“Avatar” shouldn’t…

win the award for Best Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards. and if it does, i will lose what minor shreds of faith i might have in the Academy.

astute observers might point out that i have only seen two of this year’s nominees, and that Avatar isn’t one of those.

but i stand by my assertion. the Best Picture should be the best. and i sincerely doubt Avatar is. except for its Best Picture and Director nods, the rest of its nominations are technical. no acting or writing nominations at all. a derivative plot and lazy writing (unobtanium? really?) with really cool graphics does not a best picture make. in other words, four thousand computers don’t outweigh a couple actors.

quote of the day:

“Suvlu’taHvIS yapbe’ HoS neH” – Klingon proverb

first thoughts on the iPad:

well, it’s a pretty piece of kit. but coming from Apple, you’d expect that.

i want to want one – but, as it stands, i don’t.

i do like the entry price. at a mere ten bucks more than a Kindle DX, the 16GB iPad may soon be the gorilla in the large-format e-reader market. it’s colour, it’s fast, it’s able to do far more than just read books – the list goes on.

but as anything more than an e-reader, i think it’s too flawed as-is.

first and foremost, it’s intended as an internet appliance. but it doesn’t run Flash. love Adobe’s product or not, the failure to include it on a device designed to surf the web brings to mind the “Cheese Shop” sketch from Monty Python:

Customer: Aah, how about Cheddar?
Wenslydale: Well, we don’t get much call for it around here, sir.
Customer: Not much ca–It’s the single most popular cheese in the world!
Wenslydale: Not ’round here, sir.

Flash really is the cheddar of the internet. YouTube, Hulu: both use Flash Video to deliver content. it’s used on Facebook and MySpace. Google even uses it.

so to ignore Flash is short-sighted at best.

another issue is the lack of multitasking. in other words, you can only do one thing at a time with the iPad. while not a huge issue, think about how many applications you may be running at one time on your computer. i often run four or more at once – and they aren’t obscure, either. right now, i’m running Firefox, TweetDeck, and Microsoft Word. i’ll often run Stickies, Adium, iTunes, Terminal and IDLE with these applications, too.

with the new iPad, this wouldn’t be possible. and it certainly has the hardware to do it; the ARM-based computer-on-a-chip seems to be a real powerhouse.

the price is an issue, too. i’m a “fastest i can get” sort of guy, because i expect the hardware to last me a while. this computer is soon to be four years old – but when i bought it, it was the fastest laptop in the world. i expect it will last another four years at least. so, for the 64GB/3G model, $830 is a bit much.

there are plenty of other complaints: lack of user control, hidden file system, no camera, no stylus input, etc. but the lack of Flash and multitasking are my personal big two.

i hope it doesn’t go the way of the Newton, as i think it could be a great platform in later marks. my MessagePad has nothing on a MessagePad 2100, and i assume the iPad will improve similarly. but i’m certainly not buying one now.

quote of the day:

“A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history – with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.” – Mitch Ratcliffe

i sometimes wish…

i was an expert in something. usually doesn’t matter what, just something.

plenty of people i know are experts of one sort or another, and it makes me jealous occasionally. i’m pretty much constitutionally unsuited to be an expert; as my mother often points out, my most common question as a child was, “Why?” i always wanted to know how things worked and why they happened – which might, at first, seem like a step to expert-ness. but, critically, i have always lacked the intense focus that characterizes an expert, instead wanting to know “why” about everything, not a single subject.

because of this, i think, i became comfortable with a more shallow understanding, a “big picture” grasp of things. i know a little about a lot, but there are very few things i know in great depth.

what is somewhat amusing is that i can often counterfeit expertise in any given subject, because my wide breadth of interest has taught me where to look things up.

but sometimes i’d really like to be able to recommend a wine without having to look things up. or tune an engine without looking at a manual. or any number of other things.

but that’s not me.

quote of the day:

“The man who has a library of his own collection is able to contemplate himself objectively, and is justified in believing in his own existence.” – Augustine Birrell

i hate this part…

you know, when you can’t think of anything to write about? i need some sort of note-taking thing that’s wired into my brain (c’mon DARPA, help me out here – i know you’re working on it) so i can “take notes” without having to take notes. clear?

it seems when just wandering (well, stumbling bemusedly) through my day, i have all these little random thoughts that seem really interesting at the time. i carry a notebook, but often these ideas hit me when it’s not accessible. or when it would be inappropriate to pull out and start scribbling. or dangerous; the morning commute comes to mind.

so, all my great internal flowerings of wit bloom and die, unseen by the outside world (that means y’all). you don’t know what you’re missing. and, honestly, neither do i. if i could remember them, i’d write them down.

so, some random space fillers, in no particular order:

1. the HCBC is gearing up for the new decade. we’ve got a work space, and plan to have regular hours for folks to come by and work on their bikes with our tools “real soon now.” we’re also going to move our workshops into the space, making them a “rain or shine” event for the future. keep an eye out for an open invitation to an upcoming open house.

2. i really wish they didn’t have the SPCA bring dogs on the radio that need adoption. not because i wish ill for the dogs or the SPCA, but because it makes me sad. and it’s hard to drive to work or class if i’m bummed out. i don’t have the room or the funds to adopt a dog right now (and let’s not dwell on my antipathy towards cats), but every time i hear about these critters on the radio i want to bring them home. so you have to do it for me.

3. did we really need a remake of Clash of the Titans? i mean, the greatest attraction of the original are the Harryhausen special effects. well, and Ursula Andress. but i digress. the new film will be all seamless CGI, like Avatar and the Star Wars prequels. it seems to me (though this may be my not-well-hidden inner curmudgeon creeping out) that back when the effects guys were actually trying to create a realistic effect in the corporeal world, it gave us a better experience than the “throw tons of cpu cycles at it” approach. i know that the spaceships in the prequels look “cooler” (or, at least, smother) than those in the original trilogy, but they are less “real” because of it. if you’re going to make a film about big blue people, put some dudes in rubber suits.

4. the new Jaguar XJ is hot. i got to check it out up close, in detail at Baker Motor Company’s launch event (now i just need a test drive). it’s got a very Citroën-inspired feel to the rear quarters. i like it a lot. but why are we only getting the V8 cars? i want the diesel! it’s only half a second slower to 60 mph than the non-supercharged V8 car (6 seconds versus 5.4), and gets 40 mpg combined. combined! did i mention significantly lower (than the petrol) CO2 emissions, with the same top speed (155 mph, in Europe)? and it runs around $11 thousand less for similar trim levels.

5. i’m beginning to loathe the term “graphic novel.” i really enjoy comic books. but not every comic book is a graphic novel. so stop calling them all that. Maus is a graphic novel. Pride of Baghdad is a graphic novel. Watchmen, V for Vendetta – graphic novels. some random storyline, contiguous in nature, collected in a single volume? Excalibur Classic, Vol. 1? not a graphic novel (good comic, though). just because it’s been collected and has a convenient unifying label hung on it doesn’t mean it’s a graphic novel. comic books are ongoing or single issue pamphlet-format works that tell a story without a preordained resolution. one could, perhaps, make the case for some one-shots as “graphic short stories,” but even most of them are beholden to external continuity. a graphic novel, on the other hand, is a story told through the same visual forms as the comic book (whether initially serialized or not) that has a beginning, middle and end. it is a contained story where the author is trying to either tell that story or expand on a larger theme. Maus, for example, tells the story of one man’s life during the Holocaust. it, therefore, is a contained story. Art Spiegelman is using the form of the comic to tell that story and make his points – he could have used other forms to do the same thing. Claremont and Davis really couldn’t have chosen another format for Excalibur, and there’s no resolution. the title ran on another 120 issues or so, through multiple creative teams, until it finally petered out. that’s not a novel, and neither are the smaller chunks – whatever titles you want to hang on them.

whew!

for not having anything to write about, i managed to burp out quite a bit. if you made it this far, i hope you enjoyed today’s maunderings. cheers!

quote of the day:

“Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.” – D.H. Lawrence

New Year, new posts, new ideas, same old incoherency.

so it’s been months since i’ve posted anything. and much of that is because of a general personal malaise, tied to the past year or so (well, eighteen months) has been a cavalcade of suck. much of that has been mitigated lately, both due to life choices i’ve managed to make and new medication (woohoo! better living through chemistry!).

and with that mitigation has come a new resolution to post more (and semi-regularly) on this blog.

among other things, i am now an English major. no more EE, no more CompSci, no more maths, etc. i have come to the conclusion that my brain is not now (and may never have been) structured or prepared for the rigors of a scientific career. not that i’m dumb (though i reserve the right to be dumb independently), it’s just my thought processes don’t seem to be willing to flow in a way as to do stuff like generate coherent, functioning code (i can read the stuff, though. so that’s marginally useful).

as an English major, i will be writing quite a bit more. so don’t be surprised if i share some of those assigned ramblings here. also don’t be surprised if they’re formatted differently or even readable; i tend to write differently for “publication” than i do for informal, conversational outlets like this one. go figure.

i’m also going to try to do at least one post a week that isn’t an English assignment of some sort. political ramblings, beer criticism, car kvetching, comic book raves, whatever. some may be conglomerate posts or spasms of web link rehashes. you never know. but more free product for you. so enjoy, happy readers!

quote of the day:

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” – Rabindranath Tagore

the fall of Kronos…

with the 30 September termination of talks between Penske and GM on the sale of Saturn, another American car company is relegated to historical status. and, like the vast majority of failed car companies, deservedly so.

Saturn was an interesting experiment in the 1980s, an attempt to beat the Japanese in their own specialty. acknowledging the superiority of cars from Honda, Toyota and others, GM decided circa 1982 to build a new small car different from anything they’d done before. by 1985, they’d made the decision to do it with a new company. for a corporation that already had at least ten brands, what was one more?

the early Saturn cars were fairly sophisticated and forward-looking vehicles, as well. the plastic-paneled Z-body was lightweight and durable (if somewhat flammable). the aluminum castings in the car (including the engine block) were made using a (at the time) revolutionary lost-foam casting process. cars were sold at a set price, without the off-putting haggling other dealerships had. the EV1 was leased and serviced through Saturn dealers.

but before long (in historical terms, anyway), Saturn became just another brand at GM. instead of building its own cars, it used common platforms and engines with other GM models. the same thing that poisoned Pontiac/Buick/Oldsmobile/Chevrolet/Cadillac killed Saturn; instead of building cars people wanted, they built the same car as Pontiac/SAAB/GMC/Buick/Chevrolet/Opel/Vauxhall – just with a slightly revised grille or plastic on the dash.

and so the experiment ends; but this time, without a Golden Age to follow. Saturn is condemned instead to Tartarus.

quote of the day:

“A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience.” – Elbert Hubbard

why does environmentalism…

“belong” to the liberal left?

i consider myself an independent, which mostly means i’m disgusted with both sides of the American political equation (we’ll save the vitriolic ranting against a two-party system for another day).

i recycle. i drive a car that gets almost 40 mpg. i ride a bike or walk in lieu of driving whenever possible. but when a political discussion comes up, and i mention i voted for the wrinkly white (Republican) guy, people are horrified. “How could you do that?” “I thought you were one of us!”

now, most of my friends are liberals of one sort or another; some claim to be libertarians, but i think that many of them have their definitions confused. but for the most part, left-wing (or at least left-leaning) liberals.

there is nothing wrong with this – everybody has to be something. and this country (like it or not) has always been at the forefront of social liberty. which is a big part of the left; we’ll ignore the big government safety net stuff for the purposes of this post. the conservative right is, to my mind, a rather recent development in a lot of ways – however much they might wish to claim the Founding Fathers as their own.

but my friends who are environmentally aware naturally assume that anyone else who is is also a liberal. this is no real surprise, as the left is the only side that has embraced environmentalism wholeheartedly (or at all).

why is it the conservative side of the nation will not do the same? is it the fruit and nut image that “green” calls up?

for convenience’s sake, i’m going to lump Neocons, Paleocons, Anti-Federalists, etc., all into the same “conservative” lump. while they all have very differing views on things like interventionsim and protectionism, they have similar views on economics (classical liberal Laissez-faire, for the most part). and environmentalism is just good business. it’s what a larger and larger number of consumers want to buy, after all. and it doesn’t hurt with the rest of them.

you know all those right-wing hunters, who always vote the Republican party line? many of them are environmentalists. they’d never admit it – there’s too much stigma attached to the term – but they (for the most part) want to protect the world’s wild places. many of them even realize this starts at home; they recycle, turn off lights when they leave rooms, all the little things that get lumped into “environmental responsibility.” and they’re not liberals.

Theodore Roosevelt, man’s man, hunter, champion of business (look up “regulated trust”); he was an environmentalist. and he was a champion of the values the right claims to espouse: equality of opportunity and personal freedom.

“When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit…” – T.R.

sounds a lot like what the political right (especially as embodied by the talking heads in the media) claims to espouse. so why won’t they embrace environmentalism?

is it because they are blinded by other issues? too focused on opposing the Democratic left’s government-growth policies? News Flash: y’all did a crappy job with this when you were in power, too. some could say worse. so you should probably STFU about how Obama’s policies are going to grow the deficit. one trillion dollars spent on the “War on Terror” since 2001, over one third of which was in Iraq, kind of makes for massive feet of clay.

one benefit the “left” has over the “right” seems to be an avoidance of this type of myopia. but that’s neither here nor there.

or is it? let’s assume, for a moment, that neither side of the political divide is one hundred percent correct (crazy, i know). therefore, the best course for the nation lies somewhere in the middle. but neither side will look to the middle; they have far too much invested in being the “good guys,” with the other side being the “bad guys.” but what if they would? there needs to be some way to bridge the gap, right?

quote of the day:

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” – Hannah Arendt

art meets… life?

first, an admission: i don’t use Twitter. while i think it has a lot of utility – primarily due to its popularity – it also suffers greatly from a low signal-to-noise ratio.

but plenty of people do use Twitter – i’d guess that a majority of my tech-savvy friends do.

and, from March of this year, so does Roland Hedley – a fact that was brought to my attention in today’s Doonesbury comic strip.

there are any number of people on Twitter (and the internet, for that matter) who have assumed the names of fictional characters. but, in this case, the Tweets are coming from an essentially fictional character. it’s not a fan assuming the character’s identity, but the creator (or someone Garry Trudeau has assigned the task). so, inasmuch as it can be, it truly is Roland Hedley Tweeting.

which brings me to my thought: where is the internet taking us?

with the anonimity provided by our screens and keyboards, we are accepted as who we seem to be. it’s possible, given the freeing nature of that same anonimity, that when interacting with strangers on the internet, we truly are ourselves.

as an extension of this, our “internet personas,” therefore, are real people that may differ from our “meatworld” aspects. with the increases in computing power afforded both by advances in chip technology and distributed processing, it probably won’t be long before some of the entertainment personas on the internet are partially or wholly automated. will these artificial personas have similar rights and obligations to those run wholly by meatworld puppeteers? or will those rights and obligations be solely borne by their creators?

i think we need to start considering where the line should be drawn now, before we have to make a decision then.

quote of the day:

“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.” – Alan Kay

good-bye, Uncle Walter.

news broke this evening that Walter Cronkite had passed away.

my generation is probably the last to have “first-person” memories of Uncle Walter – i was six years old when he retired as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and since then i’ve been exposed to recordings of his other historic broadcasts – whether the moon landings or the Kennedy assassination, Walter Cronkite is the voice i hear in my head.

growing up in a journalist’s household, i was inculcated with a general respect for the older generation of newsmen, and Cronkite in particular. he was the person who came into our home every evening, anyway.

launched in 1984, NASA had a “Teacher in Space” project – but what many people are unaware of is there was a paralell “Journalist in Space” program as well. my mother was one of 1,033 applicants for the spot – and when she heard Cronkite had also applied, her reaction was, “If Uncle Walter wants to go, they should let him go.”

now, as an adult, i am in awe of his accomplishments: landing (as an embed) with the 101st during Operation Market-Garden, covering the Nuremberg trials, reporting on the Kennedy assassination, his marathon Apollo 11 coverage, Apollo 13, Vietnam, Watergate, the 1968 Democratic Convention – all events that he made accessible and understandable to middle America.

but the respect my mother had for him will always most shape my memories.

good-bye, Uncle Walter.

quote of the day:

“And that’s the way it is… This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News; good night.”

Day 5: sobering observations.

i hadn’t intended to post any more about the trip until i got home to South Carolina, but today’s “sightseeing” kind of hit me.

we drove into town yesterday, spending a goodly part of our jaunt on US 90 – picking it up in Biloxi and rolling along to the vicinity of Waveland. it was somewhat disturbing to see all the empty foundations and hollowed shells of buildings – but not like what we saw today.

today, we stood on the levee bordering the Lower Ninth Ward at the location of one of the major breaches – and, except for scattered new construction, there was nothing in front of us.

makes one thankful for having a roof overhead, among other things.