The Dark Knight

I'm not going to equivocate or explain my opinion. It's very simple really.

WOW.

If you don't see this movie you are depriving yourself of an absolutely stunning piece of film.

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Summer YA Reading Spree

Recently, I’ve been on a young-adult reading frenzy. It’s a bit strange, when I was a kid I preferred adult science fiction. But now that I’m an adult, I like young adult novels. Maybe it is because the YA books are a lot better than they used to be.

“The Princess Academy” by Shannon Hale. A really interesting modernized sorta fairy tale. When the royal priests degree the future princess will be from a frontier mountain known for its quarries, officials build an academy to train the local young ladies in proper princess behavior. Only the point of the story isn’t really marrying the prince, but how education broadens the minds and perspectives of these girls so that even if they aren’t the future princess, their homes and families are greatly improved because of their greater understanding of the world. When you combine this with a likable heroine, some good adventure and complex adult characters, well, it makes for an excellent read.

“The Lightening Thief” by Rick Riordan. What is it about Greek gods? 2000 years after their worship fell out of favor, numerous fictional works make use of the mythology. Perhaps the reason is that with twelve main gods and armies of various supernatural creatures, the Greek Pantheon makes for good drama. That’s just as true for young adults as is it for grown-ups. What if you discovered that your missing father was a Greek god? What if this turned out to be a really dangerous fact? That’s the premise of the “Percy Jackson & The Olympians” novels. This first book in the series is a very fun, well-paced read with a trio of pre-teen demigods trying to prevent a war. Good fun, humorous plot twists revolving around various points of Greek myth and some interesting hints about Western civilization in general. I look forward to reading the rest of these books.

“His Dark Materials” Trilogy by Phillip Pullman. Ah yes, the controversial trilogy that advocates the death of “God”. Honestly, the subject matter is less disturbing than the extreme unlikability of most of the major characters, heroes and villains alike. I’m actually impressed that Mr. Pullman wrote three novels involving people I don’t particularly like but he somehow managed to make them suspenseful. This was mainly a credit to his plotting skills. My main gripe is that the conclusion of the series is woefully anticlimactic. The story continues for a couple of chapters beyond what it really should in order to deliver a gut-punch of a twist that frankly seems entirely too convenient. These are good books in the sense of being well-written and plotted, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, the last book was the least enjoyable for me.

On a sidenote, I'll be travelling for work this week so it's unlikely there will be any posts until Saturday.

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Thoughts From The Drive Home...

Superman and all those other superheroes are creations of another age. I mean, who cares about supervillians on the rampage anymore. This is 2008 and we have 2008 super-problems that need solving. In a time when the price of oil is skyrocketing, who will be the superhero for our age?

It appears our cries for help at the gas pump are being answered.....Never fear, guess who is here!

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Pajamas from the Mall

While at the mall today, I generally refrained from taking pictures of patterns. I find that retail personnel for clothes in particular don't like it when you're photographing their stuff. However, in the pajama department of Dillard's I came across some patterns that demanded my camera's attention.

See full post for sleepwear designed to give you psychedelic nightmares. The sheer loudness of these prints would keep me awake for hours.

Teaser: The tamest pattern of the bunch.
No really.


When acid-dropping ferns attack! (in your sleep)


I do not care how many times they say it, Brown + Pink DOES NOT equal pretty.
See?

If you stare at the following pattern for move than twenty seconds, it will appear to move.

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Movies from My Weekend

Spent my holiday weekend reading, shopping and watching some movies....

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" is just a good, fast-paced romp through a fantasy world. I'd never read the book(s?) this movie is based on but it was pretty enjoyable. Also, Freddie Highmore impressed me by being able to play twin boys in such a way that I never once confused who was who. A nice family movie.

"Hancock" was great but, man, this wasn't the super-hero movie I thought I was going to see! And I mean that in the best possible way. After the big reveal, I had no idea where the plot was going. Charlize Theron's character especially pleasantly surprised me. It was pretty interesting to see a superhero film where the superhero is such total jerk. Also even though Hancock cannot be injured (for the most part), the film did a really good job of conveying the destruction and peril that would result from these powers. There's a good bit of language but overall, this is really enjoyable action movie.

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CD Baby Strikes Again!!

Aka - How I spent my Stimulus check, part the first

Once again, I wandered into the online music store CD Baby and have now purchased an insanely eclectic bunch of music. Also, I discovered their $5 sale (buy any 3 CDs on the sale list and they are all $5 instead of their list price). Reasons for my depleted bank account:

Vibeke "The World Famous Hat Trick" - Described as "Norway's answer to early Blondie", this is rousing album of jamming music. I particularly like track 6, "Meant To Be With You".

The Frolics "The Frolics" - Like kinda dirty punk-country with a wonderful sense of humor. I can easily imagine myself humming "Crackhead Fred". Besides, you've got to admire a even tangentially country band who includes "A Ballad to Eazy-E" on their CD.

Devotchka "How It Ends" - "European influenced sad bastard music"....And what music! Although only four tracks are available for previewing, they are a varied and interesting group of songs. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd got with "The Enemy Guns" for being the coolest song I've heard in months. I really can't wait to listen to the rest.

Kagero "Kagero" & "Red & Black" - A Half-Japanese Gypsy-Punk Group whose lead singer channels Simon Le Bon. The self-titled album is more punk with songs like "Samba Au Lait". The second album, "Red & Black", with only three songs makes a surprisingly huge impression based on pure gypsy awesomeness, especially the title song.

Devil Doll "The Return of Eve" - HOLY MOLY. A rockabilly/jazz/punk singer with an out-of-this-world fantastic voice. Just absolutely blew me away with every single track. Not to mention, there's a huge variety in the song styling, from the punky "The Curse" to the more contemplative "Tortured".

Next up, buying CDs that I actually have planned to buy for a while but put off for reasons that escape me now.

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The State of Engineering, Sorta

Thanks to a coworker, today I read this article in “Design News” magazine which discusses the results of a survey of 2000 engineers on the state of engineering careers. I had a great deal of trouble taking this article seriously when, in one of the graphics, it lists the average engineer’s salary as $86,194(!). Um, maybe in the computing industry.....

Another amusing part of the article was when they asked engineers in their survey what would they change if they were CEOs of their companies? While some of the items listed are worthwhile goals, several were wildly infeasible. Here is my favorite suggestion of the bunch:

“Get rid of bureaucracy”

I think pretty much every corporate employee in the history of mankind has had this recommendation. Bureaucracy is very, very frustrating. However, how many bad ideas are (thankfully) prevented from being implemented because of bureaucracy? Imagine how much worse things would be if red tape didn’t hold back the “shoot from the hip without thinking” ideas that needed to be held back. Good bureaucracy acts as a filter without overwhelming or swamping its participants in paperwork. Whether your company has good or bad bureaucracy is a different question, but guys, entirely “getting rid of bureaucracy” is like wishing for the sky to be purple...and on fire.

The article did have one absolutely brilliant quote about working in engineering:

“In general, engineering is a very demanding and relentless pursuit, mixed with periods of chaos and panic and brief moments of satisfaction. After months of hard work and finally pulling the proverbial rabbit out of a hat, there is a brief moment of satisfaction and accomplishment. Then, your boss hands you your next assignment – and this one involves two rabbits and a smaller hat.”

Very well said.

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Movie Review: WALL-E

*This review contains spoilers*

“WALL-E” is a very strange children’s movie. This film isn’t afraid to be either desolate or off-putting and I don’t mean that in a bad way. For one, the setting is not a happy one. And the lack of dialog in the first half really hammers home how empty and quiet an abandoned Earth would be. In fact, I spent a great part of this movie seriously horrified either by the state of Earth or the state of humanity. If it wasn’t for the completely sweet WALL-E himself, I think the movie would have been too dark for most adults much less children. WALL-E as a main character is quite interesting because this movie isn’t about him growing and changing so much as it is about his effect on the people and machines around him.

See full post for further thoughts.

Still, those adults who’ve been decrying the movie as anti-human....Um, what movie did you see? Because the movie I saw named WALL-E ended on a hopeful note. The humans take control back; this is especially clear if you watch the credits where humans and robots are working together to rebuild society (including cities, industry and such). If anything, I found the movie to be profoundly redemptive on that score. Humans, having exchanged comfort for responsibility long ago, take charge of their destinies once more from little things like working on the computer past “bedtime” to bigger things like saving children from being crushed.

And this story of the humans parallels the robots. Humans gave into easy-living; robots submit to programming. Both have to overcome these impulses to take conscious control of their futures. The moving force for this is WALL-E himself who without really trying or meaning to, entices every robot and human he comes into contact with (except the Autopilot) into acting “outside the box”. From teaching robots how to wave hello-goodbye to forcing two humans out of their projection bubbles, he is the force responsible for the robots and the humans becoming something new.

I didn’t leave with the “Yippee” (like after Nemo) or a “Hell, Yeah!” (like after Incredibles). More like, “Hmmmm....That was interesting.” American cinema is certainly evolving when a supposed children’s film provokes more thinking for me than 90% of the officially grown-up films out there. The animators at Pixar should be commended for creating a remarkably grim movie that also happens to be entertainingly adorable. Because, desolate visuals or no, I still want a WALL-E robot.

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Boom De Yada = Love

So, I crossed 20 posts this month. Something I haven't done in a while....But looking back at the posts, man, have I gotten grumbly about things! This is not to say there aren't things to grumble about.....Just, it's such a cool world full of things worth geeking out over. How cool you ask?

Discovery Channel Cool.


I solemnly swear that unless aliens invade the planet or something equally OMG!, my posts for the upcoming weekend will be hopeful and enlightening (after a fashion).

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Friday Narnian Silliness

You know why I like fanfiction? Sure it's really, really weird and occasionally really, really badly-written. You have to dig through a lot of so-so stuff to find those pearls. But what pearls they are....Every now and again, some fan creates something that is so perfectly awesome you simply must acknowledge being paid to do something isn't the same thing as doing it well. Today, is one of those times.

From the kinky dens of LiveJournal I give you:
"Peter the Magnificent & Caspian the Super Fine"

Choice Quote (of many, many possibilities):

NARNIANS: We’ll kill you, Telmarine!
CASPIAN: How about instead you make me your king?
CENTAURS: You have to admit the boy’s devilishly attractive.
TALKING SQUIRREL: His profile would look good on our money!
NARNIANS: All hail King Caspian!

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Yet Another Comment on DC vs. Heller

Like many concerned with self-defense, I’m quite happy with today’s decision by the Supreme Court on the DC vs. Heller case. Short, short version: Yes, dear citizens, you really do have an individual right to keep & bear arms (barring some restrictions whose legal details that will be left as an exercise for the readers).

I’ll leave the legal commentary to the professionals but I would like to talk about a few structural and stylistic items which caught my eye in reading the opinion of the Court.

Overall, reading the majority & dissenting opinions was very much like watching a well-versed history professor debate two well-meaning sociology professors....In other words, a rhetorical bloodbath for the dissenters. This is most telling when you look at the length of the opinions:

Justice Scalia (Majority): 67 pages
Justice Stevens (Dissent#1): 45 pages
Justice Breyers (Dissent#2): 43 pages

Do you know the difference between opinions resulting in the longer length for Justice Scalia? CITATIONS. In great numbers and copious detail. Justice Scalia’s opinion is overflowing with them. In some parts, paragraphs consist of a couple sentences followed by 5-10 sources for an assertion. Whole pages are nothing but quotes. And his sources extend from a hundred years prior to the Founding to the present day. Seriously, the opinion reads like a history paper. A kinda awesome history paper.

Also, I don’t always agree with the man but Justice Scalia knows how to turn a phrase. A couple of my favorite zingers from his opinion:

“A purposive qualifying phrase that contradicts the word or phrase it modifies is unknown this side of the looking glass (except, apparently, in some courses on Linguistics).” -p18

Or what happens when a Supreme Court Justice with a good understanding of history can knock bus-sized holes in supporting arguments from supposedly-unbiased Linguistic professionals.

“If so, they overread Miller. And their erroneous reliance upon an uncontested and virtually unreasoned case cannot nullify the reliance of millions of Americans...” -p55, footnote

This isn’t funny by itself. However for some reason, it reminded me strongly of this "Star Wars" quote. Seriously, read this sentence aloud then listen to the quote (Start at 0:20). Hilarious I tell you.

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"Human Rights" For Me But Not Thee

Do you want to know why for most Americans the UN has all the moral authority of “third rate den of whores”? Well, this is exactly why. The UN “Human Rights” council banned criticism of religions (well, really only a particular one) in order to stifle discussion on genuine human rights abuses in the Muslim world.

Genital Mutilation? Nope, can't talk about it. Child Marriage? What? It's a cultural institution, really. Honor Killings? I'm sorry that's a private family matter....Not even, or perhaps not especially, any NGOs decrying abuses of human rights as codified by sharia law.

I cannot express how grateful I am that the United States is not part of the UN Human Rights Council and therefore not tarnished with the same brush as these amoral, oppressive reprobates. The fact that we allow this kind of repressive tactic to occur on our soil is however a total disgrace.

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Overheard At Work, pt14

Engineer1: “My boss is making me do this.”
Engineer2: “Her boss is [insert name here].”
Accountant: “Yeah, well, your boss doesn’t impress me.”

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Hardy Heron – Full Review

While Gutsy involved some very obvious changes to the desktop, Hardy so far strikes me as a more under-the-hood upgrade. Overall, this resulted in a fairly seamless upgrade with a couple of exceptions. This post was delayed because I didn’t want my (very frustrating) search for a music app to interfere with my review of the upgrade.

See full post for my (few) upgrade problems, things I like about Hardy, things I don’t like and my overall opinion of this upgrade.

I. Upgrade Problems

1) Errors installing Scrollkeeper: Honestly, I have no idea what this means. It about gave me a heart-attack during the install because my computer got stuck on this for several minutes. Here’s what it looks like:
There have been others with this issue but it had a much bigger effect for them than me. Unless, this error is the reason for problem #2?

2) Kernel Panic with -18 Kernel: With Gutsy, I had Kernel problems because I was loading an older version without realizing it. With Hardy, the most recent version was the source of my troubles. An older version worked OK (so I could check things out) but it’s best to use the most recent one I think. Many other people have had kernel issues with this upgrade but unfortunately, the fixes can be a bit technical. Here’s what worked for me.

I booted into recovery-mode for the latest kernel. Recovery-mode has undergone some changes. Instead of a terminal, it now goes to a very basic menu. I choose to “Rebuild damaged/broken packages”. Once complete, there's an option to reboot in normal mode.
No more kernel panic. I was able to reboot into version 18 with no trouble at all. Since my initial upgrade, there’s been a kernel update to -19 which I haven’t had any trouble with at all.

3) PulseAudio Integration: This didn’t appear until very late in the game (after 2wks). Because of my music application difficulty, I guess I may not have noticed it right away. Basically, PulseAudio confuses the computer when two applications (like your music player & your browser) try to use sound at the same time so it just doesn’t play one (usually video sound in your browser). Now I had this exact problem with Gutsy and could never get it fixed. However for Hardy, after some looking around, I found this very helpful guide in the Ubuntu forums. I performed steps A & B, then rebooted. This completely corrected my sound problems. So, bad = there can be sound problems, good = they’re a lot more fixable than in Gutsy.

II. Things I Like In Hardy

1) Streaming Sound WORKS (for the most part): With the exception of the confusion listed above, the improvement to streaming sound functionality is huge. Even before they were fixed, the sound issues were less frequent and pervasive. In Gutsy, it really interfered with my Last.FM app, music player(s), and video streaming. In Hardy, my problems were limited to video streaming and were much more correctable. This is the single most noticeable improvement from Gutsy to Hardy. I know for some people it went the other way around but in my case, Hardy is a dream sound-wise compared to Gutsy. The only other sound issue was with Last.FM. It kept stopping and then buffering the files the first few days. But then I got some software updates and it never happened again.

2) Shorter Boot & Shutdown Times: I have no idea why this would occur or even if it was supposed to. But it is nice, especially when I have to restart after a round of updates.

3) Brasero CD Burner: I do really like this application because since switching to Ubuntu, I’ve been making more data CD’s for back-up programs, etc. Brasero lets you burn several types of CDs and it’s quite intuitive to use. For audio CD’s, creating and rearranging a track-list is dead simple:
Brasero does have one flaw. It doesn’t accurately track file size. I have to attempt burning my disc several times because while it said I had plenty of room left (see bar in lower right), the actual MB amount was over the limit of the disc:
As you can see this MB amount is barely below the 700MB limit of the discs. But if you look at the earlier pic, it appears there’s tons of space left! You don’t know the MB amount until you start the burn process. If you burn a lot of CDs this would only be a problem at first, until you get a feel for it but it is annoying.

4) A Couple of Little things: Just some minor features that I noticed and liked. (a) Hard drives are labeled by their memory size not their “designation” (ex – sbc3). Much easier to keep track of. (b) This is a tiny change that makes a big difference. The “Control Center” is now available immediately under the system menu:


III. Things I Don’t Like In Hardy

1) Start-Up Manager Changes: One of the changes in Gutsy I really liked was the improved “Start-Up Manager” functions. For some reason, those changes have been removed and the “Start Up Manager” greatly simplified (to the point of being useless). Here’s the Gutsy version:
And here’s the Hardy version:
Doesn't this look so useful? Choosing the kernel version and a number of other functions has been removed. Why?

2) Most of My Firefox Themes Were Obsolete: With the Upgrade to Firefox 3, most of my themes just became null & void. A mitigating factor on this is that Firefox will regularly check for updated versions that are compatible so I don’t have to go digging for them myself. Still, Firefox was kinda plain for a while. By the time of the “official” Firefox3 release last week, several themes including Phoneity Modern (my fav), were all upgraded for the latest version.

3) XMMS Is GONE: I’ve already ranted about this here. This was the biggest Hardy downer for me.

IV. Overall Opinions

I actually like Hardy. Again most of the changes are either less noticeable than Gutsy or involve things I don’t use. But for the things I do use and see, this was a good, relatively glitch-free upgrade. After reading the forums, I was really worried about making my sound troubles worse and Firefox 3 being buggy. For whatever reason, they didn’t come up during my upgrade. For the most part, Hardy is a great deal more stable than Gutsy for me. The most significant change is the lack of XMMS (which I’m certain I will get over...eventually).

Link to full post.

Educational Statistics...

I’m currently reading a report on a study performed by the Urban Institute on the effectiveness of the “Teach for America” program, which hires new college graduates to teach in under-performing schools. Obviously, teachers’ unions don’t like the program (monopolies rarely like competition).

While the report is a bit dry with the discussion of how the data was parsed this way & that, the conclusions of the study are quite interesting. The bottom line is that when it comes to math & science teaching, students in under-performing schools show more improvement (in test scores) from the “Teach For America” participants than they do from experienced, collegiate-certified teachers. It also cites several other studies that found out pretty much the same thing using slightly different methods and data sets from other states.

However, the reach of teachers’ unions must be great. A little bit of hedging from the report:

“We should note that the findings here do not necessarily mean that there is no value to teacher training. It is possible that the teachers that TFA recruits and selects would be more effective with more pedagogical training.”

Sure, it is possible. But the more important question for me: Is it likely? I would be very curious to see a long-range study to determine if the effectiveness of TFA teachers goes up or down after “official” training & certification. If their performance does increase, then we have a great new pool of teachers. If their performance decreases, I think we should seriously examine teacher certifications and collegiate education-programs.

The last paragraph has the most telling conclusion of all:

“[The findings] stress the likely importance of strong academic backgrounds for secondary school teachers. They also suggest that policy makers should focus more on issues of teacher selection, and less on issues of teacher retention...”

In essence, “hire people who know something about the subjects they are teaching and quite keeping people on the payroll who don’t”. (1) The fact that anyone needed a study to come to this conclusion doesn’t leave me with a good impression of our education system. (2) I’m certain it will take hundreds of similar studies and millions more failed students before teachers unions will concede the point.

Link to full post.