Wi-Fi B-M-X

From time to time I run across bits online about people using "low" technology to do supposedly high-tech stuff like internet connections. For example, there's been a school project to transmit TCP/IP via bongo drums, and a cave-exploration-for-tourists outfit in New Zealand that actually uses carrier pigeons to "transmit" digital images, more quickly than a wireless carrier would do it. Fun stuff.

But a bit more seriously, I'm impressed by a hybrid high/low-tech transport method in use in rural Cambodia: wireless motorcycles. This isn't just some geeky classroom project or a way to help tourists have more fun on vacation. It's bringing important contemporary technology to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to use it.

High-tech geeks gush about wireless, and understandably so. But it's really only practical (and secure) over short distances. The further you go, the geometrically weaker the signal gets, and then there's that curvature of the Earth that blocks line-of-sight transmission. So in rural Cambodia, where they have locally-generated electricity to run computers, but no telecom connection (not even plain old telephone service), they're using motorcycles for the medium-haul carrier.

The way it works is this: If you want to send a message, you type it up and tell the computer to send it. It sits in local storage until the motorcycle makes its daily arrival in town, at which point it's transmitted by short-distance wireless to a device on the bike, and stored there until he gets within range of the central device that's actually hooked up to the grid, and it goes on its way. At the same time any incoming e-mail is delivered to his bike, and the next day he delivers it to the village. Not unlike a... mailman. There's a "fleet" of five of these "Motoman" couriers doing this.

Conceptually speaking, this is how e-mail used to work on much of the internet in its early years. In those days even universities were sometimes limited to costly dial-up connections that they activated maybe only once a day. The transport layer of the network was different, but the technique was the same. Store-and-forward is a time-honored delivery mechanism, and it's a great idea to implement it in this situation - or any other - where a continuous connection isn't practical. 1970's ARPAnoids might not have envisioned the pairing of these particular technologies to implement it... but that's the genius of what these people are doing for the poor rural population of Cambodia.

Dead Cat Bounce

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Stock market analysts have a term for it: "dead cat bounce". It's when the price of a stock falls and falls, suddenly stops, goes back up again, then falls down to where it stopped the first time. The point is not to be fooled by the fact that after a cat falls off a tall building, it bounces back up when it hits bottom: that doesn't mean it's alive. Dead cats just bounce.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

The Big Bounce is a lifeless, uninteresting film starring Owen Wilson, Morgan Freeman, and a bunch of other talented performers, none of whom do any actual acting here. It has a plot (I suppose) which is somehow about various people scamming each other, and I think we're supposed to get caught up in the twists and turns.

But there aren't any. The film's in free fall nearly the whole time. It banks this way or that way, but with no apparent point to any of it. Wilson delivers wry jokes with his trademark aw-shucks drawl. Freeman offers bits of wisdom with a sidelong gaze. Sara Foster pouts flirtatiously in very little (if any) clothing. Gary Sinise, Charlie Sheen, and Bebe Neuwirth all have pointless minor roles. Et cetera. Not even Willie Nelson and Harry Dean Stanton (in trivial roles that could hardly justify travelling to Hawaii for filming) add any energy to it.

Finally, near the end, some of the supposed double- and triple-crossing happens, and the "things are/n't exactly what they appear to be" warning actually comes into play. There's a brief indication that things are about to get interesting. But they don't. It's just a dead cat bounce. And when everything finally falls into place at the end... well, I suppose it's possible that all the pieces really did fit together at that point. But I really didn't care enough to try to figure it out. It was still a dead cat.

Nathan commented that the one redeeming trait of the film was the scenery. The shots of balmy Hawaii, surfings, sunny beaches, and so on were a nice break from the dark, grey, frigid local weather.

This movie was nowhere near as painful to sit through as, say, an Adam Sandler vehicle, or a feature film based on an SNL skit. But it made just as little sense, whether in terms of plot, this array of talent signing up to make the film*, or spending the better part of ten bucks each to see it.

*Unless it was just for the excuse to spend some time in Hawaii.

Entrepreneurial PATRIOTism

For those who don't seem to mind about the so-called Patriot Act infringing on their civil liberties, maybe they'll feel differently about it being used by the private sector for private gain. Such as this case, in which scammers take advantage of the threat of government action under the Act, a security bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, spam address lists, and a fair amount of stupidity on the part of its victims, to get access to their bank accounts. Not that this is an entirely original scam, but the added intimidation of living in a police state and/or a sheepish willingness to go along with it, is one of the reasons it works.

What's Up, .DOC?

One of the things that's aided Microsoft's domination of the PC-software market over the last several years, has been .DOC. Once you get enough copies of MS Office out there, people start creating their documents in MS Word's file format, and then sharing them with other people, you pretty much need a program that can open those files. Since MS has kept the format of Word document files a closely-guarded trade secret, that's been a big obstacle to developers of competing products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice. They've figured out most of it, but the translation is always imperfect. It's one of the reasons why even Mac users use MS Word more than any other word processor.

So it was big news when Microsoft announced they were abandoning the trade secret of .DOC for the open standard of XML, and they'd even publish the schema that their XML would use.

For those who don't follow the geek trade press: XML is a standard, independently-produced format for how to store data, which allows any XML-enabled program to understand data stored by another other XML-enabled program, in much the same way that any web browser can read and interpret HTML documents. An MS Word document stored in XML format could easily be opened by any word processor that knows XML.

Or not.

The other shoe just dropped. Microsoft is filing for patents on how MS Word stores data using XML. So instead of being a technological challenge to figure out how to open MS Word documents, it would be a violation of patent law. While it may be possible to figure out a way to open the documents without violating Microsoft's patents, the only way to test that would be in court, not in the development lab. Guess which is more expensive, time-consuming, and bet-the-company risky?

What this means to you and me is that now is the time to find a replacement for MS Office. The current versions of packages such as WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, AppleWorks, Ability Office, etc. can all open your current Microsoft Offfice documents pretty well, but the odds of them (or even future versions of them) opening your Office 2003 or later documents are getting rather slim. It's never been easier to switch than it is right now, and if these patents are approved, it'll never be this easy again. For more information, see Just Say NO to Microsoft, a rather comprehensive guide to alternatives to Microsoft products, to which I am... a contributor.

Incidentally, this is yet another example of the danger of software patents. The US Patent Office was originally set up to help inventors working on, say, a better mousetrap, or a device for recording sounds on a piece of vinyl, and to help the public in the process. The inventor would get exclusive rights to the invention for several years, in exchange for sharing the details of how it works with the world.

But as the pace of technological change has increased, the length of patent terms has as well. They now last 20 years in most cases, so by the time they expire, they're of little use to anyone. Suppose Apple had patented the point-and-click interface technique of the Macintosh 20 years ago. Microsoft wouldn't have been able to introduce Windows until after the Superbowl this year. As bad as MS has been, imagine how bad Apple would have been with a total monopoly on desktop operating systems for the past 20 years.

In the last few decades especially, the patent process has become a tool for big businesses to stomp out their competition (by filing for patents on technology that others are already using), or for start-ups that don't actually produce anything but patents they can demand royalties for. Patents are filed - and approved - for obvious "inventions" like one-click shopping (by Amazon.com), or embedding a live program in a web page (by Eolas). And apparently it's going to gives a company like Microsoft control over your access to the data in your documents. Unless you use software that doesn't restrict you that way.

Sympathy for the Monster

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I was a little surprised that Nathan suggested that we see Monster, since it's getting critical acclaim and a fairly limited release. He doesn't usually care for "cinema". But you don't look a gift whore in the mouth, eh?

That kind of callous, misogynist joke was un-called-for, of course, but it seemed appropriate in the context of this movie, which is about a woman whose whole life seems to have been full of that kind of crap. To the point that you can actually understand, and even have sympathy for her... despite the fact that she murdered seven people.

The movie is based on the story of Aileen "Lee" Wuornos, a serial killer, and her girlfriend, called "Selby" in the film (Tyria Moore in real life). Charlize Theron plays Lee, and disappears so completely into the role that Nathan - who didn't recognise the name - had no idea that he'd ever seen her before, in various "pretty young woman" roles. (He recognised Christina Ricci from Casper, and was surprised to see her like this.) I've seen some clips of the real Wuornos, and Theron's almost-perfect recreation of her (even down to her appearance and mannerisms) is downright spookly.

The relationship between the two is portrayed in rather unflattering terms. Once upon a time I would've just cringed at yet another movie featuring a "straight" woman who "turns lesbian" and then proceeds to shoot holes in men with hard-ons. I think we've gotten to the point where a movie can tackle that subject matter without being homophobic in the process. Dysfunctional as the relationship is, you can understand what drew these two women together, and why they needed each other. It's almost sweet.

Just as importantly, the movie makes it possible to understand what brought Wuornos to the point where she started killing men. A lifetime of being shit on (figuratively) and fucked (literally) by them, made her needy enough to fall for the only person to show her actual love (Selby), and finally being beaten and raped by one of her johns made her resentful enough to start taking revenge.

At least that's how the movie tells it. Dead men tell no tales, so it's impossible to know exactly what happened in each of the killings. The movie implies that the first was a case of very justifiable homicide which inadvertantly taught her that she could get away with it, that along the way she was somewhat selective about whom she killed (such as sparing a nervous guy who'd never hired a prostitute before), but by the time of her last killing she'd dropped her standards from "he deserves it" to "I can't let him live".

I've done a little online research into the story of Wuornos and Moore, and there are some signficant disagreements between that info and what's in the movie (especially the difference between Selby and Moore). There are a couple of genuinely documentary movies on the subject available if that's what you're looking for. But taken on the level of a plausible character study, this movie is first-rate. I may never again look at a serial killer in the same way.

Caution: Platform Shifting

For the first time in nearly seven years, I have a full-time job again. The job sucks, and the pay is nothing great (it's basically rolled my "career" back about 10 years), but it means I finally have enough money to actually spend some of it on hardware and (when necessary) software.

OK, I don't actually have the money at this point. Fact is, thanks to A) living on part-time wages for five years, B) the cost of going to school part-time for nearly seven years, and C) getting laid off a year ago, I'm already in debt (by several thousand dollars). The only other time I've ever been in debt was when I bought my first car, so I don't really like being back. But by continuing to live my part-time-job starving-art-student lifestyle, on my new full-time-employed income, I figure I can afford some very-short-term high-interest consumer debt before I pay off the low-interest student debt I already have. As long as the job holds out and I don't have any surprise expenses, I should be out of debt again by year end. My finances suck, but the end's in sight.

So I'm overhauling the local data center. It's currently a hodgepodge of aging, underpowered machines, some of them performing a single function because that's all they're capable of handling reliably. So by introducing some new gear at the top end, I hope to trickle down some performance to the rest of the fleet, and consolidate functions somewhat.

The key piece of gear is an Apple PowerMac G5. (The slowest single-processor one. At education-market pricing. I'm not going apeshit wild with the spending here.) This will be replacing my old first-generation iMac as the place I run Mac software. It will also let me switch some of the CPU-intensive apps (e.g. Photoshop) that I still need to run on my 700MHz Windows machine, over to the Mac. Since it can also run most of the software I'm currently running on my web/mail/file server, I'll be able to configure it to take over temporarily any time I need to take the main one offline (planned or otherwise). Finally, since it's going to take a lot of the burden of day-to-day sit-at-the-computer-and-do-stuff work, I won't need separate Linux systems for my server and my workstation, and I'll be able to consolidate those two.

So this one machine will allow me to sell or give away the old iMac (still pretty useful as a web/mail/chat/word-processing system), it will let me put the Windows machine off in the corner where I won't need to use it much, it'll free up a mid-sized CPU that I can experiment on with another operating system (I'd really like to take a look at FreeBSD), and I'll finally be able to retire the poor little cobbled-together 150MHz Pentium with the 17-year-old power supply that's my current spare server. HermitNet will get a little smaller - with fewer nodes - for a change.

I'll still have a big old CRT hooked up to the PowerMac as a second display, and I have a cute li'l B&W VGA monitor that's handy for monitoring a server console, but the rest of my displays will be sharp, energy-efficient LCDs.

I'll still have some pokey, ancient digital electronics in service. I'm using an old 486 running a Coyote Linux as a firewall/router, and I can't see any reason to retire that workhorse. I'll keep my out-of-production Psion Revo in my hip pack, with its monochrome display and 33MHz CPU but peerless software, until it stops working. And I keep a quaint little DOS-based Poqet PC handy for when I want to spend an afternoon writing, off in the park somewhere. (Not that I have time for that anymore... even if Michigan winters permitted it.)

But I'll be one step closer to freeing myself of the obsolete technology of the 1990's (e.g. low-end Pentiums, MS Windows, CRTs), and one stop further along in adopting the technologies of the near future (64-bit CPUs, Linux/BSD-based OSes, LCDs). It'll probably take me several months to finish the transition (particularly since I'm now juggling both school and a full-time job), but I'm on my way.

Destination: Mars

In his blog, Don Fox asks where G.W. Bush's new initiative for a project to send people to Mars came from. "Who was arguing that we suddenly needed to send people to Mars? "

People have been presenting arguments for sending someone to Mars for quite a while now (pretty much starting when Borman, Lovell, and Anders got back from their fly-by of the Moon in '68). I could give a dozen good reasons, such as what we could learn about our own world from closer analysis of a (presumably) dead but marginally habitable one, and even just to satisfy pure scientific curiousity about the place.

G.W. Bush, on the other hand, can probably only think of two. 1) It makes him seem more like JFK. (One can hope that Lloyd Bentsen is available to point out that he is not.) 2) Promising to put more money into NASA will be particularly good for certain key states.

Let's start with Florida, where the president's brother Jeb just happens to be governor. We all remember the fight over its 25 electoral votes in 2000; due to reapportioning of Congressional districts following the census, it's going to have 27 in 2004. It's also the location of the Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral, which would see a lot of additional activity (read: jobs and ancillary spending) if a Moon base were under constructions and a Mars mission were in the works.

Then there's Texas, home of a whole gaggle of Bushes and corporate/political cronies. It's going to get another 2 electoral votes this year for a total of 34. The Johnson Space Center in Houston would get an even bigger boost from Bush's program, to enable it to support a permanent base on the Moon and a long-range exploration mission, in addition to its support for the International Space Station, NASA's robot exploration missions, and shuttle activity.

California is the other big factor here, with its gain of another electoral vote, up to 55. This is home to JPL and Edwards Air Force Base, two more pillars of the U.S. space program. Gov. Schwartzenegger probably isn't on Dubya's personal Christmas list, so this slab of pork is more of a bribe than a thank-you gift. And even beyond the economic aid, the people of California seem to be fans of Arnold's big-budget science-fiction flicks. Dubya may not be going himself, but this enables him to cast himself in a supporting role in Total Recall 2.

It's not hard to imagine this analysis running through in the other direction:
Dubya: "What can we do to get votes in the biggest electoral states?"
Advisor #1: "Well, three of the top four have strong ties to the space program. We could go back to the moon... and hey! What's the next closest planet after that?"
Dubya: "Mars! We'll put a man on Mars!"
Advisor #2: "Um, actually Venus is closer, but it's too hostile to land and too cloudy to look at."
Dubya: "But wouldn't a mission to Venus be more popular with women? It's more girly, isn't it?"
Advisor #1: "It sounds too much like 'penis' on TV. Mars would be better."
Dubya: "OK, as long as we make sure ahead of time that the Martians don't have any WMD... I mean, we'll say they do, but they won't."
Advisor #2: "{sigh} There are no Martians, sir."
Dubya: "Great! Now write me a speech like FDR's moon speech to announce it."
Advisor #1: "That was JFK, sir."
Dubya: "Great, I've always thought of myself as another JFK. Except I didn't get shot, I mean."

In addition to the political opportunism of Bush's plan, I have problems with the plan itself. He wants to send people to orbit Mars, not land on it. Granted, that was our first step before landing on the Moon, but (with all due respect to the crews of Apollos 7 and 9, which never left Earth orbit, and of Apollos 8 and 10, who went there without landing) those were mostly just practise runs for the landings of Apollos 11-17 (except 13), which were the real mission. And given the rather poor success rate of robotic Mars missions (more have failed than succeeded), caution is definitely called for. A Martian landing would be phenomenally dangerous. (Heck, we haven't even perfected landings here on Earth.) But that doesn't mean it would make more sense to send a crew there, but leave them in orbit.

We can learn more about Mars by putting a robot on the surface (like we're doing even as we speak) than we can by putting a person in orbit. When you factor in the danger and difficulty of actually getting living people there and back again, it's just not worth it. No geologist or biologist would travel for the better part of a year to get to a remote site just to look through the windows of a tour bus and then spend another year driving home. That's about all a manned orbital mission to Mars would be.

There are good scientific reasons to continue exploring Mars. And those scientific reasons - not electorial politics - should determine how we do it.

21 Grams - Shaken & Stirred

my rating: Nathan's rating:

21 Grams is a film that's difficult to get into, and I can see why it'd be easy to dislike. For one thing, it's a gritty, and generally unpleasant view of the lives of its main characters. It's a story full of sickness, death, crime, ruined lives, empty relationships, and so on. It's meant to make the viewer uneasy, and it succeeds.

But the biggest reason for it inaccessibility is the chronology of the scenes, which are presented very much out of order, and in incomplete snippets. We get a bit of Sean Penn in a hospital on the edge of death, then after another scene we see him walking about, healthy. Is it a flashback or a preview? Here's Benicio del Toro clumsily preaching the simplistic tenets of prison Christianity to a street punk, then a scene later he's being escorted to a jail cell. Which came first? To say nothing of the brief bit we see at the beginning of the film, of its climax: Penn, del Toro, and Naomi Watts are all in it, but it makes no sense because we have context for it, and it continues to make no sense for quite a while, because these three characters have nothing to do with each other in most of the scenes that "follow".

With enough attention and patience, the picture gradually emerges. Most importantly, about halfway through, it becomes clear what initially ties the three main characters together: by sheer coincidence, each of their lives intersects with a single character. He appears in only a couple snippets, with only a few lines of dialog and little characterisation, but in one way or another, he (or more to the point, his death) has a major impact on their lives. As I said, it ain't pretty.

Nathan complained about the non-linear storytelling, wondering what the point of it was. What it provided was some rather literalistic foreshadowing of where the story would go and how it might get there. So when you see (for example) Penn and Watts meet, you know (or at least have an idea) what it will lead to. But there are also twists and setbacks which require you to keep revising your interpretation of what you've seen.

The performances are all first-rate, and that made me care enough about the characters to pay attention to the jigsaw puzzle of scenes. And toward the end the scenes do seem to become a bit more orderly... or maybe since I already had the majority of the puzzle laid out, it was easier to put each new scene in its proper place in my head. The movie does save a few surprises for the final scenes (which do take place at the end of the chronology), though they're a bit heavy-handed on the irony for my taste.

Likewise the concept behind the title, which is a reference to a bit of folklore claiming that the body loses exactly 21 grams of mass at the moment of death. The religious implications of that are profound... but it's nothing more than fiction, so it doesn't hold up the weighty philosophical ponderings offered via voiceover at the end.

Crime and Punishment / Rehabilitation / Revenge / etc.

In a recent interview writer Steve Gerber (perhaps best known for creating Howard the Duck, but don't blame him for the horrid movie) talked about the idea behind his new series Hard Time. It's part of a new line of books from DC Comics, about people who find themselves with super powers, but don't respond by putting on a costume and either committing or fighting crimes. The central characer of the book is a 15-year-old sentenced to 50 years in prison, because Gerber wanted to shine a light on the inhumanity of applying that kind of sentence to someone so young.

A debate about America's approach to crime and punishment promptly ensued on the discussion board attached to the interview. Rather than take up space there, I thought I'd expound a bit about it here.

The biggest problem with how we handle criminal activity is that we can't come to a consensus about it. We have heated debates about the death penalty, minimum sentencing laws, sex offender registries, etc. and can't come to any common ground on them because people have several mutually incompatible views of what the criminal justice system is there for.

One is model is punishment. It's a lot like how parents deal with young children: You did something wrong, so we're going to do something unpleasant to you to teach you how wrong it is. This is basic negative reinforcement, and probably the most fundamental kind of "learning" we do. Heck, even plants can respond to this approach: trim the top off enough times, and it'll give up and just grow outward instead.

Another model is rehabilitation. This is a bit like punishment, but a more optimistic. It shares the belief that the person who's done something wrong can be conditioned to not do it again, but combines positive reinforcement as well as negative. So not only do you get put in solitary confinement when you attack a guard, but you get additional privileges when you behave more like a model citizen. This is where the concept of "time off for good behavior" comes in, as the biggest carrot that can be offered, and the parole denial being the biggest stick.

This pisses off people who think in terms of revenge. They start at the same place as the Punishers, but go in the opposite direction. Rather than looking at the punishment as a way to condition people against doing bad things, they simply want to hurt the perpetrator, for their own satisfaction. This is an inherently irrational approach, and the sky's the limit when it comes to sentencing. You needn't be limited to a proportionate response; you can execute someone for doing things that didn't actually involve killing someone. The whole concept of "victim's rights" comes out of this, based on the idea that the victim of a crime has to be satisfied with the sentence or it's inadequate.

A slightly milder version of that thinking is the justice approach. This is the philosophy that actually invented the death penalty, based on the Biblical principle (which actually goes back even further than that) of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". He killed someone, so we're going to kill him. Unlike the Revengers, they tend to stop when they get to the point of matching the original crime. It's more of a dispassionate, rational version of revenge. It's very likely to give ex-cons a "second chance", figuring he's paid his debt to society, and now deserves to be treated like anyone else.

Coming at it from a different angle is the deterrent objective. Rather than simply reacting to crimes like the previous models, this seeks to prevent them, with the threat of punishment. The death penalty finds lots of advocates with this mindset, although evidence that it works that way is shaky. There's stronger evidence that it works better with lesser crimes and lesser criminals. For example, the threat of getting a big fine does a fairly good job of reducing the number of mostly-law-abiding citizens who drive at 100mph on the highway.

I suspect the largest school of thought about prison sentences is public safety. If someone is dangerous, you lock them up, to keep the rest of us safe. Combine this with the assumption that rehabilitation isn't possible, and you have life sentences. Or death sentences... not based on bloodlust, but just cool mathematics: why pay to feed and house someone when your only goal is to keep him away from the public? This is also where the justification behind published sex-offender registries comes from: whether the person has "served his time" is beside the point, and whether he appears to be rehabilitated - or even just deterred from repeat-offending - is too iffy. All that matters is giving people whatever tools they need to feel safe.

So... what's my take on the question? Like most people, I tend to see some merit here and there in several of these. The punishment approach is just to simplistic and juvenile to satisfy me. I find the whole revenge mindset seriously troubling due to the dangers of its passion, and the public-safety angle disturbing for its lack of compassion. Deterrence is a valid concept, but it leaves gaping holes through which the worst criminals will stride. Rehabilitation is what I'd strive for first and foremost, but there needs to be a Plan B for the many cases in which it isn't possible.

You're Over-Qualified

It's one of the classic unfair reasons for not hiring someone, and to the best of my knowledge it is - unlike "it's a man's job" or "you're too old" - entirely legal.

God, how I wish they'd said that to me when I applied for my new job. I've been here for over a month now, and so far the only challenges I've had have been job-related, not work-related. That is, I've had the challenge of finding the wiring closets for the college Library, or figuring out who's responsible for creating network accounts for adjunct faculty, or getting them to give me keys to the department office.

The closest I've come to a technological challenge - something related to the work I was hired to do - has been distributing software updates to lab workstations using the system the people here use. But that's really more of a training issue. The rest of my work here has been b-o-r-i-n-g crap that a kid just out of college with proper training could do.

In fact, one of my co-workers, hired a few weeks before me, is a kid just out of college. Community College. My 16 years of professional experience and 7.75 academic years of college education are of no real value to me here. And in fact, the kid is actually way ahead of me in many areas, because he's been a student here at the college, knows his way around, and is already pretty familiar with the specific software they use.

Just being bored isn't the only reason I hate this job. Being frustrated at the lack of training and orientation I've received (which makes me effectively incompetent at so many things), and the dept "culture" of focusing more on "we don't do that" than on finding ways to solve people's problems (while claiming that "customer service" is of prime importance), are a big part of why I hate this job. But if they'd just had the kindness to say "no, thanks" when I applied, I could have spent the last two months just joylessly job hunting instead of getting my hopes up and then having them shat upon like this.

Big Fish - Burton's Fables

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Did I ever tell you about the time I rode a bicycle to Alaska? All the way from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Non-stop! It's quite the story.

OK, it was the town of Alaska, which is a good afternoon's ride, but still in the same county. But it's a far better story if I make it the state of Alaska, and if I were to stick to the actual facts, it'd be kinda dull. So would you rather I just told the real story?

Nathan and I spent the ride home after seeing Big Fish swapping stories like this. It was fun. Which is kinda he point Tim Burton seems to be making with his latest parable.

It's a story about a soon-to-be father (Billy Crudup) who's trying to sort out his relationship with his own father (Albert Finney), a larger-than-life character whose life story is an endless series of tall tales. The son, being a journalist, would kinda prefer the truth. The majority of the movie recounts these great adventures of Edward Bloom's charmed life, performed with great panache (and even a credible Southern-American accent) by Ewan McGregor.

The "Big Fish" of the title refers to the legendary big fish that features prominently in several of Edward's tales, the "fish story" aspect of those stories, and also his status for much of his young adulthood as a big fish in a small town/pond. Nice when a title works on several different levels.

The movie works on several levels as well, providing clever and engaging tales to keep the viewer entertained, a bit of satire of classic Americana (with Burton's trademark off-beat view of suburban/smalltown life in post-Word-War America), and finally concluding with a message that establishes the whole story as a parable, along the lines of Edward Scissorhands or James and the Giant Peach.

Especially compared to most of the post-holiday drek that's being released, it's well worth seeing.

The Best Virus Protection

I was out with a friend, and geek that I am, the conversation turned to computers. Not surprisingly, he wanted advice. I get that a lot. He was having some trouble getting a bootleg copy of Norton's anti-virus software installed, and was fishing for alternatives. But rather than geting advice the usual way, by asking "what should I do?", he posed it differently, and briefly stumped me.

"What anti-virus software do you use?" he asked.

I drew a blank. I couldn't think of one. "I... I don't... I don't use any," I finally stammered.

He grinned, like someone who'd caught a proctologist who'd never had a colon exam, or a priest who doesn't actually go to confession himself. Which is how I felt...

Until I thought about it a beat longer and remembered why: I'd never felt a need for any. For one thing, I have a script that processes all my incoming mail on the server itself, and summarily dumps any that have attachments with potentially-executable file types, and hacks apart any HTML code in mail messages that might be used to load an executable file from a remote web site.

But the main reason I don't worry about viruses is that I'm pretty much immune. Not only don't I use Outlook to read e-mail (most e-mail-borne viruses take advantage of Outlook security holes of one kind or another), but I don't use Windows. I do most of my mail-reading on a Linux system, and my next-most-often used computer is a Mac. They're about as likely to get infected by a virus as my home stereo is. They're not 100% invulnerable, but unlike a Windows system, they were engineered not to be easy targets.

I do have a couple boxes that run Windows. One is my "legacy" system, which I boot maybe a couple times a week to run Win98 and some Windows-only software that I haven't fully weaned myself from (Paint Shop Pro, for example). The other is my "compatibility" system, which has more-or-less current Windows technology loaded on it (such as IE6 and a discarded Office XP licence) in case my other systems can't open a particular MS Word document, and to test any web sites I develop in the current MS browser. That machine rarely gets turned on. So they're pretty darn safe.

So what do I recommend for virus protection? Norton's is actually pretty good, and so's McAfee's. Anti-Vir is a nice free option for personal use. There are a bunch of other good tools out there. But what the method of protection I actually use is "abstinence". I don't engage in unsafe computing. I Just Say No.

Which World Leader Are You?

What Famous Leader Are You?

OK. I can live with that.

It certainly beats scoring as Saddam Hussein, like DebWire.

Stuck On You

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The January doldrums have hit the new-releases schedule full force, and Nathan's already seen every other current movie he was interested in (plus a few more). But he's like totally bored with nothing to do over the holidays, and I'd heard some surprisingly good reviews of it, so he and I went to see Stuck On You.

I've avoided the Farrelly brothers' movies very carefully over the years. Being neither an idiot, nor 12 years old, nor a fan of Jim Carrey or Ben Stiller, it's seemed like a good idea. This movie hasn't done anything to make me reconsider my decision to miss Dumb & Dumber, but I will give their future projects a chance. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected.

Although there are plenty of dorky gags and pratfalls to amuse those in the cheap seats, Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear play likeable characters who just happen to be be joined at the torso. The inevitable jokes about sex and using the toilet are handled with restraint (the characters talk about it, rather than us seeing it), and for the most part it's a lighthearted dramedy about brotherhood and being your own person.

I do have to admit to getting a huge laugh out of one of the "raunchy" gags, in which the actor whom Cher (playing herself) is very secretly dating is seen in bed with her, and turns out to be Frankie Muniz, who's barely of the age of consent and looks even younger. I enjoy his TV show Malcolm in the Middle (a wacky sitcom with smarts), so it was fun to see him in a cameo here.

Resolutions for 2004

I've fallen out of the habit of doing this the past few years- too depressed to even try, I guess - but I've traditionally begun each year with a short list of resolutions. Sometimes they're vague things to do every day (e.g. exercise more), and sometimes they're more like goals to accomplish before the next 12 months are up (e.g. find a boyfriend). I invariably have a mixed outcome on them.

One of the problems I run into is the usual "lack of motivation" problem that dooms so many New Year's resolutions. After all, the worst that happens if I don't accomplish them is that I hate myself and my life a little bit more, and that's all there is to it. This year, since I have this swell blog thang going, I'm going to try sharing them with you, my 6 billion closest and most personal friends. Feel free to nag me about them over the coming year.

• Get my BFA - This is a gimme. I already have all the credits I need to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and only one more course (already registered for it) on the checklist for the Illustration/Digital Media major (with an instructor I'm already friends with).
  
• Get a better job - I'm reluctant to put this on the list, because I spent most of 2003 looking for a job, and I'm fucking sick of the whole process. But the one I got is something I could have done 10 years ago, and ranges from boring to frustrating. Maybe getting the BFA with the BS will help.
  
• Get my weight below 180lbs. (and keep it there) - This one's depressing for a couple reasons. One is the fact that I've had variations of this idea on my list for so many years. Another is the fact that, a dozen years ago, seeing the bathroom scale register 180 on New Years Day was a "wake up call" that sent me on a major exercise program that got me down into the 160's (where I was in high school) before some personal crisis sent me on a eating/loafing binge of stress and depression that put me on a fat-accumulating trend I've never really recovered from. I weighed 200lbs. this morning, and I really don't like it. It's not just the number, but my health, the way my clothes fit, and what I see in the mirror every day. Hell, I wouldn't be interested in fucking me the way I look now, so why would anyone else?
  
• Finish the first chapter of my Great American Graphic Novel - Lots of people want to write a novel. I'm a pretty good illustrator as well as a good wordsmith, so I want to write and illustrate a graphic novel (i.e. a long-form comicbook). I've got the ideas, and I think I've got the talent (though a few rejection letters from publishers suggest otherwise), so the only thing standing in my way is myself.
  
• Get laid - What got me to this point is a long, sad story (if I tell it right), but the simple fact is that I haven't had sex without anyone else in a few years now. Many years ago I put these same two words on my list of resolutions (because it hadn't really happened yet), and to my delight I actually got to check that one off that year. (Not that I did it just to mark off a resolution, Don.) Maybe lightning will strike a second time.