Short Attention Span Theater

I was going to devote this entry to short attention span. I'll at least open up that way. I've been reading reddit a lot. I like it's compact presentation over Digg though I do like that Digg has different categorizations like technology, science, etc. reddit also has sub-reddits, but not in the areas I care about.

I'd imagine that many people read many articles from reddit (or Digg). For example, I might look at 15-20 articles a day. For me to reasonably complete the article, each article has to be short. If an article goes over, say 2-3 pages, my interest wanes quickly. If I'm asked to devote 20-30 minutes to read an article, that's too much.

This may seem hypocritical of me to say that. I often write many pages in my blog. I don't mind my own length, even if readers lose interest. Certainly my interest is always maintained because I write every word, and that keeps me actively engaged.

Now some of the reason I won't read an article that long is because it simple doesn't engage me. For one reason or another, I just can't stay compelled to sit and read the whole thing. Maybe it's trying to teach something to me that's deep. Sorry, I generally don't have time for that. A cool, simple idea is enough.

I did read a fairly engaging story of a man in England who saw a drunken guy berating a woman, apparently, his fiancee. He felt he had to intefere. However, this fellow was somewhat old and slow. He had learned a lesson from his elders when he was 20. He said you had to hurt someone when you're old and slow, otherwise they get an advantage from youth and speed.

While reading this, I felt the tension in this whole setup, imagining what this was like. How he ended up punching the guy over and over. This is the kind of visceral violence done in the name of justice that I wouldn't imagine myself in, but I could imagine seeing it in a film.

Point is, for whatever reason, that story had me engaged. For example, there was a good article on women in education and how they are faring better than men because of their attitudes. It's in the New York Times. I'm sure it's well written. But I'm not always 100% alert. It's also frickin 6 pages long. If I were to read this outside the context of the just browsing the times, I might actually read it.

You know how it is, that some people, when they wake up in the morning, as part of their morning ritual, they fetch the daily paper and start to read it (although I read mine online). They are choosing to focus their attention on one single news source (the newspaper) and spend a good amount of time reading it (like 30 minutes to an hour).

Because of this, they are willing to look at a longer article and choose to read it.

Now, this blog entry is already getting pretty long, and since you're not invested in reading my blog, you probably haven't reached this point, but if you have, well, you have lots of patience.

People have often said my blog entries are too long. This is similar to the effect I go through when I read something long. But I don't necessarily care. I write for myself. I like to write. I don't mind if a few people take a few minutes to read (or not). That's up to them. Or you.

Ah, so I had another topic in mind, but I think it's related. I wonder if my friends have even shorter attention spans than me. But I think it's a matter of expectations. Let's say you're interested in all things Boston Red Sox. Let's say you're interested in strategy or statistics and you read a columnist who has insightful things to say. Then, you might be willing to read a very lengthy article on the subject.

Are you willing to read lengthy articles by me about random stuff? I know people who have read my stuff for quite different reasons. One person likes tennis and reads an Andre Agassi article. Another likes movies and reads something about that. Do blog surfers have more patience to read stuff? Many of these readers are unlikely to be regulars because any one blog is really tough to find.

To effectively surf blogs, you have to use some kind of search, and be rather topic specific in that search. If you're looking for tennis, and read a review on say, Pirates of the Carribean, then your interest may wane. It's not tennis, so why read it?

It's said that people have less attention than they did many years ago. That may be a fallout from the proliferation of information now as opposed to many years ago. We were willing to spend more time reading before because we didn't know any better. Everyone simply wrote lengthy stuff.

To give you an analogy, in Asian countries, many people distrust credit cards. Why, I don't know. Thus, people carry cash. Lots of it. You might have 20-30 bucks in your wallet, maybe upwards of a hundred bucks. A typical Asian is likely to carry the equivalent of two or three hundred dollars. Stuff you'd automatically use credit, they pay in cash.

You would think this makes them vulnerable to thieves. But everyone carries this much cash. No one thinks it's a lot of money.

Similarly, people used to reading long articles don't think they have to complete their reading in five minutes. They're willing to spend half an hour on it or more. But then there was so much less information to get. You might read a book, but when you're done, that's it. You'd have to go get a new book. With the Internet, you can read for the rest of your life.

If you want to get a real sense of short attention span, try looking at the Lincoln Douglas debates. These are mini-essays. Can you imagine Bush or Gore lecturing 15 miuntes on any topic? OK, well, Bush then, since Gore is currently in a documentary talking about global warming (and he pulls every trick he can to keep what he says interesting). Lincoln and Douglas barnstormed throughout Illinois (recall this was a senatorial race, not the Presidential race, and Lincoln lost).

Political handlers would tell these politicians not to think too deeply because Americans aren't patient enough nor bright enough to figure out elaborate arguments, no matter how impassioned the speakers are.

Go ahead, do a search for Lincoln-Douglas. Try this site. It's not even that hard to read, but you can hardly imagine a discussion like this.

Women's Final

The final of the women's involves the number 1 player, Amelie Mauresmo of France, and Justine Henin-Hardenne of Belguium, the world's number 3. Henin-Hardenne has been on a bit of a streak lately, having won the French Open. She had been debilitated with a hamstring injury that left her mostly off the tour at the end of 2005.

This is a surprising final for its style of play. Women's tennis has long abandoned serve and volley. A player like Venus Williams with a great serve and 6 feet 1 height should be charging net all the time. Instead, Williams plays a hard hitting baseline game. It doesn't make sense, but it's worked for her. She had the physique to be the best serve and volleyer ever.

Most women have mimicked that style, hugging the baseline, afraid to hit forehands. When Evert and Austin were queens of the tour, they would hit two-handed backhands all day long, lulling opponents into errors, rather than play power tennis. With the smaller racquets, women were not thought to be able to hit the kind of pace men did (indeed Graf was to soon prove that wrong). Larger racquets have lead to power hitters among the women, and the 40 shot rally has been a thing of the past.

Still, baseline play is the staple of women's tennis. So I find it surprising that the women play any kind of serve and volley. Mauresmo does more of it than Henin-Hardenne, but both will seek opportunities to get to net, making it far more of a cat-and-mouse game, the kind of opportunistic play that has not been seen lately in the women's game.

I had thought that Henin-Hardenne, with her mentally tough brutish approach to the game might win handily. Fortunately, Mauresmo has taken the second set, and is serving for the match in the third. She has used her forays to the net effectively, and it's a joy, I must say, to see women coming to net.

If only the men would find a new stunningly good volleyer, someone like Edberg or McEnroe (I'll pass on Sampras, thank you, and to me, Federer's smoothness mostly applies to his backcourt game).

And, there, Mauresmo has won, as Henin-Hardenne, fearless to the last, tries to whip a groundstroke, hits it inside out clipping the net, and the first French women since the great Suzanne Lenglen has won Wimbledon.

A nice match, quality play, not as great as the greatest, but quite watchable.

Congratulations to Amelie (she's run up to hug what seems to be coach and father, a la Pat Cash).

Tennis Finals

Roger Federer just made it to the finals of Wimbledon. He beat Jonas Bjorkman handily. This was no surprise. Bjorkman is one of the oldest players on tour. He's unseeded. He's been playing on the tour for a while, and this semifinal appearance was his best in a while, somewhat akin to Jimmy Connors making the semis of the U.S. Open when he was 39 (and Bjorkman was a bit younger than that).

This is no surprise. Federer is generally acknowledged as the best men's tennis player, and he's done especially well at Wimbledon, having won it the last three years. Only a few scant years after Sampras left the tour and people had proclaimed him best men's player in a generation, people began to anoint Federer as the next great one, even greater than Sampras. At the very least, Federer seemed like he had a shot to win the French Open, the one Grand Slam that Sampras never made the finals.

What is a surprise is Rafael Nadal. Federer has nearly complete mastery of everyone on tour. Except Nadal. Nadal has had an impressive record against Federer having a gaudy 6-1 head-to-head record. However, many of these wins were on clay which is Federer's weakest surface, and some of those matches have actually been competitive.

They've never met on grass where Federer has won the last three Wimbledon's. It's expected his serve will be that much more effective on grass than clay.

Nadal's route to the finals was unexpected. He had never made it past the third round at Wimbledon. A sign that maybe things were going well for Nadal was his victory over Andre Agassi. Agassi isn't at his prime anymore, but he does have one notch on his belt that Sampras doesn't. He's won every Grand Slam event at least once, including Wimbledon.

While no one would expect Agassi to beat Nadal on clay, one might imagine that the more impatient, hard-hitting American would have a better shot on grass. True, Agassi is no serve and volleyer. In the immortal words of Bud Collins, the only time Agassi comes to net is to shake hands at the end of the match.

Still, Nadal controlled Agassi, who looked like his ankles were bothering him, and was ready to retire sooner than his announced US Open final tournament.

Nadal beat Nieminen and Baghdatis to make the finals. Neither are household names, but Baghdatis is certainly an up-and-comer and a formidable talent on any surface. His impatience showed against the deliberate Nadal.

The real question is whether Nadal can beat Federer. He certainly has a psychological edge. You can't underestimate this. At the French, Nadal got creamed in the first set as Federer looked in the zone, while Nadal appeared rushed and unable to hit his shots. But slowly, he gathered momentum and Federer imploded, making error after error.

The situations ought to be reversed with Nadal having nothing to lose, and Federer wanting to prove a point. He'd like nothing better than to humiliate Nadal on grass, though I'm sure any win would do. An emphatic exclamation point might turn the tide in their head to head matches, as it finally turned around between Federer and Nalbandian.

Nadal has been caught up in a little controversy, but it goes to show you how paranoid the cycling community is about performance enhancing drugs. The Tour de France has been rocked by scandal. Top riders Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso have been disqualified due to doping scandals leaving what was already a wide-open Tour even more open. For once, it wasn't who would lose to Lance, but who is going to win?

Nadal, one of the musclier guys on tour, has been accused of taking performance enhancing drugs. Much like Barry Bonds, the drugs only help if the guy is talented. Nadal isn't one of the hardest servers, nor the hardest hitting groundstroker. Indeed, you'd almost point to his mental skills. He does hit pretty hard and consistent, but he's not like Graf was when she tore up the tour, eliminating players in under an hour as her power totally overwhelmed nearly all players until the top ones could challenge her pace.

Nadla isn't like that. And because he isn't the best server, the question is how well he'll return, how well he'll be able to keep in against Federer. The question is whether Federer can keep mentally sharp and not make mistakes. If he starts making errors, then Nadal might be able to take his mental edge and win a rare French Open-Wimbledon double, something that hasn't occurred since the great Bjorn Borg. With Nadal already the record holder for consecutive matches on clay, maybe he's willing to take the next step that Borg did to win on a surface he shouldn't be expected to against an opponent already dubbed as the best in the game.

Tracking Comments

Seems like I post on a bunch of topics which causes different people to reply to my posts. For example, I wrote one on Andre Agassi's impending retirment. Someone followed up to that saying she(?) expressed similar sentiments.

By the way, I have to detour a bit to talk about Wimbledon. Right now, no Americans are playing in the singles of either the men or women's draw. Croatian player Mario Ancic got dismissed in straight sets by Federer, but you have to imagine that his biggest match up to this point was the fourth round.

Ancic had been playing a World Cup of sorts himself, defeating Almagro-Sanchez of Spain, Sanguinetti of Spain, Wawrinka of Switzerland, but most importantly, Novak Djokovic. Who? Djokovic is from Serbia/Montenegro. In the post-communist era, Yugoslavia broke up into several countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia. Indeed, the separation of Serbia and Montenegro from one another is really recently, like a month ago.

In any case, Croatians and Serbians didn't get along so well, so one would have to imagine that Ancic had additional incentive to beat Djokovic. In any case, he had been the last guy to beat Federer at Wimbledon, defeating him in the first round in 2002, before falling in the second round. Ancic's a decent player, really, seeded 7th, so it was not surprising he should get this far.

If you want a surprise at Wimbledon, it has to be Jonas Bjorkman. If you follow tennis at all, you ought to know Bjorkman. Long a doubles player, he's one of the few Swedes that have stayed somewhat competitive in the game. Bjorkman was born in 1972, which makes him about 34. He's a little younger than Agassi, and indeed, younger than the group of Swedes that followed Borg (Wilander, Edberg). This is only his second semifinals in a Grand Slam event. Not bad for the old guy. He's expected to lose rather handily to Federer (as is anyone). However, he does play serve and volley, so maybe he can do something.

The key match people are going to look at is Nadal vs. Finnish Nieminen. Nadal has recently been accused, along with the bicyclists at the Tour de France, of doping. It hasn't quite caused a scandal among tennis circles, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. Can Nadal get to the final? It's possible. Clearly grass is Nadal's weakest surface. He's as far as he's ever been at Wimbledon. His opponents are tough, but Nadal may be able to handle them, to set up a dream final between him and Nadal to see if he can knock of Federer on grass.

Ah, but there's a lot of tennis to be played until then.

Anyway, I also received comments on some reviews I'd written. Blogger emails the comments to me, which is nice, but they don't have an interface that makes it easy to track blog comments. I should be able to click on a "Comments" tab, which lists a brief title of the article, plus the comment just added. I should be able to expand to read the full article, as well as all the comments. Right now, I have to hunt and peck to find the comments. It doesn't make sense.

Also, if I'm logged in, I'm not sure I should have to fill out the authentication step (the one where you read the funny characters with a funny background to prevent bots from spamming the site).

Really, this would be a nice improvement.

Where on Earth is Stuart Fletcher?

Occasionally, I'd like to blog about people I've lost touch with for one reason or another. While the Internet is a big place, there are some five billion folks on the planet, many with nary a web presence at all. Stuart's right on the edge, barely flitting in and out of the websphere.

Let me back up a little in the story. Sometime around 2000, I was teaching introductory C programming. Stuart Fletcher was a student in the class. Of the hundreds of students taking the class, Stuart ended up with the highest grade in the class. He had lost something like 30 points over the entire semester.

If you think about it, that's amazing. We had two midterms, a final, quizzes, projects. There were people that lost 30 points in one exam.

Later on, Stuart took another class with me (a programming class), though he ended up taking discrete math with the other guy. He decided to add a second major to his computer science major--mathematics.

I had known that Stuart was a little older than the average person in class, in fact, about 6-7 years older. One day, while getting (I think) an award during some award ceremony, held in the rotunda part of the math building, I bumped into Stuart, and asked him what he had done during the intervening years.

He said he was part of a band. I asked what kind of music did they play. He said it was hard to describe. He would get me a CD so I could hear it. That didn't work out, as it turned out. However, I did buy the CD somewhere. I believe that was Contemporary Music by The Sorts.

Stuart became a TA for me when I taught computer organization. He was a TA for two semesters.

Stuart ended up finishing his B.S. in two majors, with a 4.0 average. I met his parents when they came out for his graduation. They were originally from Washington State (I assume they are still there) as was Stuart.

For a while, Stuart and I got along, at least we'd occasonally exchange email, have some tea, that kind of thing. Over time, things got a bit busy for Stuart, and I rarely saw or talked to him, though I consider that there was some sort of falling out.

When he graduated, he was thinking about grad school. I had recommended him for some research thing, which he got. I don't know how exciting he thought that was. But with grades as good as Stuart had, grad school seemed like the best option.

In the end, going to grad school would mean giving up music. He had been a bass player for quite a few years between the time he tried college the first time and came back to college the second time. I assume the thought of giving up music was something he wasn't quite ready for.

Ever since he left college, it's been a bit difficult figuring his whereabouts. For a while, he had a Sorts webpage, which had photos of their tour of Japan. It stayed up maybe two years or so, but never had its content changed. I sent email to it once or twice, but never heard a reply.

It seems he's been to Europe possibly once or twice since graduating, mostly helping out other bands. He mentioned to me once that he'd like to live in Europe, most likely Germany. I suppose if he were a soccer fan, he'd be lamenting Germany's loss today, with Italy hitting two goals late in overtime.

A little over a year ago, he was touring in Europe. I must admit that while I knew him over the course of his years at Maryland, I didn't really know him. To be fair, how well can you know anyone, especially when you see plenty of students, right? Even so, Stuart was a bit of a quiet guy, and I think he kept a lot to himself. That kind of personality can be intriguing, because maybe there's a viewpoint that you didn't know unless you ask.

One odd recollection I had of Stuart was his watch. He owned a watch that reminded me very much of the watch that I had back when I was a teenager. It was an LED watch. Yeah, something like that. Those watches looked real cheap. Heck, they were cheap.

Apparently, he had had the watch for years.

This would be interesting, but as it turns out Stuart is fastidious about lots of things, and that's probably why he did so well in his classes. It turns out, little did I know, that he had used the same mechanical pencil the whole time he was at Maryland. Now, I used to lose pencils left and right. In fact, I used to lose digital watches left and right (I'd hate to wear them, then forget where I had left them). That kind of attention to detail is rare.

Stuart kept so much bottled up inside that I wondered how much of what he was going through had to deal with trust issues. Who in his life did he want to tell things to? Could he really trust anyone in his life completely? (To be fair, a tall order).

I suspect where I knew the least about Stuart was his passion for music. This was clearly important to him in a way that I didn't understand. These days, I listen to a lot more music than I used to, but still, to pick up music so late in life, when I hadn't listened during my formative years meant I lacked some appreciation.

This post is something akin to a bottle in the water post. Perhaps it finds its way to someone who knows what's what.

Bujalski Redux

Sometime last year, I decided to take a trek to the Silver AFI in Silver Spring to catch Funny Ha-Ha. Director Andrew Bujalski was supposed to be in attendance. I didn't know much about either the film, nor the director, but the novelty of seeing a director peddle his own film, something that I rarely see, was enough of a draw for me.

I found the film fits and starts to be rather annoying. It tells the story of Marnie, whose the object of desire. She had had a falling out with a guy she was interested in, when she made a fool of herself. No longer interested in him, her friends have informed that he's single again, and maybe she should do something.

The director plays Mitchell, a temp who Marnie works with who falls for Marnie, but realizes that geeky guys like him are never going to be successful with girls like Marnie.

Bujalski's been compared to Cassevetes, though, being a cinematic novice, my filmwatching of the Cassevetes era is lacking (I haven't watched Fassbinder either), though I gather it has to do with pseudo-realistic drama in dysfunctional households.

I recall that I had wanted to ask a very odd question, though I was sure what answer I'd get, and that is, if he'd been given millions of dollars, would he continue to make films like he has. By that, I mean, if he were told to make blockbuster special effects films, would he do so? My feeling is directors like Bujalski would recoil at the thought, having put their heart and soul in a personal tale. The idea of making something Spielbergian when you've been compared to Cassavetes seems blasphemous.

This isn't to say that such things haven't occasionally happened. In music, Phil Collins was the drummer, then lead of Genesis, considered to be an exemplar of progressive rock of the 70s. Through the 80s, he leaned to a more pop sound, a sound that fans of Genesis felt was selling out. Collins would claim that he didn't wear the same clothes as he did ten years ago, so why should he play the same music. A new generation of fans grew up, only vaguely aware of Collins' role in the tumultous history of the strange English band.

Since I was barely familiar with his work and his inspirations, my sense of what the film was about was surely very distant to what the film meant to him. I remember reading an interview of Jonathan Coulton, where the interviewer notices certain musical influences, influences I was unfamiliar with, and thus, I became very aware that I didn't have the right context to understand the music as Coulton was thinking of it.

Now, to be fair, I see a lot of films and have seen a lot of directors, so I'm not the kind of person whose film choices are restricted to bawdy efforts like Wedding Crashers, nor to adventure films by Michael Bay. Indeed, I believe that weekend I went to see the very unusual Tropical Malady, a film that combines the mundane with the mythical, which some have called genius, but where the average viewer, unused to being pushed to think about a film would cry foul, decrying it as typical foreign art crap that no one gets, and that film critics only pretend to adore (they don't know any better either) to make the average moviegoer look like a philistine.

Indeed, Tropical Malady is about as different a film as you can imagine from Funny Ha-Ha, and comes from a worldview so decidedly foreign as to nearly be incomprehensible for the other to view.

Why am I blogging about Bujalski? No reason in particular. I had been reading a review of a later film, and it reminded me that I was in attendance on Bujalski's last tour with his film, a journey that had lasted some two years. He was somewhat relieved it was ending, the Q&A sessions, the travelling, and looking forward to talking about his new film.

When I think about that, I wonder about the nature of creativity. Some people lack enough creativity to work in any niche well. But even for those who do find something they want to say, it's interesting to see how narrowly confining it is. Could Bujalski make genre fare like Westerns, sci-fi, romantic comedies, horror? Does he even care?

Somehow I think not. And there's plenty of room for those who wish to tell their own stories.

Cars Again

Pixar films have been praised for its return to good, basic storytelling, the magical stuff that apparently had been missing the traditional Disney comic machine. However, you can't underestimate the power of computer graphics in storytelling.

In film after film, as you're engaged in the story, you're amazed at the effects. The desolate highways, the overhead lamps, the desert scenery, the shimmer off the cars themselves, the dirt on the tires, the cavernous depths and angles of the racetrack, the gloppiness of the tar on the roads. All of it contributes to an "how do they do that factor", the kind that's missing from the traditional SF blockbuster.

Only a handful of traditional special effects films stand out with the quality of their effects. Jurassic Park giving rise to realistic (enough) dinosaurs. Terminator 2 with its morphing technology (until everyone ripped them off). The Matrix with its hyper-crisp photo-realism giving 360 spins around Hong-Kong style wire-fu (until everyone ripped them off too). The impressive Gollum. Most special effects films work much better if the underlying story is compelling.

Cars treads (pun intended) over some well-worn area. The premise is borrowed nearly wholescale from Doc Hollywood a movie that's barely on the tips on anyone's tongues. If it succeeds, it does so because it's not terribly preachy, it's fun in its observed details, and it tries to teach a little bit of American auto history, about a time when the novelty of driving lead people to drive.

Steeped in nostalgia and small-town antiquery, it's not really a return to Waltons, but to a simpler life where people knew people, and yet, it's a modern twist, the inhabitants of Radiator Springs consist of some small-town types, the doc, the police car, Mater, a hick, but also Italian, a Latino, a sassy black. Even as all of these are stereotyped, they aren't stereotyped in the usual way. Real Italian is spoken, and there's a passion for cars.

Lightning McQueen is never made so hideous that his transformation to someone that cares is that unrealistic. While he doesn't quite embrace small-town values, he does begin to care for a little more than himself (he's at least aware of the history of racing, making him not obviously shallow).

If the film suffers, it is because there are some nods to expected story telling. He learns lessons from his elders, and even simple Mater, on how to drive. He learns to appreciate the friends he makes. He's playful with Sally, though it has the sizzle of a middle school romance, playful, but not much more, no heavy sexual innuendo, making the film family friendly. (Somehow they managed to stick the word "hell" a few times through, but it's become innocuous enough).

The race itself becomes one big lesson of "winning isn't everything", which, despite it's wholesome lesson, is not often seen in film these days, and often not shown as "losing is better than winning" (e.g., in Friday Night Lights, the underdogs lose, and their is bitterness when that happens).

Like Star Wars, you admire how the film observes its details, and that its slow running time gives a chance for slow characer evolution.

Entertaining and touching, even if sometimes a bit predictable.

Car Wars

How many time have you watched a big-budget SF film and thought "those special effects look fake"? George Lucas laments this. He can spend a ton of money on digital special effects, and yet people care more about his muppet, Yoda, which clearly is fake. Why is one form of fakery more acceptable than another?

Part of the answer is the bandwagon effect. Sure, old stop motion King Kong was also fake. Using lizards dressed up as dinosaurs was fake. But for some reason, we can't deal with digital fakery.

Unless.

Unless, that is, it's Pixar. We're willing to have digital effects make cartoons look more realistic. Indeed, one reason we'll probably never go back to conventional cartoons is that digital special effects for films we used to call cartoons are getting awfully realistic.

In Cars, street lights, neon, desert landscapes, even the heated exhaust of a car looks realistic. Remember the podracing from the first Star Wars film. It's perhaps just as big a challenge to make cars that are essentially cartoons seem like heavy vehicles that can move.

Cars took its inspiration from a film that you wouldn't expect--Doc Hollywood. That tells the story of Benjamin Stone, played by Michael J. Fox, a plastic surgeon heading to California, getting stuck in a small town, having to work off community service, and itching to head to California. He learns to love the place.

Indeed, much of Cars is plenty predictable. Lightning McQueen is a brash rookie car who's about to be the first rookie to win the Piston Cup. He ends up in a tie with the king (a Richard Petty like car voiced by...Richard Petty), Chick Hicks, the car that always seems to be behind the king. A race is scheduled to take place in a week.

Lightning convinces Mack, the Mack truck, who carries him to his destination, to do an all-nighter. Mack basically falls asleep, and somehow Lightning, stowed in the back, falls out of the vehicle and finds himself in Radiator Springs. Due to a chase scene of sorts, he ruins the roads in this quiet desert town and is sentenced to repair the road before they'll let him go.

He discovers small-town life, which he hates at first, but grows to like. He even finds out the country doctor, Doc Hudson was once a star racer like McQueen, before being put out to pasture.

This film is way nostalgic for the 50s, from its neon, to its diner, to the story of small town people trying to do good. These are the kinds of towns that are idealized. It's not so much that cities are made to be evil or modernity is looked down upon, but it does say to pay attention to folks who aren't ready to look for big changes, who like taking things at a slower pace.

Although the film has moments that are predictable, from Mater riding around backwards, to Doc telling him to turn wheels left to go right for dirt racing, scenes that you know will come back later in the film somehow, it does so in such a charming way that it's not hard to be won over.

In particular, the characters all have a light touch. Lightning is brash, but is really a good car at heart. They don't want him to be too unlikeable. Even Chick Hicks, the "bad guy" of the film, is the ever-suffering runner-up, and is sympathetic. The King is made to be a champ that's starting to be over the hill, and provides the contrast to Doc, voiced by Paul Newman, who has been washed up.

Pixar films take so long to be made--six years is not uncommon, that the stories can be made a lot richer, especially in its details. Even the tone of the film, or how long it takes Lightning to learn his lesson can be stretched out so the believability of the transformation is that much more natural.

The folks at Pixar were even clever with the preview trailers from a year ago. How many people thought the picture, with Mater doing comic relief, gave a sense of what the story was really going to be about. By lowering expectations, Pixar surprises with a story of a small town that's trying to make it, a story that generally wins over even curmudgeonly city dwellers, so by the end of the film, you even like Mater, even as you thought Pixar had blown it.

I was noting, to my brother, that Pixar hasn't been quite as formulaic as Disney cartoons. Disney revived its cartoons with The Little Mermaid. It had been making cartoons all along, but none like the classic cartoons from the 50s.

That movie created the basic Disney cartoon: female protagonist must fight conservative father's old-fashioned beliefs to become the woman she wants to be. This is the basic plot of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, etc. Occasionally, they stray from the plot, but they end up using women as heroes quite often, which isn't a problem, really, but shows how often they go to the well.

The Pixar films haven't been as women-focused, actually. Indeed, nearly all its films center around men. Toy Story focuses more on Buzz Lightyear and Woody. Finding Nemo splits time with Marlin and Dory. The two leads in Monsters, Inc are voiced by Billy Crystal and John Goodman. The Incredibles split time between Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl.

There has yet, to my mind, to be a woman-centered story, which may be just that Lasseter has a harder time telling stories from women's point of view without getting too stereotyped (not that there aren't stereotypes floated galore in Cars from a sassy black car, to Italians, to an old geezer, to a bumpkin car).

Ultimately, I had a pretty good time, despite a predictable storyline, and much of that has to do with just looking at the quality of special effects, where you imagine that it wouldn't take much for Pixar to finally try making the leap to characters that look real, instead of making cartoons look real. The non-people parts (roads, lights, landscapes) are looking so good, that you wonder how long before they make that last step, and a good genre to do it is a genre that hasn't often worked well in film: fantasy. For example, a Pixar Hobbit might be a fantastic undertaking, something the company might be ready for in a few years, if not now. It has just the right mix of fantasy and humans to make it work (the problem may lie in its story).


We'll see what other magic is involved.

I rate this an A- for both likeability and goodness.

Telltale Heart

I just saw a trailer for the American remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (the "other" Kurosawa) J-horror film, Pulse. I first read about this film a few years ago, when Mike D'Angelo reviewed it at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). He said it had him plenty scared.

Now, one has to take that with a grain of salt. I don't think Mike is a fan of horror in general (neither am I, for that matter). This means that what passes off for scary as horror would perhaps be too much for him. For example, Mike also had his adrenaline rushing watching Se7en and Blair Witch Project. There were folks who thought Blair Witch Project was not at all scary, and the backlash against it made The Sixth Sense popular (although, it too, wasn't a conventionally scary film).

J-Horror, presumably Japan Horror, refers to a genre of horror that, to put it mildly, is about horror without the usual jump-out-of-your-seat moments. For example, a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the typical American flick. There's some psycho running around with a chainsaw while innocent teens are running around screaming their heads off (before they presumably also become severed from their bodies).

J-Horror, by contrast, is content to be spooky and rather surreal, relying on more subtlely.

Pulse wasn't the first film to be brought to the States and modified. That honor goes to The Ring which was remade from the Japanese Ringu, which involves watching a videotape (if memory serves) that causes a person to become posessed or something. Sarah Michelle Gellar starred in the remake.

I saw neither Ringu, nor The Ring (nor its sequel). I did, however, watch Pulse, the original Japanese. The film is rather old, perhaps more than five years old now.

Basically, it details the story of a few students who work for some researcher. One guy gets a disk. He's a computer novice. When he opens it up, and starts it, he begins to see visions of zombie like people in his computer. He immediately shuts it down. Meanwhile, one of the members of the group hasn't been heard from.

When they go visit him, he appears to be there, but then, not.

Basically, Pulse is a mood piece, which is about these characters who see some apparitions on their computer, and slowly begin to go crazy. Eventually, they disappear, without remains. It is, I suppose, a commentary on the fear of loss of identity.

Initially, these disappearances only appear to affect the people that we've met. But eventually, it heads to a more apocalyptic end, as mass groups of people appear to be disappearing, as if there's some kind of breach between the real world and some kind of netherworld. The experience is creepy, but not especially scary.

At the end, I believe they are on a boat, to try to escape what's happening and find some peaceful place to live. It starts off as a ghost story and ends in a post-apocalptic vision, but all of it strangely muted.

But my point wasn't necessarily to talk about the original. No, it was to talk about the remake. What do the producers/director decide must change to make it more palatable to Americans? First, they need to make the characters more American, i.e., more brash, more chatty, basically the kind of people you see in horror films.

Presumably, they'll amp up the horror parts so that the low-key creepy moments are replaced by traditional boo moments. Whether the film will then transcend (or descend) into the post-apocalyptic moments (admittedly, a jarring turn of events) is unclear.

It's interesting that J-horror is serving as inspiration for new horror, as if the American fare is bankrupt of ideas (which has been true since the Scream series).

Oh, on a complete side note, I just saw a Star Trek book which was about the crew heading to Ceti Alpha V a year or so after the events in Wrath of Khan (which the book implies includes Star Trek 3 and 4). Although I'm sure the book is hardly quality reading, I was curiously involved at least for a few pages to find out what would happen.

The book tries to recreate what happened on the planet from the time Khan was there to the events of Wrath of Khan. I'm not sure how they plan to make it interesting. My guess is they'll run into someone on the planet that managed to survive the whole time and that will be the source of conflict.

Super, Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There and Back Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are We Ready for Social Networking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buffalo Gals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, that was my meal o' fun.

So much for losing weight...

Freak Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andre the Giant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the memories.

Brown vs. Bored of Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marky Mark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what bookmarking websites do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a crowded space.

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

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

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

And it needs to be fast.

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

Tee Pod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Par for the Course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congrats to Geoff Ogilvy.

Justify My Tech

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't just explain how. Explain why.