12/29/2008I saw the remake(?) of the 1951 movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” today. I remember watching the original movie as a kid and the robot “GORT”  scared the pee-wadding out of me similar to when the alien in the original War of the Worlds movie put its hand on that lady in the farmhouse. Even though it was scary, I was hooked on the sci-fi genre in no small part due to GORT. I just thought he was bad ass. Just look at him at the picture on the right. Que Hombre!!! The reviews from the professionals haven’t been too kind to the new remake of the movie. Actually, the two movies are very different from each other. At a high level, the first one was a warning from the aliens that we shouldn’t be messing around with nuclear weapons as it would be humanities downfall. This time around it was more about how we have goofed up the environment so bad, the aliens basically need to hit the reset button on the Earth. The movie doesn’t have a lot of plot twists and is very predictable. The plot is about as straight forward as it gets. Still, it is a good story and seems pretty believable with the way humans have treated the Earth. Keanu Reaves plays “Klaatu”. He is the alien dude. I use the word dude, because at any moment you get the feeling he is going to bust out with his “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” speak. At the very least he will pull a Neo from the Matrix trilogy (Think “Whoa…..”). I can see why they cast Keanu as Klaatu as he can play a dispassionate deadpan alien with little emotion quite well. One scene shows a guy having a heart attack in a busy train station and while others quickly rush to the guys aid, Klaatu just munches down on a tuna salad sandwich he just stole from a nearby vending machine and watches the whole scene unfold in front of him without even batting an eye. I won’t say how he arrived on Earth, but let’s just say his space suit is pretty nasty. Kathy Bates plays the secretary of defense for the US. She actually plays a pretty believable role and does what she is supposed to do and try to protect us from the perceived threat. John Cleese has a brief but very well played role of an aging Nobel Laureate that Klaatu has a brief meet up with so that the alien can see we aren’t all wicked evil little beings and deserve a second chance. Will Smith’s kid plays Jennifer Connelly’s stepson. He is one annoying little brat and quite frankly couldn’t act for crap. I guess it is good to have well known parents in the biz.  Then there is Jennifer Connelly. Ooooh, she is just soooo dreamy. My heart is all a flutter. That girl is just so beautiful; breathtakingly so actually. I think she played a decent part, but honestly I don’t know as those eyes of hers kept my attention. She played some sort of micro-biology scientist something-or-other who was very important. Anyways, she was the central human character.
The movie just seemed to never really get off of the ground. It was like, eh, the aliens are here. Mass riots spreading around the globe, people acting stupid, etc. There were some pretty good special effects and I would have loved more time given to Klaatu’s protector robot GORT (I didn’t care for how they depicted how GORT was composed of nanorobots that looked like small gnats. I don’t know, I just thought the nanobots would be a bit more different and “techie” looking.) Actually, I think the whole movie would have been better if GORT just came to Earth and started kicking some butt holding Jennifer Connelly in a King Kong/Fay Wray sort of way. That would have been pretty cool. Alien robots and hot chicks sell tickets! In the end, the movie could have been a bit better. The product placement in the movie is just a little too in your face at times which is getting to be annoying at current movies in general. Don’t go into it expecting it to be anything like the original because it isn’t. It is a decent flick and if you like sci-fi (and Jennifer Connelly ;-) ), it is worth seeing it even though they didn’t even mention the famous catchphrase from the original movie “Klaatu barada nikto”. 
12/12/2008This is just such a great shot:  Unknown photographer, found this on flickr. 12/8/2008Steve Dehaart and I went to the Nine Inch Nails (NIN) concert here in Portland last night. The concert was pretty intense. The effects were truly extraordinaire. There were several mesh-like screens that came down in front and back of various band members. The screens looked to be made up of LED’s or something similar were touch and position sensitive.  At one point Trent was behind a screen that had nothing but static like you would see on an old TV not tuned to a station and as he came up closer to the screen, it would open a virtual hole in the static and the hole would follow him wherever he went on stage so that you could see him the whole time. Additional virtual holes would open up for additional band members as they came closer to the mesh. The mesh screens weren’t down the whole time. Sometimes they were lifted up and the stage was more wide open. The mesh projected a variety of visuals including smoke, clouds, flames, etc. The mesh screen was used at one point to program a virtual drum machine for the song “Echoplex”*. A few rows of squares were on the screen with lights going down the rows and then repeating. One of the band members (I believe the drummer) came out on stage and started to touch the screen in certain places and when the lights went down the rows and where he selected the squares, there would be a corresponding kick drum, snare, etc from the drum machine. When the song was about over, the drummer came out again and slowly started to unselect the squares he had selected before. There was a brief acoustical set that was kind of cool with again some neat visuals. The visuals made them look like they were standing out in a Louisiana bayou. Of course Trent had to break a few instruments. At one point, he completely snapped the top part off of the neck of a guitar. The boy has some angst even to this day. The concert was very engaging and kept a great mix of old and new songs, slow and fast tempo selections from their previous twenty years. *According to the NIN site, this song and the associated album The Slip are and always will be a free download. I am just linking this song here to make it easier. Please go to NIN.com to sign up and download the whole album. 12/6/2008 Cassandra came home with a couple of packs of Crayola “Twistables” crayons for the kids as stocking stuffers.  You really can’t see it very easily in the picture, but instead of the ol’ skool type of crayons I had as a kid with the crayons wrapped in paper, these things are wrapped in a very thick clear plastic. The crayons themselves are thinner than the original ones as well, so you are getting less crayon. I can’t stress enough how thick the plastic is on these things. Now I know why they are doing this so that you don’t break the crayons, but isn’t that part of the fun? I used to love snapping new crayons in half and looking at the inner core. They made such a satisfying “snap” sound. I digress. These crayons can’t be refilled once they are used up, so all you are left with is these plastic crayon exoskeletons. I am betting these casings can’t be recycled either, so they will just end up in a landfill somewhere which is completely unnecessary. Needless to say, these crayons are getting sent back to the store for a set of old fashioned crayons (wait did I say OLD fashioned? Crap…). 12/5/2008Ok, I am about to bite the hand that feeds me. Specifically my being predominantly a Windows Server system administrator. I have always kept an old system around running some sort of UNIX/linux/BSD type OS to keep my *nix skills up to date and do some *NIX administration at work. For the most part, the linux distros have been OK for use on the desktop. With regards to being a server OS, I see merits for all of the above OS’s and Windows Server. Each has their place in the datacenter. This post is more about linux on the desktop. I have tried quite a few of the distributions over the years. From Red Hat 4.x way back about 12 years ago to the former Mandrake now Mandriva, Debian, Suse, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, Puppy linux, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, PCLinux, Mepis, and a few others. I have tried quite a few. I have always liked distro’s based on Debian. I like how Debian is set up and I like the apt-get package manager. About a year ago, I saw a blurb about a new distro called DreamLinux from a group down in Brazil. It certainly was nice looking, but it didn’t seem to have any direction with where it was going. Many distros are like this. They are someone’s pet project, but they don’t seem to be kept up or worked on. I was worried about becoming interested in DreamLinux because of that. Since I needed a new distro to test and becoming disappointed with Fedora 10 not being able to get the wifi driver working even with the wpa-supplicant drivers, it was quickly deleted from my hard drive. I decided to give DreamLinux a try. Setting it up was simple from the “Live” CD. After it booted, it quickly found all my hardware including the wireless antenna that Fedora puked on. It had a nice “Quick install” feature that did just that and quickly installed a bunch of commonly used apps like Firefox, Skype, etc. Since it was based on Debian, apt-get was there as well ready to go. It took me about 30 minutes to get the desktop set up and running the way I like it (I switched on Compiz and did a few other tweaks). All in all it is a pretty good distro. It is fast and fairly user friendly. It comes with a lot of software already pre-installed and was generally a no brainer. This isn’t to say it has been all peaches and cream. Like most linux desktop distros, it has its rough spots. As you can see in the picture below, the video of Thomas Dolby bleeds over onto the file manager. I believe this is mostly a Compiz artifact, but none the less it is annoying and most people wouldn’t put up with it. 
The system has also shut itself down a few times. Now I don’t know if this is a power settings issue or what as I have not seen it actually happen and haven’t gone through the logs yet to determine what is going on. Anyways, pretty cool distro and I think I will keep it around for a while as I think this distro has a lot of potential. Microsoft – you guys had better start delivering on the next desktop OS (Windows 7). It is pretty amazing that you can get a fully functional desktop OS with lots of productivity software for free. 11/25/2008A while back I mentioned I was trying to figure out what email system to use. I have been forwarding my two domains (bitflipper.com and clanmacdonald.com) to my Windows Live Mail (hotmail), GMail, and Fastmail accounts. All three were locked in a dead heat and then something happened. I was upgraded recently to the latest version of Windows Live hotmail mail email system (or whatever the heck they are calling it these days). I noticed that SPAM seemed to like my inbox now more than ever. Where I was only getting maybe one SPAM email a day in my inbox, I am now getting dozens. I keep hitting the “junk” button, and it seems to have no effect whatsoever. It is a joke. As of today I am officially throwing in the towel on hotmail. I will stop forwarding my domain email to hotmail and set up a rule in hotmail to forward on email to my Gmail account and let GMail filter it. I have had my hotmail account for about 14 years now (hard to believe) and am a paying subscriber to the service, but it is time to give it up. It is simply too clogged up with SPAM that it takes too much time to get through it and get to my real email. It is too bad too. I was really enjoying the “push” email feature to my blackjack II Windows smartphone. The battle continues between GMail and Fastmail. I plan on using each exclusively for a month at a time and make a decision after then. Here is what my typical inbox looks like. Emails labeled red are SPAM: 
Goodbye hotmail. It has been a good run. 11/16/2008It is that time of year here to clean out the gutters on your home. The leaves haven’t all quite fallen off the tree, but it was a nice sunny day and it is somewhat easier to do this chore on a nice day rather than in the wind and the rain. While doing this task, I noticed a few things. One, the goop in the gutter is quite “fragrant”. It has an earthy, damp, rotting smell. Second, I noticed how the gutter is its own little ecosystem. There were all kinds of critters living in there. The largest species was a spider about the size of a small pea. It was bright orange and had a very small yet ornate web. There was also some little squirmy worms. They were worms as opposed to the other squirmy things in there which were mosquito larvae. I suppose the mosquito larvae were using the squirmy little pinkish/white worms as a food source. I also noticed a few different types of beetle species and a couple of ants. I am sure there were other things growing in there, but they were too small for the unaided eye to see. It is amazing sometimes what you find doing the most mundane of things like cleaning out gutters. There was a whole ecosystem that lived just a few feet above my head that I didn’t know anything about until I got up close and personal to it. What did I do with all of the crud I cleaned out of the gutter? I kept it! Yep. It was enough to fill a bucket and looked like it would make a great compost for some seedlings in the Spring. 11/9/2008This is a cool little gizmo. The device does nothing more than play a few ambient clips (or “drones” as they call them) from the group FM3. FM3 supposedly got the idea for the Buddha Machine from the little Buddhist chant boxes that are sold in temples throughout Asia. Instead of having the chants embedded into the memory chips, they had their drones embedded. 
They come in many different colors including a very rare set that is made out of Pu-erh tea! Mmmmm…..Pu-erh tea, yummy. My buddy John Lee from work translated the Chinese characters. For all I know, he is yanking my chain and knowing John, he probably is. Here is the translation: 翅部 – Wing Area – as in Wing from a bird 事倍功半 – Twice the Output, Half the Effort – it’s a common Chinese saying, but not appropriate to describe 2 AA batteries. 路喂 – Road “Hi” – first character means Road, second character is common way to say hello over the phone, together they do not describe circuits 願望 – Desire/Hope/Wish – doesn’t mean plastic outer shell 心 – Heart – ok the Buddha, I get it X裁 – don’t know if that first character is even a word, but the second one means to get rid of, as commonly used in laying off people (裁員) Now, I haven’t held one of these gizmos although I have downloaded the tracks that are on the device. I don’t know what it is about the device, but I find them very intriguing. I read once that the music group Kraftwerk way back when they first started making digital music envisioned a time in the future where little machines would be everywhere creating music for people to enjoy. I can’t help but think that the Buddha Machine was the type of device they had in mind. 11/4/2008
This is really neat. Buddhist monks in Thailand built a temple out of a million beer bottles. The local villagers brought the bottles to the monks. Great way to recycle in a completely different way. More info here. 10/31/2008The Witch Head Nebula. Spookiness at a cosmic scale. |
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