Monthly Archives: March 2006

Cool project of the week

March 27, 2006 – 10:19 am

Too bad I didn’t read this before the kids’ science fair….

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Moving day (or weekend, actually)

March 18, 2006 – 7:06 pm
moving
moving
moving

Today we helped Randy and Kristi move into their new place, and I had to post these photos I took on my phone of a particularly amusing moment.

The washer and dryer hookups are inside a closet that happens to leave no room to maneuver around the side to actually hook up everything.

As you can see from these pictures, what we ended up having to do was hanging Nick in over the narrow opening on top of the dryer (which was stacked on the washer), and having him dangle down the back and make the connections for the gas, vent, etc.

Hopefully Randy will post the pics he got on his camera to his Flickr account soon, partially because they will be better quality than these from my phone, and partially because he got one where he stuck the camera back in there and got a shot of Nick hanging upside down looking back up at the camera.

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E-mail policy

March 18, 2006 – 6:46 pm

As a result of a delayed communication yesterday in coordinating the movie arrangements, Nathan and/or Dan brought up the question of why I don’t check my e-mail more frequently than I do, so I thought I’d briefly explain it here.

When I am working, I like to devote my full concentration to the project I am working on. Designing and writing complex software takes quite a bit of concentration, and I find that once you get into the groove of doing it, you are much more productive. I think that this is probably true for any type of work that involves a lot of thinking about anything that is complex. I also find that it takes a bit of time to get into that mindset, and if you are interrupted in order to do something else, it can sometimes take a bit of time to ramp back up to that level of productivity.

As a result, I usually do not check e-mail at all during the day (or at least while I’m working). I’ll usually (but not always) check it before I get started in the morning, and then rarely check it again during the day. Furthermore, I do not answer my phone while I am working, unless it is Martha. Anyone else can leave a voicemail and I will deal with it when I have a chance.

This is the whole point of voicemail, to allow you to deal with incoming calls on your time schedule, not the caller’s. Same thing with e-mail - it was never designed to be an instant back-an-forth communication tool. If you want that kind of real-time communication, that is what IRC and IM clients were invented for. Needless to say, I almost never run any IM clients, and certainly never while I’m working.

Hope that clears things up for anyone who may have been confused by my communication policies / practices. Please let me know your thoughts, either on my habits or outlining your own.

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V review

March 18, 2006 – 6:16 pm

So we (Nathan, Dan, and I) saw V for Vendetta last night, so here is my customary review.

I really liked it. I had read the original story the movie was based on (in its original comic/graphic novel form) back in the early 90’s. It actually was published in the early 80’s, but at the time I was a bit young for that kind of story. I recently went and got the graphic novel reprint of it so that I could reread it again before the movie came out, and I just finished the book this week, in perfect timing.

As with any adaptation, there is always the temptation to compare and contrast the movie to the original, so I will briefly do that here, for anyone interested. Of course there are always subtle (or not so subtle) changes to the story when the transition to a different medium, and this was no exception. Such changes seem to be even more drastic in most comic book adaptations, since long running series like Spider-man, X-Men, Superman, Batman, etc. are usually trying to condense parts of a 40 to 70 year long ongoing story into a much shorter window. I guess I expected this one to be a bit different in this regard, since it was always a self-contained story, with a beginning and an end, not an ongoing series.

That being said, I don’t necessarily have a problem with most of the changes in this case, even though there were some significant ones. I won’t spoil anyone by telling you what they are, unless you’re really interested, in which case I will. Most of the changes fell into one of two categories: toning down certain potentially offensive parts (probably in an effort to be more appealing to today’s general audience), and secondly changes to the characters and events themselves (which were probably made for the same reasons). I don’t care for the first category of changes much, but I completely understand it, and I guess even support it. As for the second, I actually liked some of the new aspects of the characters and story a bit better than the original, and even those that I didn’t like better I didn’t really dislike either. But the important thing was that the theme and the idea of the original story was very much intact, and it is a story that (as I’ve mentioned before) I really like.

All in all, I highly recommend it. If you really want to pick up on all of V’s insightful insights on politics and human nature, you will probably have to listen closely as he speaks quite fast sometimes. This is complicated by other people in the theater distracting and making noise behind you, but that’s another matter. Some of his better monologues also didn’t make it into the movie, either, so if you’re really curious I’d recommend reading the book (or “graphic novel” if you prefer that term). I’ll gladly lend it to anyone who would like to do so.

UPDATE: Nathan posted his review on his blog earlier today, I just didn’t get around to catching up on blogs other than my own until this evening.

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On a lighter note…

March 16, 2006 – 9:52 am

I’m looking forward to the release this week of the V for Vendetta movie. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, it was originally a comic book written in the early 80’s by Alan Moore. Not wanting to spoil too much about the plot, but it is about a society that has embraced totalitarianism in the name of safety, a government which has justified all sorts of progressively worse actions in the name of national security, and an insane man (or terrorist, if you will) who has determined that drastic measures are needed to wake the people of society up and cause them to remember what their lives used to be like before it is too late.

It’s a pretty good story, which will hopefully be translated well onto the big screen. I’m not sure whether the people behind the translation are trying to make a political point relevant to our time (as with the recent, excellent Good Night and Good Luck), or whether they’re just trying to cash in on the recent comic book movie craze, and found a good, dark story to do it with, but either way, I think it will be good.

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The news

March 16, 2006 – 9:37 am

This morning we launched the largest military offensive operation since the beginning of our invasion in Iraq. The target was the area of Samarra.

All of the news reports so far have been sure to mention the fact that there were 50 aircraft, 200 “tactical vehicles”, and 1500 troops engaged in the attack. I couldn’t help but notice that these numbers were mentioned in every report I heard, whereas other numbers were not. One number not included was the population of Samarra (200,000+). Another figure notably missing was the projected death toll, both in terms of the “insurgents” who were the targets of the attack, as well as the innocent bystanders which will inevitably be killed in this type of operation.

As with most reports on our dealings in Iraq, few will ask many questions; although many questions certainly need to be asked. How will we gauge whether this operation (or the invasion in general) is “successful”? What death ratio of “insurgents” to innocents will be considered acceptable? If the trend we have seen so far is any indication, the few who do ask such questions will initially be ignored. If they get loud and persistent enough, they will be reassured with patriotic generalities or outright lies.

And then, the truly sad part comes when the very few remaining who will challenge and expose the lies eventually do so, because the vast majority of people just don’t really care. When the facts came out that disproved the administration’s WMD stories, the outcry from the public was nearly insignificant, because by that point most of them had allowed themselves to be re-convinced of alternate justifications for our illegal actions.

When the truth about the illegal NSA wiretapping program came out, I don’t remember a single mainstream news organization demanding an answer for how the president reconciled the speech he made on 4/20/2004 when he explicitly stated that the US government does not wiretap without court orders with the fact that he personally ordered that exact type of spying to occur beginning several years prior to the speech.

Unfortunately, people just don’t seem to want to ask such questions anymore. Perhaps it’s because we live in a “new age” of terrorism (or at least new to us). Perhaps people want to feel safer so badly that they’re willing to suspend their disbelief and not delve to deeply into the assertions that they are being made safer by various activities at home and abroad. It doesn’t actually matter whether such actions are in fact making them safer, and they sure as heck don’t want to think about the possibility that they may be making them less safe. It’s so much easier just to believe it, and try not to think about the negative side effects, like the loss of life and liberty.

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Server outages

March 12, 2006 – 6:19 pm

My server had a RAID controller failure earlier today, which is why the sites were down for a couple hours, just in case anyone was wondering. I’m not too worried about it, since this stuff happens every now and then, but hopefully it doesn’t become a pattern, because then I’ll have to find another hosting company again.

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Ubuntu

March 4, 2006 – 10:55 pm

Dan and Sara were over for dinner tonight, and as Dan and I were doing stuff on my laptop, I realized that I haven’t mentioned on here my recent migration to Linux on my laptop.

I currently still need to use Windows for work, since I’m doing .NET development in C#, but for pretty much everything else I am currently using the Ubuntu distro running in VMWare on my laptop, and it’s working nicely. Eventually, I may even want to switch to the other way around (Linux native and Windows in the VM), but I suspect I probably won’t do that for performance and compatibility reasons.

One cool tool that I have recently gotten used to using is rsync over ssh to publish web site updates to my servers. Now I can just code and test all my changes on my local server, and then just send only the differences up to the server for a quickly synchronized update.

If anyone’s interested, I’ll post more on this later, including why I chose Ubuntu, etc. Heck, I’m not fooling anyone - I’ll still post on it even if no one is interested….

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The ultimate showdown

March 2, 2006 – 2:44 pm

This has probably been around for a while, but I just saw it today, so here is the link to one of the funniest flash animations / songs I’ve seen out there on the wild wild web.

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