Category: Personal

Spurred, I suppose, by the release next Friday of his new film, People I Know, the Times’ film critic A.O. Scott takes a look back at Al Pacino’s career: Seen This Guy Lately? Scott’s assessment, of a sameness in the characters Pacino has portrayed over the past decade or more, seems spot on to me and apparently his role in this new film is no different. He plays a publicist this time out and, not having seen either movie, I wonder if Pacino’s Eli could be Colin Farrell’s Stu 40 years down the road. Pacino, though, is pretty much always worth watching even when the movie around him (S1m0ne, anyone?) is mostly crap.

I sure hope Dave means Yakko.

Have you tried Dano yet? It’s the beta of the new version of Blogger, available only to newly-created blogs at this point as far as I can tell. I created a new blog and the new version looks nice though some of the features one would hope to see, such as trackback and categories, aren’t in it. The new UI is cleaner and more attractive and, given, a completely rewritten, re-architected code base, one can only hope the performance will be much improved too, curtailing the calls for help on the various mailing lists.

Halftime of the Spurs-Suns first playoff game and the NBA runs a promo urging viewers to head to nba.com to buy playoff tickets and get entered into a sweepstakes for tickets to one of the NBA Finals games. Plus front row seats to a Christina Aguilera/Justin Timberlake concert. And I’m thinking, could they come up with a bigger disincentive? Not for me, unless it was the proverbial sharp stick in the eye. Can you say “Bye Bye Bye”?

When you’ve lost the capacity to be surprised by how self-centered and self-serving corporate chieftains can be. Dan Gillmor posted American Airlines’ Betrayal of Trust to his blog today and after reading it I just thought, so what? I mean, the choices made by American’s executives and board are disappointing and sad but after the last couple of years, I just can’t get the old indignation up for it any more. Thank goodness for the Sweet One and sports, eh?

Update: Conservatives Attack Two GOP Senators With Electronically Doctored Images

I went through a little burst of changes on Springsteen, my semi-trusty two year old VAIO laptop, and thought I’d clue all you faithful readers in. All these are free (as in beer) if not free as in speech, a consideration for me without question these days. I’ve been thinking about finding a way, without spending money, to get into some form of .NET programming as well but haven’t yet acted on it (go Scoble!)

First off, a new tabbed browser add-on for Internet Explorer called SlimBrowser. The new tool doesn’t have a huge advantage, yet, over CrazyBrowser (for my purposes, that is) but does have someone actively developing and supporting it, while CB has not had an update in 12 months and the developer no longer responds to email.

Second, I’ve actually adopted an RSS aggregator after resisting for awhile, Luke Hutteman’s SharpReader. This is the first application I’ve used built on top of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which was the first reason I tried it. But it works quite well, suits my way of doing things that other aggregators I’ve looked at don’t, and so far, so good. My OPML file exported from SR 0.9.1, for posterity.

Third is SpamPal for Windows, “a mail classification program that can help separate your spam from the mail you really want to read.” Works with most POP3 email accounts and Windows email software–I’ve used it with Outlook Express and now Outlook 2002–and works really well, very few false positives or false negatives. Also has a working, active plugin architecture, so I’m using the RegExFilter plugin written by Stephan Slabihoud.

I’ve also installed Knoppix, a variant of the Debian Linux distribution, on another PC but haven’t found the extra monitor necessary to get started on that huge playground.

Gotta love those lower mortgage rates, though I see they’re on the way back up since I locked in last month. Anywho, today was paper signing day; for those of you not here in Cali, let’s just say for all that this state is known for being eco-friendly, we kill trees by the truckload and the stack of papers just to refinance a mortgage is a stack inches thick of mostly 11″x14″ sheet, single-sided of course. You can imagine how much thicker the stack is when purchase of the property is added in!

Wells Fargo keeps offering me zero cost deals, the only thing I see is lower monthly payments (and a reset of the clock back to 30 years) and the possibility of a higher rate (I use a five year ARM). Hell, this time the mortgage broker called me to see if I was interested, didn’t even have to pick up a phone, no new docs required, just bending the elbow to sign or intitial all those pages. Lowered my nut another $110 per month, not shabby.

1) Seating arrangements, what an exciting chore. But necessary.

2) Why is Winerlog down when such easy targets as this are around near daily?

3) Finally! Ford has announced they’re killing off the Taurus, a car that never left the ’80s.

Sadly, Dr. Robert Atkins died today from the trauma caused when he slipped on an icy Manhattan sidewalk nine days ago (Official announcement). Atkins was known worldwide for his nutritional approach, which the Sweet One, myself, and many others follow, developed in the ’60s and early ’70s from the patients at his cardiology practice and bought by millions in the years since he published the Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution as a book. If you’re looking to lose weight and adopt a way of eating that can keep you healthy for years, I recommend you look into this.

Kevin Spacey, finally with the clout to get it done, makes his dream film, a biography of singer Bobby Darin. What most of us don’t remember, but all the publicity for this film points out, is that Darin knew from his mid-teens that he would die young due to a heart defect and did, indeed, die from it in 1973 at 37. In between Darin made sure he succeeded at becoming a star and leaving his mark on the world.

Spacey, though, is already in his mid-40s and will need either serious makeup or digital fx to succeed in this role, which will also cover his marriage to Sandra Dee. Who’ll be portrayed by the 20 year old Blue Crush hottie Kate Bosworth.

Further, Spacey plans to direct the film, something he’s only done once before and let’s be nice and just say that Albino Alligator wasn’t well received. One can only speculate that Spacey would likely be much better served by bringing in a younger actor to play Darin and satisfying himself with director and producer credits.

This sounds like a John Grisham novel: County Says It’s Too Poor to Defend the Poor. Only sadder since it’s true.

Another reason we did the right thing in Iraq: Abu Abbas was captured. Abbas was a senior leader in the terrorist Palestinean Liberation Front and responsible for the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship during which a 69 year old crippled American man, Leon Klinhoffer, was murdered. Abbas was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences in absentia for that attack and presumbly he will now serve the time. He’s been hiding and working out of Iraq for the last 17 years. Good riddance!

Continuing the story, with the gender changed to confuse everyone:

X is now completely ignoring the HOA rules and doing whatever she likes, including digging up the flowerbeds outside other people’s units and replanting them with what she wants even though what she’s doing is potentially harmful (could bring snails and termites). This has brought in complaints and I thought one way to get her to stop her latest antics would be a personal conversation. I walked over to her home, only a few units away from mine, once or twice a day all week but her car was never there.

I finally went over at a time when X was home. This is very funny. As I was walking up her driveway, her patio gate was open and I could see her standing there working on some potted plants. I called out “X” so she wouldn’t be startled to see me standing there suddenly and instead of acknowledging me, she ran into her house.

I waited but she didn’t come back out. I went around her car and knocked on the door. No answer. Waited a bit and knocked again, still no answer. I walked around the driveway–I decided that just walking through her open gate might be a poor choice–and I could see her living room light on and the patio door open. I called her name a couple more times but she never answered.

Last night was our bi-monthly board meeting. The board decided to take more serious measures to end her bothersome actions.

Just the other day I commented on astrophysicist Paul Davies and his religion-driven attack on this scientific concept. So what do I find today on /. but a link to Scientific American’s current issue cover story, Parallel Universes.

Author Max Tegmark: “One of the many implications of recent cosmological observations is that the concept of parallel universes is no mere metaphor. Space appears to be infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything that is possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Beyond the range of our telescopes are other regions of space that are identical to ours. Those regions are a type of parallel universe. Scientists can even calculate how distant these universes are, on average.”

Tegmark’s credentials: professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in analyzing the cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering, and much of his work bears on the concept of parallel universes. So when you hear someone babbling on about “Intelligent Design”, just say no.

Sex in an MRI machine: do I really need to say more? Warning: no pictures and via MetaFilter.

Today, being Tax Day, reminds me to ask: where is my (pittance of a) refund already? You’d think having next to no income last year but having some large deductible expenses, primarily the mortgage on Casa Lazar, I’d get a decent refund, maybe a couple of thousand dollars. But no, the Feds will only give you back what you actually paid, not more, and then self-employment taxes (from the two months with Pyra) don’t seem to figure in as refundable, cutting my payout further. Isn’t six or seven weeks long enough for them to send me that itty bitty check?

iBeans are coming!

Some people are very fortunate and have close, loving relationships with their families. I’ve been around people who don’t and that simply makes me sad, even if the people involved accept it and don’t let it get them down. I’m really happy that I do have such wonderful people in my family, such a terrific benefit in many different ways. And today my sister Joanne celebrates her birthday and I want to tell her: I love you and I’m grateful to have your love and friendship.

When did Dennis Miller turn into a fullblown Rush and Cheney lover and official stand up comedian of the Republican party? I kept watching his new special tonight, waiting for him to crack up with laughter and explain that his jokes were just, well, a put on and that he’d get on to the real stuff. But. But he never did! I realize the last couple of years have affected some people more than others but this was over the edge. And just not funny.

In A Brief History of the Multiverse, astrophysicist Paul Davies attempts to debunk the Multiverse paradigm on the New York Times OpEd page. Certainly Davies is better educated in these matters than I but his argument seems to boil down to “Gee this is an extemely complex way to explain what we see and therefore must be wrong.” He does point to certain implications of the theory that are certainly difficult to believe.

A little Googling into who Paul Davies is, though, turns his credibility straight upside down. Dr. Davies has spent much of the past 20 years researching and evangelizing the Intelligent Design crapola mascarading as science. Enough so that Wired recently called him The Pope’s Astrophysicist and that he won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1995, only two years after Watergate burglar Charles Colsen got it.

So of course he has a need to show that any new theory in physics has to either be proven wrong or shown as another path to God. Even fellow non-doctorates Penn & Teller were able to debunk Intelligent Design in a recent episode of Bullshit. ID is the current smoke and mirrors conservative Christians use to put a scientific sheen on their completely non-scientific belief in God.

Religion, by definition, is a belief system, one taken on faith in the absence of tangible proof, so the whole idea of formulating a scientific explanation seems weird, like just another marketing ploy. And it doesn’t discredit a truly scientific, if young and not yet mature, theory such as the Multiverse. Sorry Paul.