The Core II: The Day After Tomorrow

my rating:

A movie like The Day After Tomorrow does wonders to reaffirm one's faith in the stupidity of humankind. I'm not referring to the movie's "message" about how politicians are ignoring the dangers of upsetting the delicate balance of our global climate. I'm talking about the stupidity of every damn character in the movie, including the "smart" ones. And the stupidity of the people who'll tell you how great the movie is.

The only smarts this movie shows are contained in the special effects sequences. It took some pretty sharp minds to develop that technology, and the results are quite impressive. You've seen bits of about half of them in the commercials and trailers: the tornadoes ripping up LA, the tidal surge gushing through Manhattan, the continent-sized hurricane as seen from orbit, etc. I was looking forward to seeing the film just for those, and I wasn't disappointed... by them.

The problem is that they were wrapped in such a lame screenplay. The basic structure of the plot is formula: Visionary scientist warns that disaster is imminent but no one listens. Disaster strikes. Lots of people die, except for the handful that we're supposed to really care about, particularly including the family of the aforementioned scientist. Life carries on.

The problem is that the scientist in question doesn't appear to be that smart. So everyone else has to become majorly stupid to make him look better. So we have people in LA watching multiple tornadoes bearing down on them (even flying between them in a helicopter, like the planes did in X2) instead of going for cover. The government of Mexico closes their border to a wave of yanqui refugees, even though it's obvious they're fleeing for their lives, and would have the backing of a certain military superpower based in Washington. The President of the US stays in the White House (with much of the furniture and decor already stripped out) until everyone else has left, rather than immediately evacuating to a safe location for the sake of national security. It goes on and on and on. A rescue team accidentally treks onto the glass roof of a shopping mall. A Russian tanker of some kind drifts down a flooded NYC street. Several characters take refuge in a squat public library (not much of a shelter against a flood), just so we can have some comments about the sacrilege of burning books for warmth. The International Space Station does cartwheels in orbit as if that were perfectly normal (which it would only do if smacked really hard by a Soyuz module bringing supplies). Ultimately these aren't about the stupidity of the characters, but about the writers and their assumptions about the audience.

I'm calling this film The Core II, because the science, the writing, and such were nearly as bad. It could never live up to the original, but it certainly tried.

Gypsy 83

my rating:

Gypsy 83 is the sort of film that John Hughes might have made if he hadn't been more interested in making teen angst films for the masses, such as The Breakfast Club. Instead of pop rock like Simple Minds, its soundtrack relies heavily on the likes of the Cure and Bauhaus. And of course Stevie Nicks.

It's a story about Gypsy, a zaftig underachieving woman in her mid-twenties who has dreams of following in the footsteps of the mother who abandoned her to become a rock star in the big city, and her high-school senior buddy Clive, an adorable virginal goth boy who relishes in his effeminacy but doesn't want to be defined by his sexuality. Both outcasts from middle-American society (which is what drew them together as friends), they decide to drive together from Sandusky Ohio to New York City, for Gypsy to participate in a club's "Night of a Thousand Stevies" event and possibly find her mother.

It's a classic example of the "road movie" genre. Along the way they encouter a series of interesting characters: a handsome runaway Amish guy, an aging chanteuse, and a motorhome full of frat boys... all of whom turn out to be something more than they first appear... and then turn out to be not quite what they second appeared, either. And over the course of the trip, both characters learn a bit about themselves, and end up being something other than what they started out to be as well.

The movie is not without its flaws. Although it's set in "the present" (give or take a few years since filming; a few New York scenes show the World Trade Center towers), the musical references are... 1983. Which worked OK for me, because it helped put me in the right frame of mind to relate to Clive (I was his age back then), but it was still a little disorienting. And there were a few scenes where it seemed the scriptwriter was still trying to figure out how to stage this part of the story... especially the final scene). But considering that this is Todd Stephens' second produced screenplay and his directorial debut (the other being a film named after a Stevie Nicks tune, about a gay teenager, and set back in 1984... notice a pattern here? {smile}), it's really quite solid.

Happy, Healthy, Wise, Wealthy

I heard the little snippet of verse many times growing up. Dad would recite it from time to time as a way of conveying his priorities in life, in order of importance: happy, healthy, wise, and wealthy. I don't know if he came up with it himself, but he seemed rather pleased to hear me repeat it when I quoted what "a wise man" had once said to me.

I was explaining why I had decided to quit a full-time job with a nice benefit package, for a not-quite-full-time job without... and at a slightly lower hourly rate.

Financially, it's a bad move. I'm not exactly making good money now, certainly not what someone with my qualifications should be worth. This means I'll be getting even less. So much for "wealthy". I'll have to pay for my own health insurancem which could jeopardize the "healthy" part. And my only retirement fund will be whatever I can afford to save myself and put into an IRA, which isn't an especially "wise" plan for the future compared to an employer-funded 401(k).

But first there's "happy". I have not been happy at my job. Sure, after 10 months unemployed I was delighted to get it. But my orientation and training period was more like a scavenger hunt for all the things I needed to do my job, as they didn't provide me with a working computer with the software I needed, policies-and-procedures documents that had been updated in the past two years, keys to the office, or even a phone on my desk. Frustration turned to boredom as I figured out who my coworkers were and which to ask for help with what... and the tediousness of my job set in. When I wasn't running around dealing with crises, I was bored out of my skull. And then there was the complaint from a user that I was rude to her, in which she misinterpretted what I was saying and misreported the rest. It was her word against mine, and he wrote me up as if every word of hers was confirmed by God. I've gotten to know and like a few of my colleagues, but not him.

So when I got the offer to go work for the college where I've been a student (and coincidentally just graduated), where I have several friends and acquaintances among the faculty and staff, in a position which would give me greater responsibility and more interesting work, and get another 8 hours a week free... it was pretty obvious where I had the better chance at "happy".

It might not work out. I'm probably going to need to do a far amount of freelance/consuting work on the side to make the finances feasible. There's no guarantee that I'll actually like it. But it'll actually give me the spare time I'd need to cultivate that kind of creative freelance work, and the contacts (via faculty, staff, and graduating students) to get actual technical consulting work. And just maybe this time I'll get a boss where the mutual-respect thing actually happens, and I'll get some satisfaction from the work I'll be doing.

How Movable Is My Type?

This weblog began on Blogger, but I switched to Movable Type early on, because it gave me greater control and better features. Now I have to consider switching to something else. This isn't going to be a bitch-and-moan fest, just a look at how I got here, and where I might go next.

When I first decided to set up my own weblogging software (rather than something hosted elsewhere, like Blogger), I wanted something open source. After all, my server's operating system (Linux), my web server (Apache), and a lot of the other excellent software I use (OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Postfix) are all available under open licences that make them not only free of charge, but also (effectively) public property.

Instead I went with Movable Type. It uses a lot of the free technology I already know and like, such as Perl and MySQL. It has some nifty features - particularly categories - that other packages were missing. And it was free of charge for non-commercial use. But it's a proprietary package: developed by a closed set of developers (a company called Six Apart), and with a fee attached if you use it for things beyond the terms of their personal licence. In other words, it's free (as in "free beer") but not free (as in "free speech").

I decided I could live within the terms of their free(beer) licence, so I installed it, I tweaked it, I enhanced it, and I grew fairly dependent on it. Now Six Apart has released a new version of MT. And the licencing terms have changed. In an attempt to crack down on people whose "personal" use of MT was to set up blogs for themselves and for all of their friends and their friends' friends, they've limited the free(beer) licence to a single user, with up to three blogs.

Guess who has two users and four blogs on his system.

So here are my options: A) Continue using the previous version of MT. B) Trim the usage of my system to fit within MT's new free(beer) licence, and upgrade. C) Just upgrade. (I don't think the new version enforces the more limited licence terms, and if it does I could probably hack it so it didn't.) D) Pay the licence fee that covers my usage, and upgrade. E) Switch to some other software.

I don't like C, on ethical grounds. Six Apart has every right to set the terms and charge fees for their software. I'm leaning away from D, simply because money's tight, and the price seems a bit high. I'm OK with A for now, but eventually I'm probably going to want some new features. I'd really hate to do B, for personal reasons. And E is likely to be problematic, because - although I could probably migrate the content easily enough, I've been taking advantage of some of MT's particular features and plug-ins, and I don't want to lose them.

I haven't made up my mind yet. I am going to do another survey of what other software is out there, paying special attention to those with free(speech) licences that I can be sure will never put me in this quandry again. Greymatter, WordPress, TextPattern, Pivot,
and Blosxom are on my list at the moment.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

my rating:

Nathan had to see Angelina Jolie in Taking Lives the week that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came out, plus it looked too "weird" for him. I just got around to seeing it solo. Sure, it had some weird moments, but I was more surprised by how fairly "ordinary" it was. Not in a bad way, but it wasn't as surreal as I expected.

The story is basically: boy (Jim Carrey) meets girl (Kate Winslet), boy and girl fall in and out of love, boy finds out girl has had him erased from her memories, he decides to erase her... but then changes his mind as he relives those memories and tries to protect "her" from the erasing process.

Those scenes are where the surreality comes into play. For example, we get our first warning that Carrey's memory of the event is being erased as background details start quietly disappearing, such as the lettering on signs or the faces of by-standers. Eventually she's gone altogether and the environment itself collapses into nothingness. This was very nicely done.

A couple of his attempts to squirrel the memory of her away elsewhere in his mind give Carrey an opportunity to chew the scenery with his trademark over-the-top childishness, but most of the time he's nicely understated, and likeable as a kind of awkward, lonely, and mostly-unhappy schmoe. Until Winslet - a flaky, impulsive force of chaos - came into his life, for both good and ill. Which reminded me a bit of me and Andy. As aggravating as each of us was to the other at times, we complemented each other well, and were "good for" each other.

The "moral" of the story is pretty obvious: that even when relationships go sour, there's still a preciousness to the memory of the relationship, especially when it was still going well. That's something I can relate to, and agree with. As painful as it was to lose Andy the way I did, and as tempting as it might be to wish I could just forget about him, ultimately I really wouldn't want that. Cause darn it, it is better to have loved and lost. And if it weren't for those memories, I wouldn't be the person I am today... more depressive, but still with a better sense of perspective and balance about myself.

The technique used in the film is complete and under nonsense, but that's forgiveable because it's really more of a fantasy than a science fiction film to begin with. They just used gadgets and a little psychotechnobabble to justify the allegory, rather than pixy dust and moonbeams.

In addition to a small trend of movies dealing with memory, there's been a rash of films using out-of-order storytelling, and this is one of them. It shows us the progression of their relationship from end to beginning, as his most recent memories of her are erased first, and he falls back to earlier and earlier memories to defend. There's also some trickiness with order-juggling, deliberately intended to throw the audience off track. It's a bit confusing, and I'm glad I didn't drag Nathan to see it, because it would have put him off. But it works pretty well.

The ongoing subplots featuring the staff at the slightly-shady institute that does the memory erasing were arguably necessary to the overall story (providing the hook to hang the semi-sweet Hollywood ending on), and provided some sometimes-comic relief from All Carrey & Winslet All The Time, but they introduced some secondary complications to the whole issue of memory erasure that kind of detracted from the main story. I would've liked to see that dealt with more... or not at all.

Video Games in Reality

"It's a beautiful day outside, Billy! Why don't you stop playing Pac-Man on your Atari, and go play outside?"

"Okay.... I'll go play Pac-Manhattan."

A bunch of New Yorkers have taken the quarter-century-old video game and transplanted into realspace... Greenwich Village, to be precise. It was created as part of an academic program (the kind that salt-of-the-earth types either snicker or sneer about), but Pac-Manhattan also looks like a lot of fun. (Heck, I'd love to chase this Pac-Man down and eat him. {grin})

Maybe someday people will take the radical experimental step of adapting games such as John Madden Football or FIFA Soccer 2004 or All Star Tennis to be played in realspace. Nah... that'd never catch on.

Patently Obvious

Every teenager with a computer likes to whine about their contempt for copyright, especially as it applies to music and movies. But to get upset about patents, you pretty much have to be a hardcore geek. Which I am.

Let me start out by saying that I like patents. The guys who wrote the U.S. Constitution took the trouble to authorize the Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The Patent Office does this by requiring the inventor to give them all the specifics of how their thing works, so that when the patent expires, everybody will have the info they need to copy it and improve on it.

The alternative is that people would routinely keep their inventions secret, not just for the period of time that it took them to recoup their investments and put away some money for retirement, but indefinitely. By providing the carrot of temporary patent protection, the government entices all of this stuff into the public domain. It's a perfect compromise between the mercantile capitalists and the "information wants to be free" crowd, because it gives them both what they want.

But the patent system isn't working right anymore. Patents are being awarded for things that simply shouldn't be covered by patent protection. Companies are filing for patents on everything they produce, to give them ammunition to sue competitors. If you don't patent all your inventions, someone else might, and then you won't be able to use them. And the terms are far too long.

Back when Congress created the Patent Office in 1790, the term for a patent was 14 years. It was later increased to 17 years. Now certain kinds of patents can last 20 years. Hint: this number is moving in the wrong direction.

In the 18th century, technology advanced at a leisurely pace. If you invented a new kind of stove, you could profit from being the exclusive supplier for 14 years and developing a customer base and a commercial reputation. At the end of that term, your competitors could start selling the same kind of stove... and it would probably still be "state of the art", or at least competitive. In other words, formerly-patented inventions were still useful. But in the 21st century, 14... no, make that 20 years is like an epoch. Apple probably got some patents on the hardware used in the original Macintosh 20 years ago, technology which is now so hopeless obsolete that it's useless. Worthless.

Patents need to expire more quickly.

They also need to be handed out more carefully. Amazon got one for "one-click shopping" and another for the use of cookies to store data in your web browser. A guy sued the Red Cross for violating his patent on accepting donations online (and only lost because someone dug up "prior art" that showed UNICEF had done it before he filed his patent). Microsoft just got one for having the length of time you hold down a button determine what it does... effectively patenting both the double-click and Apple's answer to the right-click: the long click. The law actually says that patents aren't supposed to be awared for things that are trivial, or obvious to anyone working in the field. But they are. Apparently because patent examiners are overworked and underqualified, and other fundamental flaws in the process (e.g. examiners' job performance being evaluated based on the quantity - not quality - of their decisions).

Software patents can be especially problematic. Microsoft is filing patents galore to prevent competing software (especially Linux) for being compatible with their upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows, and the supposedly-open XML data formats for future versions of Microsoft Office. So not only will their software fail to comply with open standards, it'll be against the law for other developers to use Microsoft's proprietary standards.

There's an article on Groklaw about a report with suggestions for how to fix the patent system. I wish them luck.