Category: Personal

Mountain View does not have a noise ordinance; therefore the only law controlling sound levels in my community is California’s Penal Code Section 415, which says: “Any person who maliciously and willfully disturbs another person by loud and unreasonable noise.” For the police to stop someone, I was told by one officer, they must determine the volume is purposely intended to interfere with another person’s quiet enjoyment. Additionally, the volume must be at this level when the policeman arrives on the scene.

Now I’m all in favor of everyone having as much fun as possible but only to the point where I can’t hear my TV or music clearly. The officer I spoke with sympathized though he wasn’t able to agree with my characterization of malicious. I wonder why, though, since Mirriam-Webster’s legal definition is simply “wanton disregard for the rights of others.” The willful and loud requirements are clear unless, as was the case this time, the volume is turned down between a call to the dispatcher and the officer’s arrival. Unreasonable has probably been defined through case law though one analysis suggests a loud home stereo system would be unreasonable.

The officer said this is far from the first time he’s had to deliver an unsatisfactory answer to a resident’s noise complaint and I hardly hold him personally responsible, of course. But that doesn’t mollify me, just makes for one more in a long line of unsatisfactory dealings with the Mountain View Police Department.

On the sad side of the ledger, my sister’s father-in-law passed away this past weekend. I only met Larry Sr. a few times, him living in Florida, but no one could miss his terrific friendliness and appetite for life. I know from talking with my sister that he was a wonderful guy who made her feel like a daughter and not just an in-law, that when he loved you he loved you with all he had. My brother-in-law is a great guy and clearly the apple was dropped only inches from the tree. Only 65, he will be missed.

Calling Doc Ock!

The Economist gets Scobelized!

Are you interested in a local, large scale Tsunami benefit to attend? Then the Bay Area Unites Tsunami Event, coming to HP Pavillion in San Jose on Sunday, Feb. 20,, might be worth checking out. Prominent author and philosopher Dr. Deepak Chopra, Grammy nominated singer Lisa Loeb, Grammy nominated musicians Shankar & Gingger, acclaimed dancer Danica Sena and philanthropist Dr. Malini Alles will be among the headliners, and former President Bill Clinton will particpate via video. Bay Area Unites is a coalition of local organizations with ties to the affected countries in South Asia including the India Community Center (ICC), American India Foundation (AIF), The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) and American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPIO). Check it out.

Smart! More networks/studios should do this. And probably will if AOL pulls good numbers.

Programming alert: ESPN2 will show the FIFA/UEFA Football For Hope Tsunami benefit match live next Tuesday (Feb. 15). The all star sides, Shevchenko XI vs. Ronaldinho XI, will play in FC Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium live at 2:55 PM EST/11:55 AM PST. Set your TiVo!

Matt Drudge quoted President Bush’s brief conversation with Mary Mornin in Omaha today (PR Newswire transcript). Mornin, a woman in her late fifties who told the president she was a divorced mother of three, including a ‘mentally challenged’ son. Just in case it goes away here is what I read:

"Begin transcript:

MS. MORNIN: That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.

THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?

MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)

MS. MORNIN: Not much. Not much."

I don’t but perhaps you find this funny; all I see from this is an enormous lack of sensitivity on the part of a man who seems lost in the ether when he doesn’t have prepared remarks to lean on if an off-message question comes his way. This woman is struggling to make ends meet yet finds the time to attend a rally supporting his (full of crap) Social Security reform proposal and the BushMeister falls back on his fratboy mean humor to thank her. Wonderful!

Nothing in human culture exists without a context. Michael Behe explains the four linked claims that argue for Intelligent Design and fails to provide the context. What, I wonder, is responsible for the intelligence of the designs we see around us? “[T]he theory of intelligent design is not a religiously based idea,” he writes but then finishes his essay without addressing this central question. Semantics aside, no one can doubt that in the world view of Behe and the Intelligent Design community, the designer is God. And then, so much for his proposition that ID is a scientific theory comparable to evolution.

Here’s a good photo of Vivian and me dancing last Saturday night at her firm’s holiday party at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay. A really great party, beautiful location, great food, really good band (Motown, ’70s soft rock and disco) and a chance for me to finally socialize with her co-workers.

I doubt I could have ever played this guitar!

I just couldn’t get up the excitement or energy to blog this year’s commercials, overall I’m very unimpressed, but you can see them all (after they’ve aired) on iFilm’s Super Bowl Ads page and AdJab is putting up a post for each ad for community comments. [via Scoble]

Not being at all interested in the unending blah blah blah of the Super Bowl pre-game whatever, I finally saw the last of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix Trilogy. The second film, Reloaded, was a terrible disappointment to me and this one was mainly interesting because of some recent conversations about the nature of consciousness. Revolutions was better than Reloaded but not even close to The Matrix.

I’m willing to chalk this up to bleed over from having seen Hellboy yesterday but I really felt like Andy and Larry Wachowski made this movie flailing around for an ending that would convey the weight of their concept while delivering the power and action enabled by innovative computer technology.

You may recall that as we left our heroes, Zion was facing imminent destruction while Neo and Agent Smith had just left the Matrix for flesh and blood; that’s where the action picks up. The two hours of screen time are filled with well done action, energy all over the place, masses of swarming machines charging into Zion and the humans fighting back with oversized machine guns. I certainly never got bored, wondering how long until the end.

But everything was the equivalent of a magician’s big hand wave, distracting the audience from the real movements that accomplish the mechanics of a trick. All the bullets fired from those machine guns, outrageously acrobatic hand to hand combat and the interpersonal emotions that are supposed to draw us into the characters fail. The man behind the curtain is exposed despite all the trickery.

Here’s the secret: everything we’ve seen, across all three movies, is unnecessary. The key to this revelation is Neo’s penultimate conversation with the Oracle, when he asks why she hasn’t given him the answer just supplied earlier; you weren’t ready, she said, and Neo is filled with understanding. Then he jumps in a ship with Trinity and runs off to Machine City so he can speak directly with the machines, who take him at his word and provide a connection to the Matrix where he and Smith stage their final, all or nothing martial arts bout.

Let me rant a bit now over egregious nonsense in Revolutions. The Zion army has very impresive technology, the ability to enter and leave the Matrix without notice of the Agents, vehicles with ultra-sophisticated power supplies and machine-killing weapons, and even those huge exoskeletons, but even though the machines that control the world can send nearly unlimited fighters to attack they’ve held off until just when the one human able to stand them off comes into the picture. And what is this Machine City?!?!?! Nothing less, apparently, then the controlling core of Earth’s masters, known to Neo and everyone in Zion, but not worthy of mention to us viewers until near the end. This is exactly the kind of hidden information that storytellers use when they’ve worked themselves into a corner and need a way out.

“Everything that has a beginning has an end.” This sentiment is expressed repeatedly and yet the Wachowski brothers evade facing it with their ending. The worst nonsense of all, suggesting volumes and saying nothing that any 12 year old doesn’t already understand. That’s perhaps the last piece of this puzzle allowing us to return to the trilogy’s origin: you got it, The Matrix started out as a comic book series.

not recommended

Part of the current wave of comic books taking advantage of modern computer effects and makeup, Hellboy is a visually exciting movie, with really good pacing and decent acting. But if you’re hoping for a complete story and a plot that hangs together with some intelligence, this 2004 release is not it.

Primary cast is Ron Perlman as the title character, John Hurt as scientist and bureau chief, Rupert Evans as an FBI agent and new minder, Jeffrey Tambor as an officious, obnoxious government higher up, Selma Blair and David Hyde Pierce as two more paranormals, all of whom face off against Karel Roden as a “reimagined” Rasputin, Brian Steele as Sammael, Ladislav Beran as an ageless ninja-ish fighter and Bridget Hodson as a Nazi and the obligatory bad girl groupie.

(Apparently, the film pulls a “Vader” on the Abe Sapien character, with Doug Jones inside the funny suit and Hyde Pierce providing the voice. Since almost all of the character’s value add was in the dialog, I’ll leave the above cast note stand.)

Basic story: Rasputin, who in this tale didn’t die in Russia early in the 20th century, has teamed up during World War II with some Nazis to open a gateway to Hell in a special place on the Scottish coast. Hurt’s Professor Bruttenholm is there with a squad of American soldiers to stop them and does, but not before a baby Hellboy comes through; Bruttenholm takes him back to New Jersey. Flash forward 60 years, to the present day, when Rasputin has returned from the dead, ready to finish the destruction of Earth.

Writer/director Guillermo del Toro film before this was Blade II, a very similar movie. Your eyes are kept glued to the screen, the action coming faster and faster and some very creative visual effects. But, as I mentioned at the start, the script makes no sense and that’s even after you accept the made up beings and technology. There are numerous others but the best example is at the very end: Hellboy faces off against a huge monster whose existence isn’t even hinted at prior to its appearance and having defeated it (of course, what do you think?) just walks off with no explanation. Yet we’re supposed to accept it and file out of the theater. All I can think is that readers of the source comic books would know the missing details.

not recommended

P.S. There’s already a sequel listed on IMDB.

Germany’s Spiegel has posted a very interesting Interview with Bill Gates. The magazine’s interviewer takes a very strong tone with his questions, much more so than we see in American media, but BillG keeps his cool and stays on message thoughout. The article was originally published in German and then (I suppose) translated to English and I wonder if some of the impression is an artifact of the translation; when I hear Germans speaking English there often seems to be a similar harshness. Still, an interesting read. [via /.]

Dan Gillmor, among others, has written frequently about a housing bubble and the strong likelihood that metropolitan California and possibly most major American metropolitan areas will suffer a significant correction or worse when the bubble is popped, which he sees as pretty much a mortal lock. “This market may be a sucker’s bet,” he wrote and who am I to argue with him?

The trigger will be a return to more normal interest rates than what we’ve enjoyed for the last 4-6 years. I’m guessing 30 year fixed rate loans above 8% for more than a month will do the trick. Bankrate.com says this week they fell one basis point to 5.67% according their national survey of large lenders. So that means a, say, $250,000 mortgage has a monthly payment of $1446 but if the rate goes to 8.125% the payment rises to $1856, nearly $5,000 more out of pocket every year. Not an amount most families can just pay out of pocket change.

No, instead rising interest rates will decimate afforability. Even now California homes are barely within reach of most people. In 2004, according to the California Association of Realtors (C.A.R.), for the third straight year home sales and the median home price reached record high levels, while supply conditions and the share of first-time buyers in the California housing market fell to historic lows.

“At 20 percent in 2004, affordability in California was less than half that of the nation.” More sweet words from the C.A.R., whose report goes on to say that rates are “expected to increase by 50 to 75 basis points as the economy grows in 2005, with the fixed-mortgage interest rate expected to be just under 7 percent by year’s end.” Already, only people selling one home to buy another can participate in the market and those who don’t are unlikely to find a way in until the bubble bursts.

[I am one of the lucky ones, no doubt, having bought Casa de BillSaysThis back in 1998. Even so I paid 20-50% more than some of my neighbors (all the homes in our little development are identical in size and layout) who purchased theirs just a few years earlier but I also know of several more recent sales at prices 50% more than mine. And as far as I’ve read and heard even those buyers would make a profit selling today.

I’ve also had a good mortgage broker. Each year for the last three years she called and asked if I wanted to refinance–no closing costs at all–at a substantially lower rate. Hard to say exactly but I figure she’s saved me over $400 a month, nothing to sneeze at. This year, though, I don’t expect to get a fourth call.]

If you bought your home in the last three years and didn’t lock in a 30 year fixed loan, what will you do when rates go up? The Fed raised rates again this week, six quarter point increase in a row, and the dollar is down enough that foreign investors will begin demanding higher returns to pay for this risk. They’ve been propping up our lack of savings to the tune of $2 billion a day and even the revered but recently politicized Alan Greenspan is saying that can’t last.

Just one more thing to put on your long list of worries.

Because actions speak louder than words: The Year of Living Indecently, ‘Pay to Play’ in New Jersey and Blaming the Messengers. Ack! Four more years of this and then what? Will the Dems still be wandering in some disconnected wilderness, unable to find the nose one their faces while the Republicans pound out the lies rat-a-tat-tat? I can’t recall where I saw it but I read an article a month or three ago which mentioned that there have been people in every age who believed they were living in the Last Days. Millenarianism, though the religious component is no longer required IMO. Anyway, there are days when I read about amazing people and wondrous things just around the bend, and then there are the days when I read all this shit and truly wonder why.

Damn, the weasel words are off and running: Participants Would Forfeit Part of Accounts’ Profits. Ownership my ass.

Jack and Bobby is a decent TV show, with an interesting hook, but the scene that just ended is a strong example of why it’s decent but not outstanding. Jack is at the doctor’s office and begins chatting with a cute girl his own age. Who turns out to go to his school. Who sat behind him for last year’s biology class. Who she is he has no clue. The dialog puts her at the opposite end of the social spectrum from him. The problem: she’s far too cute and smart for Jack not to have noticed her, meaning the producers hired TV ugly and shined it on.