I'm getting game-crazy

The Wii has lived up to my expectations in a big way.  However, I’ve run into one big problem: quality games are few and far between.  So, two weeks ago, I broke down and picked up an Xbox 360.  I’d heard that the Xbox arcade (part of the Xbox marketplace) was a great place to get/play simple games.  This was just what I’ve been missing with the Wii; its online store only has old Nintendo games, nothing aimed at the Wii specifically.

Right away, my Xbox experience was great. I have it hooked up and doing 1080i video; the difference from the Wii’s 480p is very noticeable.  And, the games are definitly high quality, even thought the controller is 10 year old technology (except, of course, for the fact that its wireless).

The media aspects of the Xbox marketplace are also great. Now, this is serious video on demand.  Between the trial games and the quick video downloads, the Xbox has definitely filled out my entertainment center.

So far, the only problem I’ve had with the Xbox is that it won’t play Divx encoded video.  I have it set up as an externder to my Media Center (which is great; the Xbox has much better video than the MC does), however, it won’t play downloaded videos that are Divx encoded.  I’ve found several applications on the web that provide streaming video decoding for the XBox, and I may move to that eventually, but nothing seamless.  Hopefully, MS wakes up and deals with this soon.

Finally, the Wii is not orphaned.  I’m currently playing Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii, and its great. It makes great use of the Wiimote/nunchuck combo, and the graphics are much more “on par” with the Xbox (though still just 480p).

So much fun, so little time …

9/3/2007 12:55:50 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Wii Adendum
An addendum to my previous Looking For Wii entry:  I found one.  I was in Best Buy at just the right time, and was able to snag one.  I like it.  It a lot of fun playing WiiSports.  However, traditional games don’t take advantage of the Wii’s unique interface. I’m hoping that more Wii-specific games come out soon. I can only play so much baseball and tennis …
6/29/2007 12:34:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Another try
Trying to post from BlogJet again…. Let’s see if this works now too..
5/10/2007 9:32:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

It seems that I filled up my blog...

I finally got back to blogging yesterday, and what did I discover? 

My blog site no longer worked!!!!  After spending yesterday and now today trying to figure out why my site would spontaneously stop working, I discovered some strangeness in my log files.

I”m still not exactly sure what happened, but at least, blogging works again!

2/19/2007 8:36:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Yet another test
Yet another test.  Explanation to follow…
2/19/2007 8:34:07 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

What's with all of this TV stuff?
Yes, I know I’ve been posting a lot of TV related stuff and not a lot of “more serious” stuff.  It’s a bit ironic:  I’m so busy at work, that I don’t have time to do the serious posts.  TV’s coming easily right now.
10/27/2006 8:35:37 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Runway Serendipity

This past weekend, I found myself sitting at a table of my cousins (it was my sister’s and brother-in-law’s 25th wedding anniversary).  It turns out that we’re all Runway fans.  What are the odds?

9/27/2006 8:56:55 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Representing Reality

John Dvorak has an article on “Photography and the Truth” today.  This got me thinking.  Before there was photography, no one considered pictures as accurate representations of reality.  Even a painting of a person was accepted as an artist’s interpretation of that person.

Thanks to living in a world of photographs, we presume that pictures somehow represent “reality” now.  Here’s the clincher: we also assume that pictures done before photography also represent reality.  This leads people to think that our ancestors must have been incredibly delusional to think some of what they painted was real.  Frankly, I think those ancestors would be amazed at how easily we accept photographs as “real” today, and using a program like Photoshop to “change” a picture would probably seem perfectly reasonable to them.

9/19/2006 4:06:43 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

The fog starts to clear: Amazon Unboxed and the "Fast Forward" problem.

I was using my Media Center (where I ran into the Unboxed issue I talked about earlier) and discovered a couple of things:  Amazon does, indeed, use Microsoft technology for their videos:  The Mythbusters video I bought automatically appeared in my Media Center Videos list; the file is actually a WMV file.  The Fast Forward / Seek problem that I had with it also happens with Media Center.

After a quick Google search, it turns out that FF/Seek only works on indexed files. So:
1. This is not an “Amazon Player” problem per se, since all WMV’s exhibit the same behavior
2. The video player in Media Center is different than Windows Media Player: When I ran a video with WMP outside of the Media Center software, it acted like it had never been run before.
3. The Media Center video player can’t FF/Seek indexed videos (that seek fine in Real Player or Divx Player).

My conclusions:
1. Amazon is sitll not off the hook, because:  There were a lot of problems other than the lack of seek support; if they’d just indexed the file, Seek would have been supported with other players.
2. The Media Center video player also needs work.  FF/Seek works fine for recorded TV shows; it should work for pre-recorded shows as well (at least those with the necessary indexing).

Amazon, Microsoft, get with the program! I just might have to try out the new ReplayTV software after all…

9/17/2006 10:17:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | technology

Books, Books, Books.

Today, I saw a post from Jennifer that led to her list of favorite (and not so favorite) books.  This sort of boggled my mind, since I wanted to post about two books that I have: one I just finished reading, and one I’m reading now:

Practices of an Agile Developer (Venkat Subramaniam & Andy Hunt, ISBN 097451408X):
I just finished reading this; its probably the best book on agile development that I’ve ever read.  The book is very practical, and not geared to a particular flavor of agile development, like the XP books are.  I’d put this on my “must read” list for any developer.

Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# (Robert C. Martin & Micah Martin, ISBN 0131857258):
This is an interesting book, because its a re-do of a book that “Uncle Bob” wrote a while back focused on Java.  This book makes his points (all language agnostic) more accessible to C# programmers.  There’s an excellent chapter on an example of agile development around scoring bowling.  I saw Bob do this live, and it was remarkable.

I’m thinking of putting up a list like Jennifer’s, but at this point, that seems a daunting task:  I read a lot of books!

9/13/2006 8:53:35 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | books

My Faith in Science has been Restored

And, keep in mind what I just said: Faith in Science.

I’m now reading James P. Hogan’s Kicking the Sacred Cow. It’s an interesting book, a rebuttal of various “popular science” themes, including Evolution, the Big Bang, and (my favorite) Global Warming.  Hogan applies a clear-eyed scientific method to these issues, reporting what experts in the field are saying, instead of what “experts” in other fields are saying.  Apparently, this is an ongoing problematic theme in popular science today: Scientists commenting outside their fields of expertise are just as likely as lay persons (in fact they are lay persons) to go along with public opinion as lay people are.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the subjects based upon what I read:

• Evolution: (surprisingly) There is no scientific evidence that Natural Selection (as currently defined) works. None. Note: this one really rattled me. I knew there were “issues” with current evolutionary thought, but wow!
• Astronomy: Most red shifts are not caused by motion (Doppler shift).  The distance of objects in the universe (and therefore the apparent size / age of the universe) cannot be measured by red shift.
• Global Warming: CO2 emissions actually follow changes in temperature rather than precede them (as would be expected if CO2 emissions were causing warming).  Global warming is (apparently) more correlated with sunspots than increases in greenhouse gases.

Fair warning, this book takes you to the scientific roots of these issues, so its a very dry read. Lots of statistics and such.  And (as the title implies), it completely flies in the face of popular thought regarding these issues.

I highly recommend reading this book! I wonder what Al Gore thinks of it…

7/31/2006 11:18:10 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

Pink Panther

I watched Steve Martin’s Pink Panther over the weekend, and I was surprised at how good it was. It was downright hilarious at spots.  When I first heard about the movie, I wasn’t impressed.  After all, how could Steve Martin doing a fake French accent be funny? Especially as funny as Peter Sellers was.  When watching the movie (I was desperate), I remembered the following:

• Peter Sellers was using a fake French accent too.
• There were only to honestly good “Inspector Clouseau” movies: “The Pink Panther” and “A Shot in the Dark” (the best of the series). The other movies were made much later (The Pink Panther was in 1963, The Return of the Pink Panther was in 1975, 12 years later), and were just done to “cash in” on the Pink Panther popularity.

Steve Martin’s take on the character was at least as good as Peter Sellers’ take, and I think the movie was just about as good as the original Pink Panther. Still not as good as A Shot in the Dark, but that was a classic.

Now, I’m disappointed that the movie didn’t do better at the box office, because I’d like to see more from this acting team, especially Steve Martin, Jean Reno, and Emily Mortimer (Nicole).

Come on, Steve! Give us a another one!

7/31/2006 10:07:46 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

CodeCamp 2.0 was suprisingly good

Frankly, I didn’t have very high hopes.  They cut the camp from 2 to 1 day, the organization showed extreme last-minute-itis, and it was way out in the boonies of north Vancouver (WA, not Canada).

In actuality, it turned out to be at least as good as last year, maybe even better. I especially liked the sessions on Iron Ruby and WMI. Boy, could I have used that WMI knowledge last year!

Now, I’m looking forward to next year’s camp, even if it is back at the WSU campus in Vancouver (a very nice, if remote, campus).

I want to give special kudos to Stuart Celarier and Jason Mauer for putting on such a good show.

That’s not to say that there weren’t some “opportunities for improvement”:

• The agenda came out way late. That needs to be better.
• I never was able to get wi-fi to work there. I know other people were, but they need to be better about helping out there. A few people were helpful, especially Stuart, but other folks just threw their hands up.
• They ran out of sugar for the coffee, and had no creamer at the start. They eventually fixed the creamer issue, but for those of us that can taste the difference, Sweet-n-Low tastes vile.  Yes, I know that this is “extra” stuff, but you don’t want to mess with a techie’s coffee!

But, these were ultimately small issues, and (as I said), it was a good code camp overall.

7/24/2006 5:36:29 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

I'm going Runway crazy, it seems

I don’t know if this is because of my own fascination with the show, or their great perception of the value of blogging, but I just noticed that I’m subscribed to 4 blogs related to Project Runway. I have Tim Gunn’s blog (he’s one of the two “hosts” of the show), Andy Cohen’s blog (Bravo’s VP of Production), Tim Gunn’s podcast (interestingly, not the same as his blog, though they both are covering episodes of the show), and now Rucker’s blog (written by the producer of Project Runway).

Could I possibly get more Runway related material? Maybe

In all honesty, I consider Project Runway the closest thing on TV to what I do every day (actually, my tasks are more like Tim Gunn’s, who I enjoy the most on the show).  I’ve written about this before: it amazes me how much in common software development has with fashion design.  If you’re sceptical about this claim, and haven’t seen the show, watch it! I think you’ll see what I mean.

7/21/2006 9:21:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general

AM Cinema! Yay!

John Campea on the Movie Blog is reporting that AMC is going to try showing movies on Friday-Sunday pre-noon for $4–$6.

I’m all for this as a trend (hear that, Regal?). I prefer going to movies in the morning. I’m an early riser, and I think of noon the way most people think of 3:00. In fact, I’d even pay full price to see a movie at 10:00 AM: Get up, have breakfast, go to the movies, and have the whole afternoon ahead of you!

7/14/2006 11:03:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Scoble on Soccer

Robert Scoble has an interesting comment regarding making soccer more popular in the United States. He says HDTV will do that.

I agree strongly. One of the reasons I bought an HDTV set 3 years ago was my experience watching a basketball game on an HDTV at the store. All of a sudden, the game wasn’t boring: I could see the whole court, and where the players were positioning themselves. It added a whole new dimension to the game, one I had only previously experienced at a live basketball game.  As I think I’ve said before, soccer is a lot like basketball: the real action isn’t around the ball, its the positioning of the other players. Being able to see them in HD-widescreen made the World Cup games much more enjoyable.

7/10/2006 9:43:58 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

An interesting article
Donald Sensing has an interesting article concerning alternative energy. He brings up a very good point: the real issue regarding global warming isn’t whether its real or not (or even whether people cause it or not), it’s what to do about it. Short of extreme hand waving, its a hard problem to fix.
7/7/2006 2:03:07 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics | world affairs

The weirdness of racism

So, Sony’s in trouble for “racist” advertising. Now, I find this to be a very offensive picture. Whomever thought this up should have their head examined.

Then, I thought, if the figures were reversed, would it have affected me the same way. I’m sorry to say, probably not. What do you think?

And, to Sony: This is a great way to sell X-Boxes. Get your collective act together.

7/6/2006 10:11:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I saw Superman Returns

This weekend, I saw Superman Returns. The movie pretty much lives up to all the critical hype that’s been thrown about. It’s at least as good as the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies, and possibly better than them. In fact, the movie is a sequel of sorts to them, using bits of history from those movies. At first, I was pretty leery of this concept. There’s been a lot of story development around Superman in the years since those movies came out, and I was hoping to see some of that included in this movie. Returning to the storyline of those old movies seemed a step backward.  In actuality, it worked out well. Instead of spending a lot of time developing the Superman “backstory”, the movie could just refer to its built-in history and move on.

All in all, this is a definite must-see. If you enjoyed the first two Superman movies (we’ll all ignore the other two), you should love this as well.

By the way, there was one interesting casting crossover: Superman’s father, Jor-El, was once again “played” by Marlon Brando! Pretty good for a dead man!

7/5/2006 3:28:18 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Iron Man is so misunderstood

Today, John Campea, in the Movie Blog, was saying that Iron Man is just a Batman knock off. Now, I don’t want to say that he doesn’t know Iron Man, but he doesn’t.

There are some fascinating twists to the Iron Man story.

First of all, Iron Man has a “day job” as the bodyguard of his public identity, Tony Stark. This means that Iron Man’s always getting pulled into Tony Stark related stuff.

Second, Bruce Wayne is a playboy/philanthropist; Tony Stark is an industrialist/weapons manufacturer. As above, this means that storylines tent to focus on his company, Stark Industries, as opposed to the kind of “general crime fighting” that Batman is up to.

I’m hoping that the upcoming Iron Man movie will be “true” to the character’s origins and have a plot around Stark Industries, industrial espionage, and global terrorism. This is where the Iron Man character really shines.

That alcoholism stuff they pulled was lame beyond lame; they never should have gone there. It was very un-Iron Man.

Finally, you want to talk “Batman knock-off”? Let’s talk Green Arrow!

6/23/2006 4:06:56 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Portland BarCamp anyone?

This weekend is the San Francisco BarCamp. What’s BarCamp, you ask? BarCamp is yet another form of the un-conference (like Code Camp). The thing that’s different about BarCamp is its only for participants. So, it breaks the speaker/audience model, even further than Code Camp does. Everyone presents (or at least participates in presentations), so its more of a peer gathering.  You can find more information on BarCamps here and there’s a “BarCamp for Dummies Newbies” here.

I’m wondering if this would be a neat thing for the Portland area… Any takers?

6/23/2006 9:25:39 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general | development

New Palm, part 2

Well, I’ve been using my Palm TX for a while now, and while I’m still annoyed about how hard it was to get going (are you listening, Palm? and why can’t I tell you about that directly?), my actual experience is terrific. I’ve got all the software I use regularly installed, and even was able to find a new video playing program (open source / freeware this time) that is better than what I had on my LifeDrive.

And, due to recommendations at work, I’m finally giving Rhapsody a try. It took me a while to get used to the interface, but so far I’m liking it. My boss had a good point: the music I listen to changes over time, so why not just “rent” it via a monthly charge? My MP3 player on my TX also works directly with Rhapsody, so loading musing into it is easy.

Overall, I’m quite happy with the purchase now. In fact, I cancelled the MP3 player that’s been on backorder for a week now.

I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen right now. Excellent.

6/15/2006 11:11:34 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

A movie that wasn't as bad as I expected

Yesterday, desperate for something new to watch on TV, I watched the remake of  The Stepford Wives. At first, I found the movie annoying in its one-sidedness. After a while, I began to see that the one sidedness was part of the story, and started ignoring it. Once I did that, the movie was almost entertaining (yes, I said “almost”).

Near the end of the picture, in the first “revelation scene”, I realized that the movie was fundamentally a “role reversal” picture. By switching the gender roles around, the story made a lot more sense, and was a lot more “sinister” in nature. It definitely wouldn’t have been made that way, but it was interesting to look at the picture from that angle.

The final twist was also interesting and one I didn’t expect at all. I won’t describe it so not to spoil the picture for anyone masochistic enough to choose to watch it.

All in all, the final resolution showed some nice balance, though not enough to make the picture into anything but a bad remake. I did think it was interesting that a movie making a statement about the subjugation of women (if that was what they were trying to do, its hard to say) only had one actor with star billing: Nichole Kidman. Even Matthew Broderick was relegated to billing “under the title”.

As a side note, what’s with these remakes that either ridicule (Stepford Wives, Starsky and Hutch) or ignore (all the MI’s) the originals? It’s a safe bet that the folks making these movies weren’t fans of the originals, and they’re basically just cashing in on the name recognition, or are they trying to “say” something more significant? If they are, they’re doing a lousy job of it.

6/12/2006 5:03:34 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  TV | general

Palm Postscript
I tried to send my previous post directly to Palm, and found that there was no way to do that. Hopefully, they’ll find my post directly. Not a high hope though.
6/12/2006 11:27:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

New Palm, new adventure

I’ve been having “slowdown” issues with my Palm LifeDrive. It’s a great PDA/MP3 player, but has a huge flaw: Palm decided to treat the HD storage like internal (Flash) RAM instead of as external storage. This means that applications are stored in it and must be swapped to RAM to run. This causes a noticeable delay at both startup and when switching applications, and can be really annoying when all you want to do is check your appointments for the day.

I considered just resurrecting my T3, since I was happy with it (other than having decent MP3 capability). However, I realized that I’d miss having WiFi capability (the T3 only has Bluetooth). I remembered that Palm now had the TX model out, and sure enough, it has both Bluetooth and WiFi built in. It also has 100 MB of (available) Flash RAM, so it sounded like a serviceable MP3 player too (like the LifeDrive, it comes with MP3 player software). Since the price was right, I went for it and picked one up.

It turns out that the TX has a few flaws in its OS … Everything went well until I tried to synch up with my LifeDrive’s backup: the synch locked up in the middle, and the TX started resetting repeatedly. The only way I could stop it was to reset it back to factory defaults.

Now, a little history. I’ve been using a Palm OS device since the Palm IIIx days in the mid ‘90s (gadzooks! just about 10 years!). I’ve gone through several “device transfers”, and they’ve all gone without a hitch. Even when there were hardware / OS changes, the system was smart enough to handle it without any major work on my part. So, this reset problem was extremely unwelcome.

I did some Googling on the problem, and found a couple of articles on how to handle it. Apparently, mine was not an isolated case. Plan A and plan B both failed (soft reset, hard reset). Plan C finally got the device working (reset to factory defaults, remove all backup records from the HotSynch database before synching up for the first time). Then, I had to load the missing applicatons piecemeal from my old backup. After a few hours of work, I (finally) have a working TX with my old data intact.

Then, I ran into my next hurdle: While the Life Drive will work as a virtual disk drive through its hotsynch cable, the TX doesn’t. I was surprised by this, since its a standard feature of Palm’s only real competitor, Microsoft. Luckily, I found a third party app (kudos to the Palm development community; they’re the main reason I’ve stuck with Palm over the years) that provides virtual drive support to the external SD card. This actually provides me with potentially MORE storage than I could have had with the Palm’s Flash RAM, since I can get up to at least a 1 GB SD card into that slot. This is MORE space than I was using on my Life Drive.

Anyway, today I’m finally up and running on the TX. So far, now that my startup pain is over, its living up to its promise: its nice and snappy, and has all the nice features that I used with the Life Drive. As an added bonus, the Grafitti 2 interface seems to work better with the TX than it did with the Life Drive. Frankly, I have mixed feelings about the current Palm devices. Both the TX and the Life Drive before it showed a much lower level of quality than the previous units. Frankly, I’d be switching to a Windows Mobile device, except I have experience with it as well, and the quality there is even lower: Microsoft doesn’t seem to understand the handheld market anywhere near as well as Palm does. So, I’m sticking with Palm for the duration, hoping and praying that they get their technological act together. Needless to say, that I’ll be sharing this story with anyone interested in hearing it…

6/12/2006 10:54:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  technology | general

WinFX is dead, long live .NET Framework 3.0
It looks like Microsoft finally found a “product naming person” with a clue. They’ve decided NOT to call the (next) version of the .NET Framework “WinFX” after all, opting for the much more sensible “.NET Framework 3.0”. Okay, so it still a terrible name (try Googling “.NET” and see what you get!), but at least it has some continuity with what’s come before. We’ve been living with the “.NET” name since before 2002.
6/9/2006 5:08:21 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Pixar's next
I just saw the trailer for Pixar’s next movie, Ratatuille, and it looks good great! I’m lukewarm about Cars, it looks too much like an old Chevron commercial to me. But, Ratatuille looks like its back to greatness for Pixar!
6/9/2006 9:23:36 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

I'm on the fence about the Akaka Bill

Dan Akaka, junior senator from Hawaii, submitted a bill to essentially award the Native Hawaiian federal status similar to that given to Native Americans, including Eskimos.

The bill was narrowly defeated via a Cloture vote today (Cloture votes prevent filibustering).

I’m on the fence about this bill. Originally, I was against it. It sounded like rewriting history. What happened in Hawaii was nothing like what happened to the Native Americans; that was more like one nation (the various Native American tribes) being overrun by another nation (the good ole US of A). Most people are probably unaware, that the Constitution specifically talks about Native American issues and specifically treats them as “foreign nations”. Native Americans weren’t considered “citizens” of the United States until the 20th century.

The case of Hawaii was more like that of Texas: Citizens of the country (Mexico in the case of Texas, the Kingdom of Hawaii in the case of Hawaii) broke away or overthrew the existing government and set up their own “Republic” in place of it. In both the Hawaiian an Texan cases, there was some degree of unofficial U.S. involvement in the governmental change.

In the case of Hawaii, certain lands were passed over to the Federal Government for their administration (these were lands originally held by the rulers of Hawaii, that the subsequent Republic of Hawaii also held in trust). The US government has been managing these lands since then, but not as reservations; Native Hawaiians have always had the same citizenship rights as all other residents / citizens of Hawaii.

According to Senator Akaka’s web page, his bill would just add more formality to the relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian people, placing the management of the lands in the Department of the Interior (where Native American lands are administered) and establishing some sort of working relationship between the Federal Government and the Native Hawaiian. It specifically disallows any question of land seizure or even creation of Casinos on Native Hawaiian land. These were amendments added because of concerns expressed by various other Senators.

This sounded pretty benign to me: the Feds already had some sort of acknowledged special relationship with Native Hawaiian, this just added more structure to that relationship.

But, Senator Akaka talked about issues like the Native Hawaiian “deciding” whether to have a monarchy or not. So, this sounds more like the creation of a special, ethnic shadow government for Native Hawaiian. The State of Hawaii tried this before, creating the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

So, I’m on the fence here. Frankly, I think the Hawaiian politicians are just pandering to the liberal constituency of their state, rewriting history by accepting that the United States government overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. This seems to be slowly becoming the “conventional wisdom” in the state, and its just wrong.

Native Hawaiian activists like to talk about how :“their land” was “stolen” from them, but to this date, the largest private land owner in the state is a Native Hawaiian trust, the Bishop Estate. And there are many other wealthy Native Hawaiian families as well. Also, before those “thieving” white people had their way, it was impossible for common people to own land in Hawaii; Hawaii used a feudal system where land was controlled solely by their nobility, not by the common folk.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I feel better.

6/8/2006 5:17:31 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [1]  general | politics

"White on White" racism in America: a perspective

One thing that gets very little press today in the talk of immigration reform is the history of “White on White” racism in the United States. I was doing a little “audit” in my head, and was shocked by the results: There are three European ethnic groups that come to my mind when I think of “White on White” prejudice: the Polish, the Italians, and the Irish. Guess what these three groups have in common? They’re (by and large) Catholic. Now, there’s something I hadn’t anticipated.

Guess who’s also (by and large) Catholic? Yes, Hispanics. What gives?

6/7/2006 2:20:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Horror of the Character Actors

John Campea of The Movie Blog just reviewed The Breakup, and said some interesting things. I won’t go into his review; just follow the link if you’re interested. I will say this much: its not the usual review of this picture.

However, some of what he said got me thinking: He likes Vince Vaughn in the movie, but says that we might be getting tired of him. Vince basically just “plays” Vince. This sounds very familiar. It reminds me of Jim Carrey. The same thing: in comedies, Jim just plays Jim. No muss, no fuss.

In the old days, guys like these two would have a comfortable career as character actors. Whenever a producer would say “Get me a Vince Vaughn type”, his casting director would just call Vince’s agent and see if he was available. Vince would show up, be Vince on screen, and everybody would be happy. If you watch old movies, like I do, you know that there are a ton of folks in them who fall into this category. You probably have no idea of their names, but you always recognize them when they walk on screen. I recently saw Charles Coburn in Carey Grant’s Monkey Business; he’s one of these guys.

Unfortunately, we live in different times. Guys like Vince and Jim who have no range or depth to their performances are getting star billing, that’s just wearing out whatever distinctiveness they have. Don’t get me wrong; I like Vince Vaughn, and I used to like Jim Carrey (before he became over-used and over-hyped). I just think this new system does both the actors and the audience a disservice.

6/5/2006 4:22:02 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My opinions on Batman bad guys

The Movie Blog just said that Spider-Man 3 will have 4 villains, and John was quick to express his displeasure. In solidarity with his opinion (considering that I still haven’t seen Spider-Man 2), here’s my comments on the Batman movie franchise, that (in my opinion) started this whole multi-villain thing.

1. Batman: one villain (that counted): the Joker (Jack Nicholson). He stole the show, which was bad (remember the title of this movie?), but not a bad picture, overall.

2. Batman Returns: two villains (that counted, forget about Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck). Bad move. People (Tim Burton, that is) were sidetracked with Jack’s over the top performance in the previous movie, and thought that it would take 2 villains to fill his shoes: bad idea stacked on bad idea. Catwoman was enough of a character. The dual story of Bruce Wayne’s relationship with Selena Kyle and Batman’s relationship with Catwoman would’ve been terrific, but they blew it by adding the cartoonish Penguin character.

3. Batman Forever: two villains (again!). After the Joker, Two-Face is one of the best villains in the Batman genre. And, they totally ignored him so that they could latch onto Jim Carrey’s rising star, playing The Riddler. The Riddler was a small-time villain in the comic, made big by Frank Gorshen’s great TV performance. To add insult to injury, Tommy Lee Jones was playing Two-Face! Now, come on, one of the best actors of modern times, and you ignore him! This focus on what was basically a TV-villain would be a harbinger for the next Batman travesty…

4. Batman and Robin: two villains (and three! heroes). The “ensemble cast” would have been bad enough, but the sheer campiness played pseudo-seriously was downright disgusting. Building on the wholly inappropriate Riddler debacle, this movie tried to cash in on Alicia Silverstone’s rising popularity by casting her as Batgirl in this farce. There should’ve been just one villain (either Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy would have worked), and the movie should have concentrated on the relationship between Batman and Robin (again, remember the title????). This movie almost killed the franchise. Joel Schumaker should never be allowed to make a movie again!

5. Batman Begins: two villains (but, one at a time!). Finally, Batman done right! Even better than the original movie: this one centered around the title character instead of allowing the villains to steal the show. The two villains were there to support the main character, instead of chewing up the screen with their own drama; excellent. And, that plot twist about Ras Al Ghul at the end was brilliant!

So, now, 4 villains in Spider-Man 3. I can hear the cash register now: cha-ching! In a bigger sense, I think its a sign that Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst can’t carry the picture. Especially since they’ve decided to add Gwen Stacey to the mix. This shrieks of Batman and Robin all over again…

6/5/2006 10:48:38 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

My comments on "the worst sequels of all time"

The Movie Blog just posted Entertainment Weekly’s list of the top 25 worst sequels of all time. I figured I’d add my 2 cents as comments…

25. The Matrix Reloaded: Never saw it. Haven’t missed it.
24. The Next Karate Kid: The downhill slide started with KK Part III. I though that this was better than III, I was sorry they didn’t do a sequel to this one.
23. Porky’s II: yeah, a piece of junk.
22. Teen Wolf Too: Teen Wolf itself wasn’t much of a movie. They actually pulled it off the shelf when Back to the Future turned out to be a hit. But, yeah, this was a loser.
21. Legally Blonde 2: Not so great, but not as bad as some say. After all, the first one wasn’t exactly Oscar material.
20. Godfather Part III: A good movie, but not a good sequel. It was better as a stand-alone movie than as a capper to the previous two.
19. Revenge of the Nerds II: This didn’t need to be made.
18. Battle for the Planet of the Apes: All POA movies after the second were junk. As was the remake.
17. Star Trek V: Yeah, it was bad, but not as bad as the first (yawn) one was.
16. Ocean’s Twelve: Still haven’t seen it, but as a sequel to a remake of a really bad film, how bad could it be (relatively speaking)?
15. Dumb and Dumberer: I like the name. I didn’t even watch the first one.
14. Conan the Destroyer: yeah, yuck.
13. The Sting II. I didn’t think anybody remembered this. Jackie Gleason playing a Paul Newman role? Come on!
12. Star Wars Episode I: Episode II was even worse.
11. Dirty Dancing Havana Nights: “Nobody puts Baby in…” oh, wrong movie. Yeah, who cares?
10. Jaws The Revenge: Didn’t like the first one, thought that this one was silly, though Jaws 3D was worse, I’m sure.
 9. Speed 2: Another one I missed (on purpose)
 8. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Didn’t watch any of these. I guess you had to be there…
 7. The Fly 2: Hey, this was just on TV! No, didn’t like the remake either.
 6. Weekend at Bernie’s II: I was amazed they made this after the original.
 5. Batman & Robin: Almost killed the franchise, it was that bad. And it could have been sooo good. George Clooney was robbed.
 4. Blues Brothers 2000: Amen.
 3. Leprechaun Back 2 tha Hood: What? they made a SEQUEL??? sheesh.
 2. Caddyshack II: Yeah. It had all the bad parts of the original and none of the good parts. It even had some new bad parts.
 1. Staying Alive: The only good thing about this movie was that it was bad enough to prevent a third “Fever” movie from being made.

5/31/2006 3:41:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

No X-men spoilers here
Did you notice that I didn’t directly mention any of the X-men plot? Boy, that was hard. I have a lot to say about what happens in the movie, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone that hasn’t seen it yet (I think this is a sign of just how good the movie is. After all, I really wouldn’t be motivated to reveal much about the movie if it was bad). If I remember, and am so inclined, I’ll post something next month. If anyone wants to discuss it before then, drop me an e-mail.
5/31/2006 2:28:58 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

X-men 3

I saw X-men 3 last night. This was a big deal for me, since I generally don’t go to the theater to see movies, instead waiting for them to come to DVD. In fact, the last movie I saw in the theater was  The Incredibles in 2004.

The movie was excellent. It wasn’t Oscar-worthy, by any means. And there were a lot of plot twists that I didn’t particularly care for (being a fan of the X-men comic from way back). However, it was very entertaining, I’d say the best of the three movies.

I disagree with those speculating on an X-men 4 though. I think that would be a big mistake. X-men 3 pretty much ends the story for the X-men. Of course, a Wolverine movie wouldn’t be out of the question…

And by the way, I saw the Superman trailer (interesting watching a trailer for a DC comic character before a Marvel comic character movie). I’m feeling better about Superman Returns now. I still don’t like the fact that they’re building on the old movies instead of doing a more updated story, but it looks like it’s going to be good too.

And (finally) Ghost Rider looks like it’s going to be really good. Nicholas Cage makes a much better Johnny Blaze than a Superman (he was the original choice for the Superman role in what became Superman Returns).

5/31/2006 9:23:42 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

So far, bad reviews for the Da Vinci Code movie

The early reviews of the movie are in, and they’re not good.

Urban Cinefile said, “There might be a riveting adventure thriller to be made from Dan Brown's controversial bestseller, but this is not it. Melodramatic, overlong and dare I say occasionally boring, Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code gets lost in the maze of its puzzles and media”.

Sounds a lot like the book to me. I guess Ron Howard was true to the source.

5/17/2006 1:52:10 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Superman disappointment

I watched the Superman trailer recently, and was very disappointed. It looks like they’re basically writing (yet another) sequel to the ‘70s & ‘80s movies instead of finding their own vision. That was over 20 years ago, guys. There’s been a lot of character development in the Superman genre. Frankly, if they were going to do something derivative, they should be looking at the Superman animated series. It had a much more “modern” view of Superman, Lois Lane, and Metropolis as a whole. While, I’m sure the movie will do well (they’re already planning the sequel!), I was hoping for more of a “Batman Begins” approach, where they would show off a new facet of the Superman character.

Oh well. That’s Hollywood for you.

5/16/2006 10:19:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Microsoft has (finally) released Web Application Project (WAP) 1.0

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before. The Web development interface in VS 2005 is vastly different than that in VS 2003. I’d say gratuitously different. My .NET study group took a look at it when VS 2005 first came out and were thoroughly confused by it.

Well, for whatever reason, Microsoft has been working on a thing called the “Web Application Project” for VS 2005. It adds a project type very similar to the VS 2003 Web project, but takes advantage of .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 features. (I’d like to think that its because they realized the error of their ways, but come on. this is Microsoft.

According to Scott Guthrie, this will be part of the VS 2005 SP1, and will continue to be supported in the future as part of VS 2005.

Well, version 1.0 is now released.

5/9/2006 8:51:01 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

May Day

…

I just looked down at my desk calendar and noticed that today is “Early May Bank Holiday” in Ireland. So, “Happy Irish Early May Bank Holiday!” Boy, those Irish sure can name ‘em!

On a related note, as all Hawaiian school children know, May Day is Lei Day in Hawaii (this is a song that school age children get to / are forced to sing at Hawaiian school pageants. So, to all you readers, Happy May Day. May all your May Days be Lei Days  .

5/1/2006 10:42:17 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

God

Lately, Scott Adams (of Dilbert) has been on a God/religion jag. His latest question/statement is (edited): do you believe in (1) Psychics? (2) God? (not a multiple choice, this is a two-parter.)

The Psychic thing I’ll leave alone.Scott seems to want to draw parallels between the two, and that just muddies the waters further.

As far as belief in God goes, this is an interesting conundrum. If someone believes in God, this is pretty straightforward. They say “yes, I believe in God, and here’s what I believe about God…”. Now, if someone says that they don’t believe in God, they then have to define what they don’t believe in. This generally goes something like “I don’t believe that God is an old, white man with a long flowing beard.” or “If a benevolent God exists, why is there so much strife in the world?”.

So, here’s the thing: what if we defined God to be “the force that causes the Earth to revolve around the Sun”. Now, who “believes” in God? Perhaps someone could argue that they don’t believe that this force is God, but then how is their opinion relevant when they’ve already said that they don’t believe in God?

So, the way I see it, people who believe in God have defined God in a believable (at least to themselves) way. People who don’t, have defined God as something not believable. So, its less about “belief” and more about definitions, and a “desire” to believe.

 

4/21/2006 9:52:15 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Free Will? Free Willy? Free Beer?

Scott Adams, in his Dilbert Blog, has been talking about Free Will lately. He chalks up people’s belief in it to “superstition”, but I suspect that his reliance on science to define his reality is also “superstitious”. Nevertheless, I recommend reading this, it’s very thought provoking.

By the way, if you do read his posts, I (personally) don’t believe that random numbers really exist: They’re a useful fabrication / model that simplifies the work of mathematicians and scientists.

Frankly, I think that anyone who discusses “reality” in any meaningful way is just fooling themselves.

4/11/2006 8:58:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)      Comments [0]  general

Interesting legacies

I just finished listening to Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWIT) and Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes. I think its interesting that both of these “cutting edge” “technology shows” include theme music. This is sort of a hold over from radio shows, and now television (though some television shows play with the format, placing the theme music later and later in the program. The theme music doesn’t really add anything to the program, since its self contained anyway. It’s not like we need something to inform us that the show is coming. And yet, the programs would seem less professional if they were missing.

As an aside: yes, this is one of the ways I get my tech news. I think its fantastic that I can simply download these shows to my Palm LifeDrive without the hassle of dealing with TV or radio networks.

3/24/2006 4:43:09 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)