Hello Yourself, Moto
For Dena's birthday, we took the plunge into mobile phonedom.
There have been a few times out on the road where my poor wife has had car troubles, or we've crossed wires, or what have you, so I took her off on the Sunday to get a mobile.
(That, and I think I've finally overcome the association of cell phones with years of being woken up at three in the morning being sworn at by people on rigs needing technical support. Oof, not fun times.)
I got her a black Motorola RAZR, and myself a V317. They had a special on Bluetooth headsets, so we got those, too. Dana Green at the booth at South Centre took care of us very well.
The present came in useful almost immediately. My mother packed up the rest of the house and I drove her up to the airport, with Dena following in the PPE. Once we got up to the airport, Dena lost us behind some pedestrians and couldn't find us again. Talk about timely :)
The Ideal Lawn for Mowing
My Mom at last sold her home where we kids grew up from junior high to high school and a little beyond. It was a little bit of a sentimental occasion, but it's a very nice family from Ireland that's bought the place.
I got to take the old lawnmower for one last test drive. Boy, was that an exercise in frustration :)
No Free Hunch
In following the "Intelligent Design" debate, when I'm not getting a bit sick to my stomach, I must admit to being thankful for the occasional humourous distraction.
The No Free Hunch list (a take off on Dembski's paper "No Free Lunch", which I've dissected elsewhere) is a great, dripping sarcastic list which despite its humour really does identify what's wrong with Intelligent Design, its proponents and Creationism in its various guises.
Inventions To Cause The Downfall of Society
I was musing over a theoretical invention that could cause society's downfall. No, it's not telepathy, though I'm sure that would do it.
If there ever was a device that let you hear what people said for the next ten seconds after you hung up the phone, I think that would be enough to do it. I'll bet technical support would be the first to fall :)
Well, unless people started watching their words for ten seconds :)
X-Men : The Last Stand
Link: http://www.x-menthelaststand.com/
We went to see this today, and quite enjoyed it. It's a little uneven in some plot points and flat in some interaction and fight scenes, but it was overall very enjoyable, and they certainly upped the stakes here. Grand altercations and a few surprises abound.
Yes, that is Kelsey Grammar as the blue-furred Hank McCoy a.k.a. Beast. It's a fun role for him.
Watch for the (nearly usual now) Stan Lee cameo :)
They do leave a crack open for a sequel, though this quite comfortably ends the series. There are no huge cliffhangers right at the end.
If you stay past the credits, you do get a little scene that only makes sense if you remember the talk about ethics earlier in the movie. I'll say no more than that.
Simpsons : The Monkey Suit Episode
Link: http://www.tv.com/the-simpsons/the-monkey-suit/episode/724778/summary.html
I didn't really think the Simpsons would take on a stronger evolution versus creationism episode... but they did, and while the ending was a little bit 'diluted' from my own views, all in all, I'm pretty impressed at the way it was handled.
The approach to the whole episode tried to avoid some of the actual hot buttons: constitutionality, rebuttals to "missing link" arguments, and the reasons for the judgment and its retraction were 'goofy', but the Simpsons have pretty high visibility here. Even with 9 parts comedy to 1 part seriousness, they will offend some people.
It will get people talking, though. I expect a few flame wars about, but I think finding out what the fuss is all about will help some people.
On a final note here: I am all of a sudden very, very impressed with Marge :)
Oblivion
Link: http://www.elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_overview.htm
I've liked Bethesda's series of games for quite a while now. Daggerfall, Morrowind and now Oblivion.
Oblivion is an epic quest in the same style as its predecessors. The same use-it-and-gain-it skill system is there: if you run a lot, your Athletics goes up. If you jump and fall off things, your Acrobatics goes up, and so on.
The perpetually-staring characters are voice-acted quite well (I swear I heard Patrick Stewart in there). There's utterly no shortage of quests, and you will find yourself perpetually busy. If you get yourself all your recommendations for the Mage's Guild, you get to enter the Academy and create your own spells and enchantments.
The travel system is a refreshing nicety. No longer do you have to manually trudge from the Red Mountain all the way home like in Morrowind, but you can simply travel, risk-free, from a safe place with a clear exit (e.g. outside cities, in the wilderness with no enemies around) to most any previously-discovered site.
Now, Oblivion has some pretty high requirements. My video card and computer setup, perfectly able to handle World of Warcraft with aplomb, was utterly underpowered here. GeForce FX cards suffer quite a bit here.
You can type ~ (tilde) then tlb [ENTER] inside the game to turn "Lite Brite" mode on. You will get grey "blobs" around in many locations, though, but this setting will help:
A: You have to edit your Oblivion.INI and change fLODLandVerticalBias from 0 to -1200 (yes, minus 1200).
However, one very kind soul came to the rescue of most of us with older video cards. His site is over on "Oldblivion" (I must say: I love the name!) Let me tell you, it works. I wish there was something preset in between the low and medium settings (medium settings still give me a slow frame rate during combat), but experimenting should get it there.
It's an addictive game, and I must say I am enjoying my hiatus from World of Warcraft, since I can just save and exit any time I want. I forgot how much freedom you lose when you're in the middle of a three-hour World of Warcraft dungeon run ;)
Not... Learning... Fast... Enough...
This article almost seems to me to be satire. Is it? Probably not.
Perhaps it's just the tone of the article that irks me. Well, it's definitely that:
But at the same time teachers are becoming more comfortable with using eMail, students have largely moved on to another, more sophisticated form of communication, the survey suggests: instant messaging (IM).
Sophisticated? Fun, maybe. It's a substitute for phones, and you wouldn't use phones in class, would you? Or would you?...
A Big Intelligent Design Thread
Link: http://soundingtrumpet.weblogs.us/2006/03/30/intelligent-design-proponent-coming-to-cornell
I just had to link to the comments over on Sounding the Trumpet because I've been extraordinarily wordy in there, and occasionally lucid 
The two interesting personalities over there are 'High School Student' and Wayne Hollyoak. Wish we'd seen more of 'High School Student'; they seemed interesting and willing to throw back questions for a proper response.
Culture Plateau?
Looking back at movies from the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's, and then comparing the 90's with today, it occurs to me that despite the "ever increasing pace of change", we really seem to be... stabilizing.
Beauty, clothing and music technology has been developed to the point that it seems like everything is coming down to plain old individual choice in any of those axes. You can dye your hair pretty much any colour you want - and you can make it look bad or good. You can make pretty much any song or sound you want; it's just a matter of practice. You can have pretty much any hairstyle you want - whatever looks good (or not good) - you don't have to have seas of big perms or beehives at all.
You can make movies that look like anything, given the budget. There's not much in the way of new territory to explore, just more interesting or bad stories to tell.
The naughties (00's) seem to be pretty much just like the 90's so far. I don't think there's any big reason to expect the 10's to be a whole lot different either.
Something could make it different, though. I wonder what it would be?
I Am Lasered
After watching my wife enjoy a year and a half of good glasses-free and contact-lens-free vision from laser eye surgery, I decided to take the plunge myself.
I went to the same outfit my wife did, Lasik MD.
I had the consultation on Thursday. It's a little like moving through all the stations at a science fair, only you have to wait in between. It's a pretty thorough optometric checkup - they look for eye shape, condition of your retina, and they numb your eye and dilate your pupils for some of the later tests.
They warned me that with the dilation test, my vision would get blurry, and in about 10 minutes, I probably wouldn't be able to read. I think it's a testament to how little light true blue eyes' irises actually block that I could still read just fine with my pupils wide, wide open.
They indicated that I was a candidate - I had pretty thick corneas, though pretty large pupils (the sole 'contraindication'), and they gave me the rundown on risk factors of the various procedures. Regular LASIK was an option, but had some increased risk of after-effects, so I decided to go with the ZyOptix instead.
They do the occasional Saturday, and it just so happened that they were doing some this Saturday, so I signed myself up.
The Truth (With Jokes) : Al Franken
Link: http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452287677/thecerealkill-20
This is a much angrier, more serious book, only lightly seasoned with humour this time around. There's not so much focus on the right-wing hacks this time, though they are still present, but this focuses more on the upper echelons of the US government.
He's obviously in a bit of shock that George Junior managed to get re-elected. He's in more of a shock that just because George "actually" got elected this time, that not only is George claiming that gives him a "mandate", but that this is being parrotted not only by the usual suspects, but by the mainstream media as well.
This book covers quite a few things in the current and recent political landscape of the present-day leadership. There's a fairly long treatment of DeLay and Abramoff, including scandals and scandalous behaviour in relation to Saipan, the Terry Schiavo case (you can have fun with the nitpickers over at frankenlies.com on why Tom DeLay "pulling the plug" on his own father wasn't hypocrisy), ripping off/having irregular dealings with native casinos (Abramoff and Scanlon).
There's a great deal near the front of the book on the "fears, smears and queers" tactics that seem to come dramatically to a head before elections, like the strangely-raised orange alerts that subsided after the election. Keeping people on their toes, and deathly afraid for their lives.
Invalid Floating Point Operation in Embedded Internet Explorer
Ran across some trouble the other day. We've allowed embedding Internet Explorer windows in our solutions, which is great for linked portals, intro pages, etc. Things were going great guns, but on some particular web pages, things would go into a tailspin. I was tapped on the shoulder to help figure this out, and it turns out to be a bit interesting. I'm posting this so that if anyone else encounters something like this, no, you're not crazy :)
We made a local not-quite-live copy of the web pages in question to test things out. When I ran them, I got an Invalid Floating Point Operation. The call stack said that the error was being thrown in jscript.dll, Microsoft's library for running Javascript (aka ECMA Script).
If you don't know the debugging technique of binary searching, also known as "divide and conquer", and you do debugging, you really must learn. You divide the area to check for bugs in two. You either set a breakpoint before the halfway point, or comment out or remove everything after the halfway point. If you still get the problem, then the problem is in the first half; if you don't, it's in the second half. Pick the half that the problem is in, and divide it in half again.
On to dissecting the problem...
V For Vendetta
Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/
Set in a future Britain, this is one of the better dystopian flicks I think I've seen in a long time. Not as "extreme" as The Matrix, or 1984, the story has that slight chilling "it could happen here" edge (we've seen what people will do and give up out of fear), but with a more colourful protagonist than any you would ever see in real life.
I've been impressed so far with comic book movie renditions of this past decade. This is only the second in the line of Vertigo movie renditions (the previous one was Constantine, which I also enjoyed very much)
There's a little bit of this movie wrapped up with Guy Fawkes lore. Guy Fawkes Night I remember being celebrated in Scotland more quite a while ago.
(I didn't know at the time that it was to celebrate Guy Fawkes' downfall, but such are the vagaries of childhood. My relatives still seem to get a chuckle out of remembering saying "a penny for the guy" - I sometimes wonder if they ran around with effigies :) )
While some of the plot is a straight line, what makes this movie are the twists, character development, and some of the fine, horrible elements of a government gone wrong.
Highly recommended, although I still don't think homemade explosives ought to go up like pretty fireworks :)
Comment by Adam:
# I have the original Alan Moore version of this. Apparently he was rather disappointed with the movie so I'm rather curious to see how they differ.
"Remember, remember, the 5th of November, with gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
should ever be forgot"Catchy rhyme, and I imagine almost any school kid in the UK can remember the whole thing, even if they have absolutely no idea what it's about. On the other hand the fireworks, bonfires and toffee apples were always good, even if I could never figure out at the time why we were burning a "guy" in effigy (whatever an "effigy" was.)
Comment by Ritchie:
It saddens me that, once I moved away from Scotland as a young child, I never really did get back during that particular season, so my relatives have good memories of it, but I don't. Dang it :)
I'd love to see the comic. I imagine it was there in stores when we go on our occasional graphic novel hunts, but I'll be darned if I can remember seeing it :)
I'm trying desperately to imagine what on Earth they would do for the others in the Vertigo series. I could imagine Preacher would be pretty dangerous to make into a movie, and the Invisibles would be... spectacularly strange. Books of Magic has been a little bit usurped by the very Timothy Hunter-esque renditions of Harry Potter.
I think most people would be scared to try putting Sandman into film. They'd be scared of getting a translation of Neil Gaiman's seminal work wrong :)
Comment by Adam:
Next time you're over at my place, I'm sure Dena will be able to find it almost immediately given that she's memorized the layout of the bookshelves with the trade paperbacks :)
"The Invisibles" would probably be a very good one to make into a movie given that they'd need to chop out an awful lot. It would certainly make the narrative a whole bunch clearer. I do pity the actors when they find out what they have to wear though... Agreed on the "TBOM" movie as you're entirely right that any attempt to make it will be derided as derivative. "Preacher" just wouldn't be made: too gory, too sacreligeous, too flipping odd. There's a lot more in the Vertigo lineup that can be mined though and some of it may even be properly done.
Comment by Ritchie:
I will let her loose amongst your tomes - I'm sure she could find it in rather short order :)
The Invisibles certainly could be a good one to make - it has some great characters and an interesting universe to play in. The Archons and the Outer Church make for some fabulous larger-than-life sick and twisted authoritarians which nicely compliments the money, sex scandal, authoritarian, fundamentalist themes in the news these days.
Reading about it in Wikipedia, there were options picked up to make a TV show and a movie out of it, but neither materialized.
*laugh* Oh dear, what would they wear? Please, just don't let Hugo Weaving be Lord Fanny :)
*sigh* I guess I'll have to do without a Preacher movie :)
That said, it's interesting to come across tidbits like this:
For several years, a film adaptation was in the works, with James Marsden attached to play the lead. The project never materialized, although production got so far as to begin make up tests for the Arseface character, gruesome pictures of which can be found online. At one point, Samuel L. Jackson, a comicbook fan, expressed interest in playing the Saint of Killers.
I haven't read a lot of the other titles in the series. Transmetropolitan hasn't caught my interest just yet. Neither has 100 Bullets (though the premise lends itself better to a series). Y: The Last Man could be a lot of fun, especially if it reflects some of the smart/cheeky writing style. Lucifer would make for a very colourful, mythical world - it could make it as a movie, but it would need a pretty special screenplay for a screen adaptation.
The "Good Old Days"
I was on the LRT yesterday and didn't quite bear witness to an altercation between some "punk-ass kids". One older guy on the LRT chased them off, for which I was quite happy. However, once they were gone, he started spouting the same old sort of drivel that just drives me insane.
"It's all those violent videogames; they should ban those." "It all started when they stopped using the strap in school"
Wait a damned minute.
These are just part of the same damned old "good old days" reminiscing that I've seen online and infrequently encountered in person, but based on how people vote and to how much of a head some issues come, a lot of people actually believe this tripe.
So, in I weigh with my own rant...
