel like idiots in some of the set-up scenes. For example, the kids want to host a party, and they re-enact the grilling they go through when the complex says it's against the rules to host a party with excessive booze. This is, and I kid you not, re-enacted in black and white. The four interns are thinking "what the hell?".

There are several things that I do find rather positive. First, the company is run by a coder. That somehow makes a big difference to me. The company I'm at feels like it's run by marketers, and this ultimately means that there's disagreement about what's important to the people who market versus those that produce the product. It feels so much more sensible if a software guy runs a software company.

Second, they get kids their own places to stay. Our company told interns to find their own spots. Microsoft does this too. They own apartment complexes right near their "campus", and interns don't pay for it, nor do they have to look for their own spots. The Fog Creek apartments aren't their own, but at least, they got it for the kids, furnished it with large TVs and a DVD player. This means they are always thinking, how do we get the best talent? What do we need to spend to make it happen?

Now, it's not like these kids couldn't have found their own place, but the idea is to get them to get along with one another, and what better way to do this than to make them live with each other. Sure, they may come to blows, but it fosters a togetherness that wouldn't otherwise occur.

Like I said, I'm halfway through watching this, and I decide I want to blog about this. Normally, in a movie, you have to watch from start to end, and there's no way to do anything about this until you're done. But this is a DVD, and I can just pause it, and blog away.

So far, I've told you what I like. Here are the things I don't.

These days, documentaries are resurging in popularity. I should say surging, because up until recently, it was hard to catch documentaries outside of PBS. The reason they are popular is because people who make documentaries suddenly realized they needed to do more to make themselves watched.

First thing they had to do was to pick subject matters people care about. Enough about the plights of Native Americans and post Holocaust victims. We want to see a guy eat at McDonald's for a whole month, and nearly die from it.

Second, and this is important. Camera tricks. Watch, say, Tarnation, and you see that if this were handled like a straight-forward documentary, it would be, sure, compelling, but still not exactly as visually exciting as what Jonathan Caouette eventually came up with.

The director does diagonal framing, black-and-white, stuttered pans, quick swish-pans from spot-to-spot-to-spot. The idea is to keep the camera angles interesting, because goodness knows, the subject matter may not be.

What also hurts, to some extent, is to distinguish between one geek and the next. I know one guy seems a bit Russian, and there's one kid with glasses, but only Joel really stands out, and that's because he's more self-confident than everyone else.

But I came in wanting to understand how software gets created, and what I get is a kind of travelogue. Rather than deal with the meat of what these kids are really doing, they deal with the fringe aspects. Where they live. What geeky things they like to figure out on the side. It's as if the main topic, building software, is simply way too technical, for even techies like me to follow. Or at least, too boring.

This is where having a filmmaker make the film hurts (I think). I'm a computer science guy, and I've taught. I also care about how people learn. I'd make the film about that. What is it that separates these kids from the average Joes of the world. Unfortunately, to really show this, you'd have to start showing why smart kids are smart, and that means showing why dumb kids are dumb, and that's a touchy subject. You can do without showing this part, and that would still work as a film.

I've talked to an intern who claims there's nothing she learned in college that she uses. To be fair, she learned coding in high school, and to be fair, you can never tell how indirect stuff helps you in your everyday job. Just because you don't use physics at a company doesn't mean you didn't use the fact that you learned physics to help out. Solving difficult problems, regardless of its domain, can have indirect impact in solving any other difficult problems.

Anyway, I'm leaving the second half of the documentary until tomorrow (which is today, since I'm blogging at 3 AM). I've stopped at the point where they came to the DC area to show their wares. I remember it was local enough that I could have attended. I had to work then, so I missed it. Anyway, we'll see how that turns out.

Beat It

Mike D'Angelo has raved about a few films that have terrified him. I remember, first and foremost, was David Fincher's, Se7en. Quoth Mike, I cannot recall ever responding so physically and viscerally to a motion picture before. A few years ago, at a film festival, Mike said the same thing about Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (the other Kurosawa) Pulse.

So effusive was his praise, that his quote "More frightened than I've ever been in a movie theater" sits on top of the English release of this film.

Given his similar reaction to The Blair Witch Project, and the tepid response by true horror fans, all I can say is that D'Angelo (and critics like him, say, Scott Renshaw) do not watch horror on a regular basis. To be fair, I don't watch them either, but I know to take his hyperbolic descriptions with a grain of salt.

J-Horror, as Japanese horror is referred to, lacks the kind of jump-out-of-your-seat thrills that horror has, and prefers a creepier, moodier setting.

Pulse wavers between two films. The first half of the film is about seeing strange visions on a computer. It involves a group of students who seem to work in some kind of botany lab, and an economics student named Kawashima, who decides to get onto the Intenet for the first time, and has his computer showing him scenes of people, before sending him the eerie message "Do you want to see a ghost?".

The first half is creepy. There are rooms sealed in red tape, and what appears to be burn marks of bodies on the wall. Later on, a random student explains (in his mind) the strangeness as ghosts leaking into the world. It appears to be a meditation on seeing something so frightening that one becomes disengaged from the world, and that people seek others and fear being all alone.

As the film heads into the second half, it becomes less horror, and more of a zombie post-apocalyptic world, as people are beginning to disappear, after seeing ghosts.

And as it headed into the second half, I was wondering when it would ever end. I suppose Pulse is about the fear of losing everyone around you, more than conventional scares.

Oddly enough, after I left the film, shortly after midnight, and was walking the nearly desolate streets of DC, heading to the Metro, on a cold windy night, then heading into Metro Center, and staying on the train for ten minutes or more, before it finally moved (apparently, the last train of the day--it was waiting for those with connections to work their way to this train), I felt an isolation to everyone I saw.

To be sure, these were strangers to me, but it seemed all the more heightened after watching the film.

This is the second film I've seen (the other one being Samaritan Girl, or was it Tropical Malady?) with Windows products in Asian lettering. I have to wonder if there are MS employeers who think about the internationalization efforts that allowed the software to cross international borders. I know it's a particularly geeky thing to think about, but I suspect there's still a film out there that still needs to touch on those who live their lives on the Internet.

These first films that have explored the Internet see it as a creepy Frankenstein creation. Films like Copycat or Me, You, and Everyone We Know deal with the fear elements. Occasionally a film like You've Got Mail or Napoleon Dynamite envision the possibility of love. I think there's still something more that can be said about this brave new world.

Email and Beyond

1994. That's a little over ten years ago. The web was barely anything in those days. Free email was fairly uncommon. I used to find it peculiarly funny to overhear others talking about email, because it seemed like something academics and geeks used. But it didn't take long before email has become so ubiquitous that no one bats an eye at it.

Email and IM away messages have become a peculiar way to advertise something to friends. For example, consider this
site. If it persists that is. I found this off someone's away message or their personal info from their IM. It's a video of Christmas lights synchronized to music. Whether it's real or not is up to debate, but it seems plausible that someone could do it.

A while back, I saw something called Ping Pong Matrix, which had two guys "playing" ping pong. In fact, the ball was held on a stick and made to move as if the players were hitting it. The two players were lifted and moved around by people dressed in black and it created a funny effect. This video has made the rounds, as has one by Sony where four robots to a robot dance (Sony's robots, I guess).

In the past, such oddities would hardly be seen. Maybe you'd read about it in a newspaper, but these days, you can just get on the web and see it. It's really become an amazing way to transmit information, even if it's usefulness is rather dubious.

I've also noticed that, although technology moves quickly, not everyone is ready to keep up. OK, so there's email, there's web-browing. Lots of people buy stuff online. But how many people are still running Windows 98? How many people are perfectly happy with dial-in. How many people don't want or need wireless access?
Clearly, the issue is money and interest.

My parents barely use the web. I know people who would sit hours in front of a computer for fun. They watch movies, read comics, read newspapers, whatever. But if you've never done this, why do it now?

I can't say I'm up on everything. I should be listening to podcasts. Maybe I should podcast myself. I told my dad recently what podcasting is. I want to know how RSS does what it does. At the very least, I've heard of these terms.

The kinds of technology that seem to work best are those that people absolutely can't do without. So far, that's cell phones, email, and the browser (maybe video games, if you want to include that). It's difficult to make people embrace technology they don't think they need, especially if it means learning something new.

PDAs, for example, are still relatively uncommon. I only know a small percentage that use it. You're more likely to find someone with an IPod than a PDA, even if th e prices are somewhat similar. Music resonates far more than a reminder service.

What does the crystal ball fortend? Who knows? We'll watch it unfold in the next few years, and see.

Harry to the Max

I caught Harry and Max on DVD recently, after watching Race You To the Bottom at Reel Affirmations.

Ostensibly, the story is about two brothers, with a manipulating mother, who jump starts their singing career. Harry's the older brother, fading boy-band one-hit wonder. Max is starting up his career, though he wants to major in physics at some top-notch university.

The story's ultimately about incest. I've seen enough films on the topic that it doesn't particularly faze me to watch another one. This is generally sympathetic to this relationship, although generally unsympathetic to the lives that kid singers lead.

What really hurts the film is it's awkward unnatural dialogue. By contract, Race You To The Bottom seemed far more natural, despite also having moderately intelligent people. I just couldn't believe these two were brothers, and certainly didn't buy they were music stars.

The two parts don't mesh well. When dealing with celebrities, it helps to have the trappings of celebrities. You don't see band practices, nor agents. Instead, the story tosses out any external people, and focuses on about four people. Harry, Max, the chick played by Rain Phoenix, and an older guy who Max once had a thing with.

Oddly enough, the parts I liked best were throwaway scenes, with music overlayed on top of travelling the roads. I don't why.

This might have been a good story. The actors are good enough. But the script really needs help. It just doesn't seem real enough, or emotionally involving.

Potter Pans

On Black Friday, I went to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire at the local multiplex near my folks. Reviews had been, overall, positive, some placing this as the best of the four Harry Potter films.

Although I did enjoy it at the time, I felt the entire first half of the film was a bit of a muddle.

Let's see. There's a tri-wizard tournament, where two other schools are invited to Hogwart's. It turns out one is an all-girls school and the other an all-guys school, and they're appropriately stereotyped. The girls are dressed in blue, speak French, and flirt. The guys are lead by Victor Krum who's a complete non-character. Does he utter five words throughout?

The tournament is explained as something dangerous, and yet, there's nothing Amazonian about the women, and indeed, the female representative (each school has a single representative, except Hogwart's which has two. Harry Potter, whose name is mysteriously entered in the goblet of fire, and is spit up as a contestant, despite Harry being too young) wilts appropriately.

Mike Newell, who directed this film, is the first British director of this British fantasy series. Unlike the other directors, he grew up in a British boarding school, and infuses the story with little tidbits, such as a study hall where Snapes keeps whacking people who talk.

It's also the most international cast of the four films. There's East-European Krum, and the French whoever they are, and even the Indian girls who serve as dates for Harry and Ron (and Asian Cho, with an Irish lilt). They are suitably dissed, as Harry is too shy, and Ron pines after Hermione.

The ending is not terribly deserved because the character of Cedric Diggory isn't developed. Ultimately, if Goblet of Fire fails, it's because it tries to cram too much story, of an uninteresting sort, into two and a half hours of movie, and can't do its many parts justice.

Shortly afterwards, I saw an A&E special on Harry Potter, which is really the actors promoting the film, and pretty much summarizing it too. As usual, you see ideas the director had that, at least for me, didn't come across as I had thought. For example, I didn't really get the sense that Dumbledore wasn't all-wise and all-knowing, and that for the first time, he was unsure of himself. That's mostly because I didn't get a sense that he was all-knowing and all-wise from the previous films.

I'll also say that the kids looked really young in the first film. It's amazing to see just how youthful they were, much like the old Full House episodes.

Well, there's still Kong, Narnia, and Brokeback Mountain. Hopefully, they'll turn up better.

Savage Love

I was listening to the local NPR's fund-raising drive. This happens, I believe, twice a year. There are critics who think the government shouldn't fund a leftist radio organization, the same kind of critics who say the government shouldn't fund the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) because of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe (do a Google image search if you want to see what kind of photos Mapplethorpe is noted for).

Fortunately, NPR seems to do a pretty good job of staying afloat from people who pledge during beg-a-thons. It's also a great time to listen to best stories that have been broadcast on the air. When you listen to these, you really see how deprived evening news, and even all-news networks like CNN are. If anything, NPR makes the stories more personal, and that makes it all the better.

One story I heard was about an Iraqi war veteran. He's suffering from post-war trauma. In this war, he had to kill for the very first time, and he had to do it time and again. He could justify the killing to some extent. He did it to protect himself. Even so, it takes quite a deal more iciness to have a complete disregard for life, even as most people's nature is to distinguish between them and us. They are inhumane. We are good people. They are monsters. We are solid folk.

This was one of the more harrowing stories I've heard, made all the more powerful because it was partly narrated by the man.

Another story was the origin of the song Ring of Fire, which Johnny Cash was well-known for. Johnny Cash was, until the time of his death, seen as a long-time country star. Since many people aren't country fans, that was all anyone knew about Cash.

When he died, there was a resurgence in the popularity of his music, due, I suspect, in large part to his deep, resonant voice, his abuse of drugs, and the darkness of his lyrics. Suddenly, it was hip for college-aged kids to revisit the songs of Johnny Cash. There's even a film with Joaquim Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as the leads.

Ring of Fire was, as it turns out, written by June Carter, who became Cash's wife. Except, at the time, she was not his wife. Both Cash and Carter were married. Carter was Nashville country royalty. Her mother was also a singer, and highly regarded. She was also raised religious, a good Southern Christian, who beliefed in hell and brimstone for sinners. And she lusted after Johnny Cash, a man that was not her husband.

She wrote a song Ring of Fire, to express this forbidden love, about a person descending into hell. She eventually divorced her husband, and Cash eventually divorced his wife, and they married, and basically lived happily ever after.

Another of the fabulous stories was that of Dan Savage. Now, I know very little of Dan Savage. I knew he wrote a column called, not surprisingly, Savage Love, which is a kind of advice column, I think. His name suggests, well, a kind of savageness, even though, that's quite a silly thought to have.

I didn't even know Dan Savage was gay. So, he is. He's been with his partner for about ten years. A few years ago, he and his partner decided to adopt D. J. During the height of the 2004 elections, one major topic that got a lot of play was gay marriage. It said something of the moderately insidious nature of this topic that it both pushed gay marriage further than it has been pushed, and yet galvanized the religious conservative base to vote on referendums that basically acknowledged that states considered it illegal to have same-sex marriages.

This was a bit of deception. Those who were encouraged to vote believed that not voting meant tacit approval of gay marriage, or even legalizing it. Conservatives in the know did not do much to disguise this untruth.

Dan's parents, one Catholic, one a Republican, wanted Dan and his partner to get married. They wanted them to show their commitment to one another through marriage. The two had only given it casual thought. As Dan says, when you admit you're gay, you are also saying that you are willing to give up marriage, kids, the whole lot. And, until last year, many political gays just felt Americans weren't ready to deal with gay marriage, and so gay marriage wasn't top on the list of political agenda items to push.

When it became the hot button issue, one of the people opposed was D. J. who was about 5 years old. He thought of marriage as something girls wanted, and guys didn't like marriage, so his parents shouldn't get married.

Now, I've never heard Dan Savage speak, until I heard this segment. For all I knew, he sounded like Howard Stern, a deep, practiced radio voice. Instead, he has the prototypical NPR voice, somewhat timid, and unassertive. I don't mean that he sounds stereotypically gay, because he doesn't. There's no lilt or camp in his voice.

The typical NPR female voice, to my mind, is basically the voice of Lisa Simpson. Remember the Johnny Cash story? It was narrated by Sarah Vowell. She did Violet's voice in The Incredibles, the shy, invisible girl character. She sounds like Lisa Simpson.

I can't really do the story justice. You should really listen to it yourself. Here's the link: Zing Zing, Zoom Zoom. You need RealAudio to listen to it. Go about 19 minutes into it. You'll be glad you did.

Ceviche

A few years ago, I went to Jaleo for the first time. In fact, it was on my birthday. A friend and I were wandering around Bethesda, looking for a place to eat. One place seemed closed. Another, too expensive. Then, we went to Jaleo, and the prices looked way cheap.

Once we sat down and had tapas explained to us, we found out why it was so cheap. Tapas is, for lack of a better word, Spanish dim sum. For those of you who've never had dim sum, this is basically Chinese appetizers. Restaurants specializing in dim sum usually do it on the weekends, from about 11 AM to 3 PM. If the size of the restaurant permits, they bring carts filled with appetizers.

Typical dim sum include dumplings of all sorts, beef, chicken, shrimp. They have fried rice, some veggies, battered balls, taro cakes. Occasionally, there are a few exotic items. Chicken's feet (which is basically chicken skin over very tiny bones) and possibly even congealed blood, for the really brave.

You point to what you want, or ask, if you don't know what you have, and the wait staff puts a mark on a card, indicating what you've ordered. Each appetizer is usually suitable for about 3, maybe 4, to get a small bite. A dim sum meal consists of eating maybe 4-5 samples, if you want something light, or upwards of 6-8, if you're really famished.

For a brunch, dim sum can be a bit heavy. Like much of Chinese cuisine, dumplings are known to be greasy, and so you have to deal with greasy food.

Tapas, in general, is not nearly this bold. Tapas, at least at Jaleo, splits into three categories, based on temperature. Modeled after a clothes washer, the temperatures are split into hot, warm, and cold. Unlike dim sum, there are no carts. You order with the waiter, and they deliver.

Since I've only had tapas maybe half a dozen times, I can't recall what items usually come with tapas. There's, I'm sure, some meat offerings, some fish, various veggie things. Overall, it's less greasy than dim sum.

Last night, I tried a place called Ceviche. Now, apparently, this is a Peruvian dish, and can best be summarized as "Peruvian sushi". You take raw fish, then mix it with, say, lime and cilantro. The acid tends to make the fish looked cooked, but it's raw.

Dave and I split the ceviche. We also both had mixed drinks. Dave had a daiquiri, in the style of Hemingway, which Dave said tasted like grapefruit juice. I had caipirinha, a Brazilian drink, made from lime, cachaça, and sugar. It's basically a Brazilian mojito.

Here's a description I found for cachaça.

Cachaça is Brazilian liquor made from distilled sugar cane juice. While rum is distilled from molasses, cachaca is distilled directly from the juice of the unrefined sugar cane. Before distillation, the juice ferments in a wood or copper container for three weeks, and is then boiled down three times to a concentrate. Cachaca is always distilled in such a way that the scent of sugar cane and inimitable flavor typical of rum are retained.

I've noticed that restaurants that sell mixed drinks usually have less alcohol than if you were getting it at a bar. At least, I think so. I did have a magarita at some restaurant, and they gave me something like 12-14 ounces worth. That was a lot of alcohol.

I also ate some kind of dish made with some cheese sauce, potatoes, tomatoes, avocadoes, and a soft-boiled egg on top. This was decent, but I was hoping for something a bit spicy.

Dave said that the place, despite being named after a Peruvian dish, is more of a Cuban place. It tries to look trendy, though Dave felt it looked like a chain, sort of a Latin American Tara Thai (Tara Thai is a chain Thai restaurant, as you might imagine). No idea whether that's true or not. Dave said Cuban food is generally not spicy.

Anyway, with the mixed drinks, and each of us having a modestly expensive dish, and splitting the ceviche, it all added up to a pretty penny, which I treated, since I'm the one making the money. I jokingly remarked to Dave that I expected him to put out. I wonder if that term is even used much any more. Make me feel old to use it!

Next time, I think, we'll try the Thai restaurant next door (I saw two former students at the Vietnamese restaurant, that really is next door--the Thai restaurant is really two doors down), which should be a lot cheaper than Ceviche.

I'd recommend trying Ceviche once, but the prices, and the general "it's all right" feeling I got, means I probably won't head back, except to get just the ceviche itself. One plus---the portions were tiny. I think restaurants should do that more often.

One minus. I decided to get more food. I went to the local Jamaican carry out. Oh, is this place ever slow. I decided to be brave and order the soup, which is called "Mannish Water". I'm sorry, but this has to be the least appealing name for a soup ever. I'm guessing that there is some sense that it is a masculine kind of soup, by I tend to think thoughts like rancid sweat. Not appetizing.

This time, they explained what it was. In parentheses below, it said "Goat Head's Soup". Also, not so appetizing. I still ended up buying it. It tasted a bit strange. There are some goat meat that had fatty parts. I have no idea if that was really part of the head. There was some kind of dumpling, and some kind of veggie like thing that looked like bamboo, but who's insides tasted a bit starchy like potatoes.

I had half of the soup, before putting it away.

Then, after that, I went to a party at Yancy's, who, I was told, lives nearby. By nearby, I thought this meant may 5 minutes away, walking. But it was more like a mile, walking. And it was cold. And I was carrying beer. And when I got there it was really crowded.

At these kinds of parties, one ends up talking to people that one knows. I talked to Arkady, a guy I occasionally play tennis with. He used to room with Justin, which is how I knew him, before both moved out to separate places. Arkady was there with two of his housemates.

The centerpiece of the party was something called the "Jesus Luge", if I understood what was being said. This was a frozen sculpture of Jesus on the cross. Well, it's more like Jesus as if He were a stuffed puppet, and an ice sculptor depicted this puppet. There's no sense in trying to capture the emaciated Jesus, so often seen in paintings.

This was meant to be some kind of blasphemous humor, which is fine by me, as I'm not the religious sort. Most people deemed it as uber-cool. I just wondered where one even finds such ice sculptors, and the logistics of bringing it back.

They must have invited some 40 people or more, and it was really crowded. I had the misfortune of standing in front of a side door, and was forced to constantly dance near that door as people attempted to go in and out. I know. I shouldn't have stood there, but that's how crowded this place was. I was trying to talk to this guy, Jeff, that was Dami's friend, and whom I had taken a course with once.

Finally, seeing some space clear up on the couch, Jeff and I claimed it so we could talk. It felt deserved after all that door maneuvering. We talked about how he was doing. He said he was happy to be done with school, and looking forward to not having exams. Jeff knew one other guy who seemed awfully stoked about the ice Jesus, and the guy asked to partner with him for beer pong.

We also talked with Dan, Jaime's college buddy, who usually comes to these parties. Dan's now a lawyer. He's always had insightful observations about pretty much everything. It turns out Jeff has been part of the ACLU, and asked Dan his opinions. Both seemed to hit it off because they seem to be near each other politically.

I wanted to head to work the following day, so I left just around midnight. Since I wasn't completely sure how to get back, I headed to route 1. It was cold, and I was walking around some motel, and people were making a ruckus, which I wanted to avoid. Turns out, it was nothing. I then thought about eating at this 24 hour diner. But it was locked, despite people on the inside.

I figured, that's good. I already had a dinner, then bought soup, then had some beer at Yancy's, so maybe I should head home and get to sleep.

And that was my Saturday evening.

Racing in Circles

For fifty years or more, the United States has dealt with issues of racism. Sure, racism goes back long before that, but dealing with the issue as racism has, it seems, been a more recent event.

In the 1970s, even as people tried to view the country in a color-blind fashion, there were challenges. For example, towards the start of the 1980s, rap (and then hip-hop) became popular, but generally serious listeners of rap were black. Even then, there were attempts of white rappers to cross over, most notably, The Beastie Boys. I knew folks who just couldn't stand rap or hip-hop. These were generally non-blacks.

However, non-blacks who grew up in the 90s have increasingly embraced the hip-hop sound. This is not to say that non-blacks listen to hip-hop exclusively, but that it is part of what they listen to.

The point? The point I'm making is that 50 years of dealing with the civil rights movement has shown increasing progress towards some kind of racial equality, or at least, a heightened sense of racism. Sure, you will always find people who are racist, and those who would brand others as racist often have issues too, playing the blame game, rather than dealing with their own form of "ism".

You would think a society, so sensitive to the racism label would, well, be rather racist. And, yet, because it's constantly in our face, the effect has caused us, for the most part, to be less racist.

I just read an article that was trying to discuss racism in France. In France, the government says that all French citizens are the same. They are French. Because they posit that everyone is French, they make no attempt to determine if there is racism. They collect no statistics. Even if people are being racist, and there is evidence to suggest they are, there's no way to document it, because the French government averts its eyes.

I'd guess, if you ask a French immigrant from North Africa, or a Turk living in Germany, would tell you that the "French", meaning the white "French" and the white "Germans" do not consider them French nor German. All the thoughts white Americans had about African Americans, in particular, are thoughts that run through Europeans for non-native Europeans.

Brazil is seen as one of those countries where blacks and whites often consider themselves equal. Intermarrying between blacks and whites is quite common. Yet, at the very highest levels of government and industry, whites are far more common. There's equality at the lower income levels.

Ultimately, it's not just race, it's culture. People group themselves to those that look and behave the same. I would imagine that, were blacks, whites, Asians, etc. thought alike, enjoyed the same songs, the same literature, and so forth, there would be far less difference, than the obvious skin tones. It's because there's a cultural difference on top of that, that people associate skin color with stereotypical traits.

That commonality, I think, would be bad, because it leads us to a stagnant way of looking at the world. Americans exclaim that no one would ever pay more in taxes than they receive, and yet the richest Swedes must pay exorbitant taxes. Ultimately, we're better off when we can challenge the way we look at the world, and this means everyone. Just because, say, one group is discriminated against, doesn't give them any more enlightenment than the next person.

To sum up, I find it fascinating that accusations of racism might lead to a less racist society than a society where the government claims no such thing occurs.

Programmer's Dilemma

I once read that computer science brings together people who think in the same way. That is, they think algorithmically. How best to describe this kind of thinking? Basically, it's problem solving using tools. The tool part can't be underestimated, because it's essential to the kind of solution you get.

For example, suppose the problem is eating spaghetti. I give you a fork and possibly a spoon. How do you eat it? One way is to get the fork in the spaghetti, use the spoon to push the fork against, and swirl. The spaghetti gets wrapped around the fork. When there are no strands left out, then you eat.

But, now I ask you to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. The swirling trick doesn't work nearly as well. Instead, you have have to lift the spaghetti up in the air, put your mouth underneath, and eat. Or you bring the bowl to your mouth, and slurp.

In any case, how you eat depends very much on what you use to eat. It depends on the tools available tool to you.

In a way, programming is much the same. Now, most people would tell you that the programming language is the tool. Say, Java or C++ or C#. However, that's no longer the case. The kind of software people want to write, say, server software, would require so much effort to develop the code to do the infrastructure that you'd drive yourself nuts. Other people have therefore created framework to make it easier to write these applications.

That's supposed to help you program. But, then people have developed all sorts of things that are peripherally realted to programming. For example, if you have multiple developers, you want some way to prevent one person from overwriting the work of another person. Software firms use some kind of version control system. There are several to choose from: CVS, Subversion, ClearCase. The problem? Suppose you get to know CVS reasonably well. Now, the company wants to switch to ClearCase. Now you have to learn more stuff.

Is this reasonable? Technology is both boon and bane to programmers. In order to program Java, I use Eclipse. Eclipse is not emacs. It has lots of features, in fact, far too many for me to keep track of. I'm sure I'm not using a bunch of features I could be using. Whose fault is it that I don't use it? I'd say it's Eclipse's fault.

You see, at one point, I learned how to program. Those basic skills are still the fundamentals of programming. Yet, the entire environment has changed. A good programmer these days must learn how to use a testing system, a version control tool, a build language like Ant, possibly XML and processing XML, possibly SQL of some sort, some server technology. Now, tell me, is that really necessary?

To give you an analogy, suppose I tell you to learn a musical instrument, say, the clarinet. You invest time learning the clarinet. Do you expect the clarinet to change over the years you use it? What if they move the keys around? Add keys. Remove keys. Add bizarre features? A double reed. An electronic sound modifier? What if the music notation changed on you? You have to learn to read a new form of music. It offers features (I can't imagine what) that you've never seen. You can see it's beneficial, but it's work.

Next week, you're supposed to be playing a trombone. Or now, you have a piano, and have to deal with chords. At one point in your life, you played the clarinet, and while that music is still fundamental to what you do, there's more crap to deal with. How much of this is algorithmic thinking?

My feeling is that, yes, the tools are changing, and changing, and changing some more. They address problems that programmers deal with, but there's no agreed upon solution. Thus, variation upon variation upon variation. You know why Mac lovers hate PCs and why PC lovers hate Macs? Because using the other computer makes them feel like idiots. They know how to use one computer well, and now they're told everything they learned is different, and behaves in some way they're not used to.

Is that worth it? Some people don't care. They love the new. They'll sit down and figure out whatever someone else has come up with, and deal with it.

I remember there was a skateboarder named Mark "Gator" Rogowski. He was a star in the skateboarding community, before drinking and self-abuse eventually lead him to jail. At one point, when skateboarding in parks lost its allure, a new kind of street skateboarding. Mark tried to keep up with this new style, but found he couldn't learn the new way of skateboarding. He tried using his old skills, but people didn't want to see it.

Did Mark suddenly forget how to skateboard? He got good at what he did, and then things changed on him. He wasn't able to learn the new stuff, or wasn't willing to.

To me, that's what it feels like programming has become. Most people just deal with it, but it's not like mathematicians, who basically have agreed what makes a valid proof. Once they have that, they just think and think. They don't have to learn weird stuff to do what they've always done. Sure, new techniques do become available, and at times, there have been mathematicians who couldn't wrap their heads over different math techniques, but for the most part, the way they do math lasts.

Anyway, like many other programmers, I do what I can to deal.

Dude, Where's My Blog?

There's a kind of discipline needed to blog. You have to believe that someone is going to read it, or, at the very least, believe that you owe it to yourself to put in entries. Things have been relatively hectic the last few weeks, so I haven't written much lately.

Let me try to redress some of that.

Last weekend, I went to the Northern Virginia Software Symposium. They were part of the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour, where speakers talk about the state of the art in Java. The conference is geared toward those doing enterprise Java development, which, to me, represents server technologies which includes some interaction with users and databases.

Although that's not the kind of Java programming I do at work, it is a useful gauge of where the industry is, or, better still, where the industry will be heading. Given the rapid changes in the software industry, conferences such as this give attendees some bearing, as they decide what they need to learn, to keep up.

In some ways, I don't like this kind of industry. An academic computer scientist would claim that what the industry does now is faddish. And it really is. How people write code to do what they do now will change in a few years. It's not that things are getting better and better, really. It's that the original solutions were so bad.

And it's not that they intentionally started off bad, but that they had no idea, when they started off, how much work it would take to write these enterprise applications, and how inefficient it would be. Often, when you design something, you want others to be able to decide how to use it. Thus, there is a lot of ways to configure the system. A lot of work is required to get the configuration to match your setup.

The lesson is that flexibility implies complexity. If the computers used by everyone was exactly the same. Same software, same location of software, same everything, then it would be easy. But everyone has something slightly different and want to set up stuff in different ways.

Anyway, ever since J2EE came out, and ever since people decided it was something of a headache, people have been trying to find other simpler ways to write software for servers.

The conference is set up in 11 sessions. Friday had three sessions, plus a keynote. Saturday and Sunday had four sessions each. Each session has six speakers in six separate rooms. The problem is deciding which session to attend.

My first thought was to attend some sessions on Ruby. Ruby isn't Java, but since Java appeals to the open-source community (although Java isn't open source), and in particular, since it isn't Microsoft, there's demand for Ruby talks.

Now, I heard of something called Ruby on Rails. This is a framework to develop web applications using Ruby throughout. Ruby is a language like Perl, but is object-oriented. Ruby, the language, was developed by a guy named Yukihiro Matsumoto, of Japan, who goes by the nickname, Matz.

Although I had expected some discussion about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, what I did not expect was that Ruby on Rails would be so incredibly popular. Dave Thomas, who is an entertaining speaker from England, recently co-authored a book on Ruby on Rails. He gave five entertaining talks, four of which were on Ruby.

The other talks were on Spring, Hibernate, Ajax, some stuff with graphics. Although I attended 11 talks, I heard only four speakers. I went to five talks from Dave Thomas. I went to two talks with Jared Richardson. I went to half a talk with Venkat Subramaniam. I went to one talk by Paul Duvall on Cruise Control. I went to two talks by Scott Davis.

Of the speakers, Dave Thomas was the best. He's funny and teaches well. Two things you want in a good presentation. Jared Richardson was good at presentation, but I felt his content was a little light. He also seemed to be plugging the company he worked at (before I came, we were a disaster---even if this was true, it sounds like bragging). Paul Duvall was OK, if a little bland. I should have attended a few more talks by Venkat, who is hyper. He talks fast, though I could follow him.

Venkat is also an amazing thrower. He would throw out candy to people in the room, and get very close to where they were, even if they sat more than five rows back.

Scott Davis was also quite good. He has this infectious smile and seems real happy all the time. I sat in a presentation about playing with various map services (via Yahoo Maps or Google maps) and then gave another talk on how to do XP (extreme programming) for one person.

From the entire symposium, I got a better feel for trends in Java. In particular, AJAX and Ruby on Rails seem like the hot subjects of the day, and it was suggested people spend some time learning how they work. Other topics of interest were Spring and Hibernate, something called RESTful services. There was a trend to lightweight solutions on the server, as opposed to the heavyweight solutions currently in place.

Although we don't do this kind of programming at my work, it was a good view into where the industry is headed, plus, since these speakers are selected by their entertainment and education value, many of them were quite good.

While I grumbled about giving up my weekend, I think it was still worth it. I only wish I could have caught a few more talks.

Atomic Energy

I first heard of Atom Egoyan about 10 years ago. Mike D'Angelo had written a review on Exotica, which he loved. Before Taratino (re-)popularized non-linear story-telling, Egoyan was doing it earlier.

Egoyan has been criticized for telling chilly stories, where characters are hard to relate to, and for appealing to the brainy set. He often opens his film with a peculiar scene. In The Sweet Hereafter, it is a view that's very odd, blurred. Over time, you see that it is water rushing down a windshield. Then, you see it is a person in a car in a carwash. This opening scene makes an apperance later, as it does in Calendar.

The opening scene of Calendar is a video being taken on a dirt road passing by, if I recall, sheep, or some herd of animals. The car lurches forward, then stops, as it negotiates past animals occupying the road. This scene is finally explained at the very end of the film.

Egoyan isn't like David Lynch, who often does not explain what he's doing. Egoyan explains, but in a subtle way. He gives you scenes out of context, and then puts them in context, making you piece together what's happening. In the middle of this intellectual exercise are often characters that are dealing with emotional issues, yet, he presents these traumas in a muted way, so subtle, you may not even notice if you don't pay attention.

One of my favorite Egoyan pix is one of his first: Next of Kin. It tells the story of a WASPish Canadian teen, who has the life. His parents are rich, but they are emotionally hollow. Nowhere is this more evident than in an early scene, where his parents sit near their indoor pool, and the boy is swimming. He hides behind a structure, out of view of his parents, and doesn't move.

Do his parents care? Do they rush to see if he's alive? His mother peers out for a moment, then goes back to reading. He realizes his parents don't care if he's alive or dead.

They go seek counseling. He finds a tape of an Armenian-Canadian family who is dealing with their own familial issues. The daughter, as many immigrant daughters do, is rebelling against her parents. They attribute part of their problems to a son they had to give up for adoption. The WASPish kid gets an idea. He will pretend to be their son. He is not Armenian, but he gives it a try.

The parents are so desperate to fill this missing void, that they don't even question that this is their son.

Ultimately, the film also serves as a kind of metaphor. We've all heard of American being a melting pot, but it's seen as something peculiar to the United States. Yet, people emigrated to Canada as well. Egoyan's family emigrated by way of Egypt (although he is Armenian).

The Armenian family isn't perfect. It argues. It tries to bridge the gap between the old culture and the new. The father likes to go to strip clubs, even as the mother has no idea, and devotedly stays at home. Yet, they are more vibrantly alive than the family that's considered more truly Canadian.

Egoyan hits several themes that he revisits again and again. First, there is some relation between the WASPish son, and the Armenian family's daughter. Egoyan hints at a kind of incest, even though they are not brother and sister. This kind of almost-incest occurs in Ararat between a half-sister and half-brother, though it's explored more explicitly.

He also visits the video as a form of digital memory. In this case, video is used in the interviews that the WASP kid views. In later films, especially, Calendar, it serves as a kind of selective memory, showing that even video, which is meant to be objective, is, at times, not at all objective. You watch what you want to, and what it means, depends on the viewer.

Egoyan also deals with some themes he doesn't explore so much in later films, such as the Armenian immigration experience. At one point, the "son" who is clearly in his late teens, wants to be held by his "mother" as she did when he was young, even though such an incident never occurred.

It is a form of rebirth, and as with many scenes, Egoyan mutes the emotional impact of this kind of rebirth. It is common among, say, born-again Christians, and yet, he does it without any religious implications. Egoyan constantly revisits powder-keg issues but never glamorizes or overplays it, partly, because he wants us to accept it as it is. I believe, for example, that he thinks incest is indeed fine, in the right conditions, but he also knows it's a very tricky subject, and so he must show it in a way the unintelligent viewer doesn't notice or care, and the intelligent viewer sees him sneaking the ideas in.

The transition theme also occurs at a birthday party. The kid has a birthday early on, where his real parents go through the motions. Then, he has another one in the Armenian family. They sing "Happy Birthday" before slipping into a traditional Armenian song, and you see the embrace of one culture for another, and one child into a family, serving both a small and large theme simulataneously. Egoyan seems to avoid this parallelism in his later films, preferring to tell the story at hand, and not make it metaphorical of something bigger (either that, or he's even more subtle).

Go watch Next of Kin, and you'll see a master at his audacious start.

Flights of Fancy

I meant to post this yesterday, but a bit of alcohol and all I wanted to think about was sleep.

I went to Cornell to do some recruiting. As usual, any university that's notable constantly builds new buildings. They built "Duffield" Hall, which sits in front of Phillips, which is the electrical engineering building. It effectively merges the building with other parts.

The result is that there is a wide open area at the bottom, and you can stare four or five floors up. This seems like a common theme for buildings. I was at the University of Illinois and the University of Washington, Seattle, and both computer science buildings create this open interior space.

The weather was perfectly miserable too. I can blame Hurricane Wilma, I suppose, but really, it's just typical Ithaca weather. Rainy and cold. All day long.

However, one plus was staying at the Statler Hotel. They should work out a deal where you get one day to stay at the hotel when you're a student. You might use this to arrange a special date, or something. In any case, it's a nice hotel, despite the fact that they forgot to return my on-flight pillow, which I spent way too much on. I need to call them about that.

Let me fast forward, past the cancelled flight to Philly, past the flight in a small noisy turboprop to Laguardia, and onto a huge plane to DC National. This plane should seat maybe 100 people. We had all of 15 on the flight. This one Latina girl was being particularly friendly, talking to people around her.

She insisted on finding out the middle name of a guy seated near her. He said she'd never find out. She said she'd tell him her middle name. Her first name was Alejandra, at least, I'm guessing that's how it's spelled. She asked him to guess her middle name. She only told him it was a male name and it started with "J". He wasn't able to guess, and so she told him, which means she told the entire plane.

Jorge. That's Hor-Hay. Her dad's name was Jorge, and so her middle name was Jorge.

Now she wanted to know his middle name. He said he wasn't going to tell. But she said hers, she pouted. OK, here's a hint: it's Scandanavian. So she guessed something like Bjornstromson or something atrociously long, and he said it was close. She made another guess that sounded more German than Scandanavian. He said it started with an "S" but was a last name.

Of course, I'm having fun, so I guess "Sven". He said, close, but it's a last name, so I guessed "Svensson", and he said that was right. So, eventually, she did find out his middle name. Michael Svensson.

He fit the look of some American with Scandanavian heritage. Tall and blond. He was there with a female companion that looked part Asian.

As it turned out, we got on the Metro, me, the guy I went to Cornell with, Michael Svensson and his female companion.

Normally, you don't get wacky (yet harmless) behavior on a plane. But when a plane is 70% empty, it seems the thing to do.

And naturally, my thought was---I need to blog this.

So Alejandra Jorge and Michael Svensson, you've been blogged.

Film Fest Marathon

Saturday, I decided to watch four films in a row. This was the last day of Reel Affirmations, a bad name, in my opinion, for a film festival. But it's in its fifteenth year, so they have to continue with the name.

At 2 PM, I saw 50 Ways To Say Fabulous. If there's one adjective that describes films out of Australia or New Zealand, it's quirky. And this one is too. Set in the 1970s, it tells the story of Billy, who's overweight, and not much good at rugby (his dad is into rugby), and his best friend and cousin, Lou, who's a tomboy. He sounds like a girl. She looks like a boy. Both are about twelve years old. Already, we're hitting gender bending issues.

New kid, Roy, is the awkward kid that comes to the small kiwi town that Billy lives in, and begins to fall for Billy. Billy's conflicted. He's not sure Roy's his type. When Jamie, a farmhand in search of a job, decides to live with Billy's family, Billy falls for Jamie, who's about 18 or so, and is another in the Brad Pitt type.

If anything, this film shares something of the sensibility of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. It depicts an idyllic New Zealand setting, with gay characters that resort to fantasies. In this case, Billy idolizes a female character in a science fiction TV series that resembles Lost in Space. The female character appears to be played by him, wearing a wig. The acting is a bit odd too. It isn't particularly naturalistic. Billy smiles a bit readily, almost in this antiseptic view of the 50s that's parodied nowadays.

The film doesn't even head to where you think it will go. In particular, you think Billy and Roy will get together. They don't make the perfect couple by any stretch. He's dealing with weight issues. Roy's just gawky. To the film's credit, none of the three leads are particularly photogenic, or even particularly likeable. The depiction of live in New Zealand resembles, I'd imagine, the kind of life in Welcome to the Dollhouse, where kids are particularly cruel to one another, even friends.

Setting the film in the past, and making it somewhat fantastical. makes dealing with the difficult subject matter of sexuality in early teens a bit less intense.

An interesting movie that doesn't quite end up where I thought it would.

Then, I watched a series of shorts. Some were awful. There was a short about three transvestives. One has bought a dress. She wants to meet a guy named Henri who dumped her, so he falls for her again, and she dumps him. She thinks the dress will work magic. Meanwhile, one of her roommates wants the dress, so she wears it, and her third roommate dumps ketchup all over it. There's not much more to it except some hijinks.

The next short was rather peculiar. It involves some guy who seems to have an internal monologue we can hear. He's looking for some photographer. He's drunk and drugged, and meets up with friends of sorts. It seems like a video from the early 80s, and frankly, made little sense to me. The best one, in my mind, was one about two brothers, who were close as kids. One brother was athletic, and always impressed dad. The other was less so, and always let dad down. To illustrate their relationship, the short opens with the two brothers in a swimming pool. One swims to the side, while the other is drowning, and dad is yelling at him to swim. The athletic brother jumps back in and helps his brother, thus setting the tone that the athletic brother helps his less athletic brother.

This theme has been explored in films like Gattaca, down to the swimming idea. In this case, once the kids have become teens, the shy brother kisses the elder, and eventually the two fall in love. To escape dad's wrath (dad is played by John Wesley Shipp who played the Flash in a short-lived series), the two run away. Then, it goes into Thelma and Louise. Deciding that they can't live without each other (the dad has sent the police to track them down), they decide
to dive in a pool, handcuff themselves to the ladder, embrace, and die drowning.

Shorts like this don't try to explain relationships. They generally don't have time. They set a mood and emotion, and to that extent it succeeds. I suppose it doesn't hurt that they make both brothers hot, though that always seems to be the way to deal with issues like incest. It certainly doesn't explain why incest happens, at least, nothing meaningful. I also found this film to be similar to Dead Ringers, also about two brothers, one successful and outgoing, and the other not so, and their strange closeness.

The next one was good, but hard to follow. It follows a guy who has sex with men in restrooms. There are images of dolls. It uses text printed on the screen to indicate what's going on. Done very much like an REM music video, it reminded me a lot of a darker, weirder, Peter Greenaway film. In particular, using text on the screen to convey information. There's some scene of a guy who loses control of his car, and kills a woman, and wants to hide her death. I couldn't quite recall if it was the kid's dad or what. It had a spooky feel that, say, MirrorMask didn't quite achieve.

There was also another film that was about an artist going blind, and a boy toy he has who paints for him. He doesn't particularly care for it. He has a lover that used to sleep with the artist, and tells him to kill the artist so he can be free of him and have his place. In the end, the guy can't do it, because he's essentially a good guy. I suppose it's trying to talk about art, and relationships between old and young, between those who can do art, and those who can't. Again, it's mostly an emotional piece, that doesn't try to explain how they got into this situation.

Then, I saw "The D Word". There was a a short prior to this, about some bookish lesbian, who wants to be involved in a wilder relationship. This eventually takes her to meet up with an ex into S and M. For some reason, probably due to dance numbers, it reminded me a little bit of Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, though Maddin films in a style suited to the 1920s. Then, there was a series of episodes of The D Word. I've never seen The L Word, so I can't tell you how it compares.

From what the director/writer says, The L Word is pretty white. Her version is more diverse. It follows several stories. There's the basketball player who's basically closeted, and falls for a cheerleader type. There's the girlfriend of a guy, who finds it more exciting to be with the African American owner of a local bar. There's the two happy women trying to find a sperm donor to have kids. There's the dykish gal who can't remember who she's slept with, and has nice nails. There's the transsexual who looks like a teen, and sings. There's the cop lady. It seemed pretty funny, but more suited for a television series, than a film.

Finally, I watched Loggerheads. I expected this drama, about a woman finding her kid. But, instead, it was a slow-paced story, told in three sections. One part is Bonnie Hunt, playing a woman who now lives with her mother, and wants to find her son, who she gave up for adoption 17 years earlier. The other story is about a minister and his wife, who is the family that adopted the son, but he was gay, and ran away from home. The third is about the son, who is trying to save loggerhead turtles, and falls for a guy who owns a hotel on the North Carolina coast.

The story is basically told in pairs. Bonnie Hunt's character is trying to deal with the guilt of giving up her son, which her mother did, because she thought it was best for her daughter. The daughter hasn't had much of a life since then, having odd jobs, and once thinking of killing herself. The son seems like he's modelled a bit after Timothy Treadwell, who is featured in Grizzly Man, but really, it never goes to the same depths to show his love for saving turtles. Treadwell literally found more comfort with bears than people.

The heart of this Southern drama is really about the minister and his wife. They lead a pretty quiet life, trying to be good Christians. As time passes, the wife realizes that they didn't do enough to keep their son. They let him run away. The film is pretty even-handed about religion. The minister seems like a good man, who listens to his wife. Chris Sarandon does a good job of underplaying this role and never seems like a demon, even though he can't accept his gay adopted son. The son, too, isn't resentful of his mother, either one, and says he was a good kid.

The film tries to avoid too many stereotypes about the South, about how gay relations can be, and about religion. If anything, Loggerheads doesn't really tread any new ground, other than to deal with things in a deliberate pace, and to be fair to Southerners that often get stereotyped. If anything, the film lacks a strong payoff, but there's a sense that it's better this way. Lives aren't always about the excesses of emotion. The gay relationship isn't particularly strong, and is more of a friendship, than anything else, and tries to convey the sense that the South can accept gays, at least, to some degree.

In the Q&A, an audience member asked about similar films about the south, including Junebug. The director knows the director of Junebug well, and he says the two, having grown up in the South, want to depict the South more realistically, rather than dealing in stereotypes. Another person questioned whether the minister, when getting his haircut at the local barber, sees a teenage kid, and gets lost in thought. Is he thinking of the kid as his own son? Is he a child molester, and that's why his kid ran away? The director said he left that scene deliberately vague, though he didn't want it interpreted that the minister was a child molester. He says that was an unfortunate side effect of news related to Catholic priests.

The director felt the movie resonates because it's really more about adoption and for a mother wanting to find her child. However, I believe the other themes are important. The reason for having a gay son and religious parents is to point out the importance of religion in the South, and how the South tries to reconcile the two, even though they can be at odds. Ultimately, it says the answer is family and love, that this is more important in religion than deciding who is viewed as a sinner in God's eyes.

So, the parts I liked about Loggerheads. A fair treatment of life in the South. A relationship that's built slowly, and isn't particularly torrid. Oddly enough, I found the story of a woman seeking her own son less compelling. It's really about the decisions we make in our lives, and how we choose to deal with them. Both mothers made decisions that caused the loss of the son they shared. If anything, they might have played up more about the son's desire to save the turtles as a way to find meaning in his life, but already, the film had two strong stories it was trying to tell. Having his story be strong, may have made too many competing parts.

I expected to be exhaused after eight hours of watching films, but it wasn't all that bad. Of the films I watched, I suppose I would place Loggerheads and Race You To The Bottom at the top of the list. 50 Ways To Say Fabulous has a few too many odd pieces that don't fit, even though it's weirdness resonates in a way. I admire it more for its casting choices, which avoid picking cute moppets for its leads, and for dealing with difficult subject matter of growing up gay and gawky.

Since this is a genre festival (as much as gay and lesbian is a genre), the quality of film is expected to be somewhat lower than for a general film festival. Gay and lesbian films still focus a lot on certain popular themes. It may show a sign of maturity when it can move past making and remaking certain films (coming out films, in particular), and perhaps fusing with other genre pictures, such as spy films, science fiction, westerns, and so forth.

I wish film festivals could be watched more conveniently at home. Don't get me wrong. The Lincoln Theater is a really nice venue to watch films (except its screen is too tiny). Even so, having to make a trek to go out to watch is a pain, and knowing that the film only shows once also makes it tough to see the film I want to see.

Still, after all that, the big film people are still anticipating is Brokeback Mountain, and that film, while this festival would have loved to show it, couldn't nab something that big.

The Truman Show

I've watched several films that have been set in the near past, about 30 or 40 years ago. Good Night and Good Luck was set in the early 50s. 50 Ways to Say Fabulous was set in the 1970s. Capote was set in the 1960s.
Loggerheads was set just 5 years ago, mostly because of laws that applied then, but no longer now.

There are several reasons to set a story in the past. The most obvious reason is that it's historical, and you want to set history at the correct time in history. A second reason is to evoke a period in history. I suspect moviemakers enjoy the idea of recreating a period.

Capote is set from 1960-1965. Unlike Good Night and Good Luck which didn't offer much insight into who Edward Murrow was, Capote does offer some insight into Truman Capote, the gay writer from Alabama, famous for writing Breakfast at Tiffany's before penning the non-fiction account of the murders of Clutter family by Perry Smith and Dick Hickok.

Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another great performance as Capote. The problem, I suppose, with biopics is the degree of impersonation. You don't have to get it right, per se. People admired Anthony Hopkins playing Richard Nixon, even if the impersonation isn't entirely faithful. It's even easier if no one knows who the person is. Richard Crenna once played Ross Perot, before Perot ran for President. If that film were made today, it would significantly narrow the choices of actors, because people would expect someone that resembled Perot.

The film, in many ways, parallels the story it's trying to tell. Capote is seen as someone who alternately cares for Perry Smith, seeing him as a darker side of himself. Both he and Perry were artists of sorts. Perry drew fairly well, and tried to read and use advanced vocabulary. Capote, of course, was well-known as an author. Both had mothers that were abusive and uncaring to one degree or another. Yet, as portrayed, Capote cared about his book and his own fame more than he cared about Perry. He was willing to like to Perry to get what he wanted, which was a good story.

To that extent, the film also dramatizes events. It was said Capote never wrote again after In Cold Blood, though he did write again, but just once. Other characters in his life are underplayed so Capote gets credit. This includes Harper Lee, who was Capote's best friend since youth. She's described as manly, but you never get a sense of that. Jack Dunphy is shown as, well, Capote's lover? I mean, you know they are friends, and perhaps more than that, but their relationship is never established better than that.

I once watched a horrible, horrible biopic about Dale Earnhardt. Half the dialogue seemed like a reading of Earnhardt's resume of wins. When Capote talks about his own work, at least, he's sounds egotistical. He loves to tell stories and to entertain crowds. He gains pleasure from the fame, and yet, they also want him to deal with the demons that favors the prisoners being executed so he can get a good story. There's some plausibility that he thinks he's writing the novel of the century.

If Capote is good, it's in its quiet portrayals and it's reproduction of the era, in its looks, but it resembles more of a photograph of the era than something really evocative. Again, Chris Cooper is excellent, in a supporting role, who plays the beleagured sheriff that wants to see the prisoners executed.

It's funny what you pay attention to in a film. Capote was a rather diminuitive man. Hoffman is about 5'10", not towering, but not exactly short. They must have played a few camera tricks to make him look short.

As with any film dealing with execution, there's always the issue of capital punishment. On the one hand, they show the grisly killing. On the other, they show the hanging (yeah, I was surprised about that too), and try to give the tension of what it must be like to be hung. Perry's breathing becomes elevated, his head covered in a black cloth, and the reaction of Hoffman reacting to the hanging.

There's supposed to be another Truman Capote film in the works, and that one will cover a longer period of time, especially a few years after this event. This isn't scheduled to come out until next year. It will be interesting to see how that one turns out. This kind of "movies in cluster" happens from time to time. For example, Dangerous Liasions and Valmont cover roughly the same story (based on the same play), though I much prefer the first. Valmont in particular has an ending that doesn't work for me.

Apparently, Milos Forman finds the thought of a woman that gets back together with a guy who seems to have control over her, then dumps him, to be rather emotionally intense, and uses it in this plot. Like Ebert, who recounts this story, I find it puzzling. He attributes it to European sensibility (or nonsensibility).

We'll see if the new Capote movie is any good or not.

I'll have to blog about the monster movie day I had yesterday, watching four consecutive movie offerings in a row. I wasn't exhausted really, so that bodes well for a life reporting at film festivals! :).

Home Of Phobia

Home Of Phobia. I mean, c'mon. That was really the title of a film? A romantic comedy? It might have been clever had it been, say, a horror film, with gay elements, or something, or even a family drama, but a romantic comedy? Clearly, someone must have agreed and decided to rename this to the nearly as bad, Freshman Orientation.

Coming out films are generally pretty popular in the gay genre films. Often populated by handsome, yet, conflicted teens, there's something that either appeals to folks as mementos of their youth, or, more than likely, discovering that someone, far better looking that you, has to deal with these issues. Coming out films are, almost always, dramas. The impact is discovery, and being judged by those who see you differently.

On the other hand, romantic comedies. This is a genre that manages to survive, despite resorting to cliches, and a story arc that is completely predictable. Presumably, so many of them are made because people still fall for its structure. Perhaps they are unaware that they are seeing the same plotline once again. Here's a romantic comedy plot. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl and vice versa. Boy and girl have a fight, and appear to break it off. Boy and girl reconcile, and all is well.

The devil is in the details. Sometimes, it's two boys, or two girls. I suppose there are a few where it's centered on the girl, though romantic comedies usually prefer following the guy. There's even the occasional movie that bucks all trends, like My Best Friend's Wedding, which is Julia Roberts trying to break up Dermot Mulroney and Cameron Diaz, until she discovers they're perfect for each other. It's really more screwball comedy than anything else.

Now, if I had to guess, I'd say Freshman Orientation was directed and written by someone gay, and yet the plotline, is rather peculiar. I can see how that can be both clever and offensive. Sam Huntington plays Clay Adams, who, I suppose is meant to be unlikeable at the beginning of the movie, though only in a sitcom sort of way, and learns something about himself.

OK, basic plot overview. Clay falls for a blond girl who's part of a sorority only because her mom got her in. Blond girl dislikes ex-cheerleader mom, but sees this as opportunity to get away from home, and the life she's supposed to lead. She gets a free ride at the sorority (why?). As part of initiation, each girl must find a stereotype (fat guy, Muslim), convince them to fall for her, invite them to a party, and dump them. The blond girl in question has to find a gay guy to fall for. Her "best friend" (not really) in the sorority is Jewish, and has to find a Muslim, but generally coaxes her to find a gay guy.

Enter Clay, who, trying to meet women, thinks joining a fraternity will help him score, and convince a guy who looks like young Clark Kent to join him. As part of hazing, they are thrown, while asleep and drunk, into the middle of some public area on campus, and everyone thinks they are gay. You have to admire the screenwriter for working this hard to have the plot make some plausible sense, yet, not.

Blond girl thinks Clay is gay, and Clay decides quite quickly that he is. Enter John Goodman, playing gay bar owner, to teach him otherwise. The film has a bevy of minor characters that populate it. Drunk horny lady. President of LGBT who is hot for Clay. Black, lesbian activist. Sassy, black professor. Blond frat guy who also wants blond. Head of sorority who seems to hate men, and has organized the dumpfest.

The film seems aware that what Clay is doing is repugnant (act gay to pick up women), and yet it works, so what's its real message? There was a film a few years ago about this guy who decides to be black to get admissions, and somehow learns about being black. Goodness, that idea was bad, and was the devil to execute (dark skin pigmentation does not make one black--there's facial structure as well, which is why Indians, as dark as African Americans, don't look like African Americans).

To be that heavy-handed a message movie would be hard to deal with, and Clay never really makes that kind of a transformation, because he's such a sitcom character to begin with. Huntington is all eyebrows and expressions.

If the film is enjoyable, it's in its tiny details. The audience I saw it with loved references to gay history sprinkled throughout, despite the story not really being gay friendly. It's a tricky tightrope of a story, which seems to suggest that being gay is a pretty good idea, but brings it as more of a choice, or at least, relatively fluid. One difficult thread has to do with Clay's roommate discovering he's gay and more than that, has fallen for Clay. But since Clay needs to fall for the blond, roommate has to find someone else to fall for, and since it isn't his story, that guy is someone even more closeted than himself.

The film is both ambitious and not, trying to juggle a bunch of people, most of whom are stereotypes. It barely addresses the much deeper topics that it hints at, such as the gay roommate that's in love, the possibility of gays being involved in unwelcome advances to straight guys, men-hating women. I think the audience enjoyed it, but I found it totally silly, and bordering on offensive. I have to say the writer, despite all sorts of contortions, makes it plausible for the two to get back together, given that the girl really has nothing to go back too, and as it turns out, neither does Clay.

Well, I may catch up to three films today. The first is a New Zealand coming-out story. The second is a lesbian comedy. The third is a family drama about a woman who wants to meet the son she gave up for adoption (who's gay). The trailer makes the title of the film way too precious. The title is Loggerheads, and is about the gay son's fascination with loggerhead turtles where the mother returns back to the same spot as where she gave birth. I mean, that's a huge amount of underlining. Of course, it has double meaning, as people come to "loggerheads", which means they fight, so there's expected to be a yelling match when they meet. Still, there are pretty good actors in this film, mostly, Bonnie Hunt, and the gay couple isn't hysterically good looking (like, Brokeback Mountain).

There's a fourth, that is a series of shorts, but I may have to miss that. We'll see. Four sets of movies would be quite daunting to watch. I've managed 2 before, possibly three with a break, but never four in sequence.

Bobo Skee Dottin Dottin

The first Bobo I can remember was Bobo Zivojinovic, who was a Croatian or Serbian player (can we say Yugoslavian). He did well one year at Wimbledon, and people loved his name. He was really Slobadan, but went by Bobo.

I recently checked out a blog entry from a friend who read Bobos in Paradise. The author, David Brooks, had lived a few years outside the US, and returned to find an interesting sociological trend.

The elite in America was an educational elite, who, instead of embracing blue blood and wealthy parentage, embraced education and the bohemian lifestyle. Bohemians, he noted, would like European coffees and poetry, but had a disdain for the search for wealth. However, there's a growing class of educated elite that embraces Bohemian lifestyle, while still seeking wealth.

Brooks refers to these folks as "Bobos" which are bourgeois bohemians (or vice versa).

I'm barely a chapter through this book, but it seems interesting so far. Brooks is detailing the fall of the traditional elite, where wealth was passed from parent to child, the old aristocracy, and the rise of the new elite, which was, ironically enough, encouraged to grow by the old elite, though likely without realizing the full consequences of what they were doing.

This is clearly a book written by bobos for bobos, as he makes numerous references that are aimed at those who have college degrees, and seek to be widely literate in the arts as well as business.

We'll see how it turns out. I know the term is used frequently by folks at Microsoft, and presumably any other comparable techie place (Google or Yahoo). It might be best I learn something about it.

Out and About

Wow, the Lincoln Theater is nice. No, no, not the Ford Theater, which is quite close to the E Street Landmark. The Lincoln Theater, which is on U Street and somewhere between 12th and 13th. Normally, Metro stops a few blocks from where you want to be. After all, it can't drop you off everywhere you want to go. And, yet, I stopped at the U Street Cardozo stop, which is the same stop to go to the 9:30 club, or the Black Cat, or the Studio Theater, each of which is a few blocks from the Metro stop.

Not the Lincoln Theater. Just get up on the 13th street exit, walk across the street, and you are there.

This was the 15th year of Reel Affirmations, what has to be the worst name for a Gay & Lesbian film festival (I suppose there are bisexual films--tonight's file might qualify, and aren't too many transgendered films either). Tonight I went to watch Race You To The Bottom. To be honest, I hadn't heard of any of the films at the festival, which isn't so surprising, since gay & lesbian films form a small (though vibrant) niche.

What's difficult about such films, at least, gay films, is coming up with stories that aren't weak gay versions of bad straight stories. Although they were able to get some (ok, one) star in Eating Out, the story line and the acting were weak. Those films tend to get audiences to watch it because you see skin.

Actually, there were two films on. Let me talk about the first film, which was Room Service, which, as it turns out, I had heard of from a bulletin board I read. This was a short film about a guy who lusted after a porn star. He discovers that the porn star has since become a hustler, and decides to arrange to meet him. Bringing his camera along, he wants to film his fantasy man.

Fortunately, it turns out a little better than the story line sounds. The guy who's filming it is a geek, who, although he's had a boyfriend, hasn't really been in a relationship. The porn star has washed out and his life is spent trying to eke out a living, since he no longer can do movies. There's a bit of humor, because the kid is completely awkward, and yet, by the end, they have a small connection. While the kid's background is a bit contrived, it's a nice effort.

The nice thing about twenty minute shorts is that it's unnecessary to do a lot of character development. You try to get in a few humorous moments, work in a little backstory, and don't go in too obvious a direction. I wish shorts were more common. Unfortunately, the only way to watch shorts are at film festivals. Personally, I'd like to see shorts prior to main features all the time.

Race You To The Bottom is primarily relationship driven. It's a road picture with the structure of a romantic comedy. Unlike a romantic comedy, the two main characters are well-established. He's a gay writer for a travel magazine. She's a temp. She's been tagging along his travel stories, and this time, they're headed to Napa to report on wineries. Of course, with a road trip, it's really about discussing their relationships.

To get a sense of this film, I can compare it to several other films. I recently saw Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha-Ha. The acting and cinematography were much better in this film. Funny Ha-ha is all about the interactions of several guys to this girl, who is attractive, but awkward. The whole film is centered around awkward interactions. On the other hand, the characters in Russell Brown's film are confident, sassy, fun. Maggie and Nathan like each other because they're fun for each other.

Nathan is gay, but he likes her enough, so he fools around with her. You can see how she's eventually going to fall for him. What's remarkable about the film is how it establishes the history between the two characters. They like each other. They hate each other. He gives a hand job to a guy she pines after. She flirts with a guy he went to high school with. It's a tenuous relationship. He's willing to fool around, but he can't really fall in love, even though they get along great. She has feelings for him, and can't deal with his cruelty.

When I haven't heard of a film, and I hear it's independent, I tend to think it won't be very good. There are far more people who want to make films than those who have talent to make them well. So it's surprising when I find that it's an excellent movie. It's not as auspicious a start as Steven Soderbergh or even Shane Carruth, but it deals with an established relationships with remarkable realism.

Clearly, the film is aided by strong acting jobs by Amber Benson and Cole Williams. If I were a Buffy fan, I would have known she was in Buffy, but I'm not. She reminded me of a perky Scarlet Johanssen. As it turns out, I had seen Amber before. She was in a bit role as a waitress in Latter Days. Cole Williams comes across like Leo DiCaprio. Long hair, with a wisp of facial hair, he exudes a confidence, and yet, can't really commit.

As it progresses to its end, there's the problem of tying up loose ends. This isn't a comedy, so it would seem a bit sappy to make them get together, especially since he's supposed to be gay. The ending resembles Chasing Amy. Their lives move on. They have something great together, but it can only go so far.

Even if the story idea isn't so novel (although it is a little unusual to do a road trip with a gay guy and a straight gal), a film like this is all about execution and acting. It's much like Before Sunrise, except these two have history, and therefore know how to hurt each other.

Russell Brown also attended to do a Q&A session, but there were very few questions. I couldn't think of a good question either. I did briefly talk to him afterwards, but it seems directors aren't all that outgoing. I suppose these things are awkward enough. Kevin Smith, for example, can stretch an answer for ten minutes, if he has to.

Still, I'm impressed enough to want to see what he does next. Apparently, it's already been made, or at least, significant parts. However, he was very quiet.

This film is expected to go in general release next year.