Category: Personal

My previous post might seem like I watch too much TV. This is possibly true. That’s just a prime time schedule. You may have noticed I seem to watch a lot of soccer too. This is also true, for instance I’ll be taking Wednesday off as comp time so I can see Liverpool take on Milan. There are no excuses, just what I do.

Raw data courtesy of Zap2It.

Blogger Buzz gives a shoutout to fellow Sun alum Owen Linderholm on the launch of his new company’s first book, Digital Dish. Good luck with the book–this is some sweet visibility for you–and then the next one, Owen.

Reading the last entry of Simon Ng’s blog was chilling. The post, just a short paragraph, was written moments after allowing sister Sharon’s ex-boyfriend into their apartment, moments before Jin Lin stabbed him to death. As efforts towards citizen journalism grow, little bits like this cut steps through the forest. [via Anatoly]

Wait a second. There are “sneaker bloggers? So many that Nike could include 20 in a contest and still leave one out?

Yesterday: Pouring rain
Today: Bright sunshine

Yesterday: Office full
Today: Office nearly empty

You do the math.

We’re talking about the original 1966 film Alfie, not last year’s example of how Hollywood generally can’t leave well enough alone. The broad strokes are the same, except this one’s set in London and stars Michael Caine, still young enough to be on the barely muscular side of pretty boy pretty. Another difference, and this is important, is that 1965 London is filled with people just barely over the recovery from World War II and into an economic boom. Class is still important but not so much that Caine can’t bluff his way around it.

Everyone knows the punchline to the theme song: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” That’s also the theme of the movie, the journey which Caine’s character takes. Women can barely resist Alfie’s charms, despite the harsh, careless way he treats them, but the less pleasure he takes from them. One woman loves him so much she has his child, cooks and cleans for him, though he never marries her or makes a commitment to the boy and eventually walks away.

Director Lewis Gilbert (who also helmed three James Bond flicks) shows Alfie often enough what he’s missing through all this. A father’s love for a son, a husband’s love for his wife, a wife’s heartbreak over betrayal, but all Alfie wants is the pleasure. One can only presume that as a child his parents or father left him (died in the war?) but Bill Naughton’s script, adapted from his stage play, never goes there. To me this is fine, we can infer what we like and aren’t spoonfed every little detail that might matter. Even the ending leaves us unsettled, Alfie standing on a bridge looking off into the distance.

recommended

I have to tell you that Peter F. Hamilton, even without a personal website that I can find, is one of my favorite writers. I just finished Pandora’s Star and it ranks right up their with his Night’s Dawn trilogy. Nearly a thousand pages–this is part one of two–and the characters are there, the plot twists are there, the SFnal creativity is there. Sort of pisses me off that I didn’t wait until the second half comes out next year so I could read it all at once but I’ll probably just re-read this one then.

Nearly 400 years from now life is good for most humans. By 2050, wormholes, memory storage and periodic body replacement are developed and now people live on hundreds of planets for hundreds of years. Good is not perfect, of course, since people still have emotions that block optimum decisionmaking as we have today. A few alien races have been encountered, though not many, and those that have are either friendly or far less developed. Mainly people can experience variety and abundance on, well, exactly the scale we dream of today. Which is kind of Hamilton’s point.

Not everyone believes that all the aliens are benign. Specifically, one group claims that an alien named the Starflyer (which has never actually been seen by anyone who’ll admit it but is alleged to have been on a crashed ship on a world called Far Away) has subverted people at the highest levels of government and business, to ends that will do great harm to humanity.

Elsewhere, one of the few academic astronomers left–who needs telescopes when you can open a wormhole close up–notices two stars simply disappear from the sky. Hundreds of lightyears away, so he takes a wormhole train to another planet at the right distance so he can observe and record the event as it happens. The stars don’t explode, their light simply disappears in three seconds like a light switch turned them off.

A starship is built and a couple of hundred humans take a four month trip to see one of the systems in person. On arrival, the crew find the star system is inside some type of quantum barrier and then one day, two thousand years after it appeared the barrier switched off. Though not at the second system. Inside are, well, exactly the vicious, powerful kind of alien that’s been missing so far. Someone put the barrier up for a reason.

I don’t want to say more but I’ve barely scratched the depths of the creations Hamilton’s got in here. Those psychological imperfections mentioned are wielded like craftsmen’s tools and when the final page is read I could have punched the author for making me to wait until next year for the second half.

definitely recommended

For those of you reading this through the feed, I wonder whether you have any strong feelings about this topic. Google has announced they’ll now allow AdSense publishers to include the ads in feeds and since I run the ads on the web pages from which these entries come seems reasonable to use them here too. Would you unsubscribe, not care at all, or occasionally, if an ad was for something useful to you at that moment, click them? The current ads hardly pull in any money, maybe enough to cover the hosting fees for the site, maybe a little less, not that I’m complaining, but no point in not taking advantage of an opportunity if the consequences are low.

Want to let me know how you feel?

Have you been wondering what I’ve been up to at work? The linked page is an example of one part. Great crew, innovative and robust technology, strong leadership. But I don’t want to gush.

Congratulations to Harlan Coben as his latest mystery, The Innocent, hit the NY Times hardcover bestsellers list this weekend at #6. Just started reading it this morning–if nothing else, Harlan has a great way with opening sentences:

“You never meant to kill him.”

In the neverending, unwinnable war against spam I have no email address exposed on this site (as far as I remember) but instead offer a contact form. Very little comes through this and usually the messages are questions about movies or suggestions that I add someone’s upcoming favorite. Occasionally though I get puzzlers, messages that I can make no sense of, not connected enough to any specific blog post to trigger understanding.

Such as one just now received, which the sender chose not to even supply an address to which I could reply. Here I quote in the entirety:

“its about some scum buying my club nothing else we will break this club so we can buy it back and make it big again you watch”

Perhaps the author will see this and amplify. Possibly not and so I’ll suffer to the ends of time.

Geez, been awhile since I watched a whole movie. Possibly Open Range (released in 2003) wasn’t the right choice to break my dry spell. Kevin Costner and Robert Duval are old school cattle drivers, taking advantage of legal permission to graze their herds on open spaces. Or open ranges, that’s probably part of where the title comes from. Trouble comes in the form of a rancher (Michael Gambon) who doesn’t care for the men or the competition.

Costner also directed, using a script by Craig Storper from Lauran Paine’s decades old novel The Open Range Men. As the film opens, Duval, Costner and two younger hands are settling in for the night with a thin tarp sheltering them from a torrential downpour; nothing much happens for the next 20 minutes or so except one of the younger hands, played by man-mountain Abraham Benrubi, heads back to the nearest town for some supplies. When he hasn’t returned a couple of days later the two older men find him in jail, nearly beaten to death.

This is just a warning from Gambon, an Irishman who controls the largest ranch as well as the sheriff and town–you can pretty much picture one of those thin mustache twirlers from the silent picture days and nail this character. Duval immediately understands that his boys better destroy Gambon or leave their herd behind and run away, there won’t be any middle ground.

But neither of them are willing to duck the fight. Costner’s Charley Waite was apparently the Civil War equivalent of a Special Forces soldier though as director he feels no need to specify in which army. Though that might have been 17 years in the past, the stress and skills have lingered–Costner almost seems to making a Vietnam allegory or perhaps a Sopranos western. If there’s a difference, the latter probably uses dark humor to emphasize the hollow core of its characters but Open Range is simply gritty and single-minded.

Is this a good film? Compared to other recent westerns like Eastwood’s Unforgiven or Costner’s own Dances with Wolves, I’d say no. While those two films twist a classic genre into modern psychological expeditions and emphasize the beauty of what we gave up for today’s conveniences, Open Range exploits those conventions and wastes many minutes of screen time in plodding conversations or extended shots of (admittedly) beautiful vistas. The last hour was actually decent and if someone had stepped in to put Costner right this could have been much better.

not recommended

But can blood power a PDA?

More than a year has passed since I last entertained you with the story of X, the owner of a unit in my little development who isn’t happy with decisions of the board of directors on which I still serve. X filed a lawsuit, (his || her) attorneys have come and gone and come and gone, inexplicably extensions and delays were granted by the judge, and finally our own attorney has taken X’s deposition and received a settlement proposal. I’d post the PDFs if I could but let’s just say that the details far surpass my poor brain’s capacity to understand.

X asserts that members of the HOA board of directors, past and present, have insulted, abused, harrassed and tortured (him || her) so that (he || she) has suffered severe illness and fears for (his || her) life or to even go outside, and further that we allow cats to use “the space outside my window as a toilet area.” I’m personally retaliating, according to this sworn testimony, because X had letters sent by (yet another) attorney when the board failed to repair a light outside (his || her) unit despite repeated requests.

Torture and abuse? Me? Another person might use such language to exaggerate for effect but I believe X intends the words quite literally based on the severe terms (he || she) proposes to settle the dispute. Specifically, and I quote some of X’s terms here unedited except to remove identifying information:

• “The board MUST allow due process.”
• “The board should NOT be a dictatorship.”
• “I want a guarantee that I will not be persecuted by future boards or individuals over [specific detail removed]”
• “I want to have the CC&R amended so that they cannot continuously repeat, year after year, board after board, or whenever somebody like [other owner name removed] wants to use the board as revenge.”
• “Other items to be discussed.”
• “Financial terms to be discussed.”

The settlement terms the board agreed to propose, as you might expect, are on a somewhat different plane of existence. We have a mediation meeting scheduled this week to see if a settlement can be reached without going to trial. I’m not at all confident this is possible.

Makes me wonder what the California standards are for slander in these situations.

Dan Gillmor has launched Bayosphere, the first public effort of the new venture he launched after leaving the Mercury News. To Dan and the Grassroots Media team, I say congratulations on getting yourselves through the birth pangs and into the screaming infant months. Hopefully your effort will rival the impact of Karl’s terrific PhillyFuture and other localized web-based community systems. Even for a beta product, though, perhaps this launch was premature given the lack of information and/or functionality. A few things I’m pretty much in the dark on:

• What I can do after registering, can I have my own blog?
• How are my bookmarks used?
• Can I control visibility of my (theoretical) blog and bookmarks?
• What’s already on the site other than your blog and comments people have left on it?
• Who’s behind Bayosphere other than yourself (neither grassrootsmedia.com nor grassrootsmediainc.com resolve to a ‘company’ site for this organization either)?

I’m looking forward to a quality, exciting Bay Area-centric system and a new platform for reporting and analyzing local issues we face, opportunities we have and relationships we can develop. Thanks for taking on this challenge.

Joe, I sure do feel lucky. We got the phone call about two and a half hours ago that my nephew Jacob Michael Rentz was born at 4:45 this afternoon, a healthy six pounds nine ounces and 20 inches long, and he and my sister Joanne are resting comfortably. Despite the ultra-connectivity we think we’re living in, no photos have yet been emailed to me but I expect to post one ASAP. Larry, do you hear me? LOL.

Coincidence: Tonight the final episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise and Andromeda were broadcast. I think this is more significant for my nephew’s future than the date being Friday the 13th.

Jake, down the line when you ask about today, here’s what I want to say: You are a fortunate child, born to two wonderful parents with four older siblings that will surely help you, tease you, tickle you and love you. Grandparents who’ve been waiting for your arrival as long as I can recall who want nothing more than to spoil you, within reason, as any grandparent should. And your Aunt Vivian and I, we may not be physically close but you’re always going to be in our thoughts and hearts. Welcome to your new home. Live long and prosper.

I’m sure Tim Draper music video is all that and a bag of potato chips but throwing around the claim that it was produced by a member of the Eagles, when in truth it was produced by the guy they hired to play drums while Don Henley preens upstage is not exactly the same thing. Even if you are a hugely successful venture capitalist.

37signals posts an article pushing back on Google Web Accelerator, Hey, not so fast – an alert for web app designers, which was a reaction to the way GWA prefetches even destructive links. Now arguments have been made, pro and con, on how wise it is of Google to do this and for web developers to use GETs instead of POSTs so the functionality is vulnerable to it, I’m not debating which is the best answer. I am sitting here laughing because on the same page as this blog post, 37signals has an add for the book they authored, Defensive Design for the Web. I personally expect people who write books about defensive design to actually design defensively, don’t you?

Driving to the gym this morning, one of the radio station blabbermouths mentioned a recent academic study which found that only two percent of all marital affairs stay secret, meaning that 98% become known to the other spouse. Let’s call BS on this, assuming the radioman reported the study accurately, because if you’d successfully (and purposely) hidden knowledge of the betrayal from everyone would you really be likely to tell a complete stranger? Even if anonymity was guaranteed why would anyone take the chance?