3 Billion Years and Turn the Lights Out

It’s true. While the Universe may live on for billions of more years, our own beloved Milky Way will be destroyed in only 3,000,000,000 years by colliding with nearby galaxy Andromeda. Astrophysicists Lars Hernquist and John Dubinski ran Galactic Collision Simulations to see what it will look like. I can’t wait to see it with my own eyes. Okay, eyes may be stretching the point, I’m sure I’ll be using some advanced sensory technologies by then.

Yesterday’s movie: Meltdown/High Risk

Watched a very funny Jet Li movie last night, which is called Meltdown on the DVD but High Risk on The Official Jet Li Website. A criminal kills Li’s wife and some schoolchildren after collecting a huge ransom; two years later, they face off again when “The Doctor” (played by Kelvin Wong) and his crew target some antique jewels at the opening of their exhibition. By this time, Li is working as the bodyguard (and stunt double) for martial arts film star Frankie Lane. Lane is famous for doing his own stunts but Meltdown shows us that’s just PR BS, Lane was a world class fighter who’s long since degenerated into a sex-crazed party wimp. To my eyes, the Lane character mocks Jackie Chan but in the end the charater redeems himself by defeating the most dangerous of The Doctor’s crew. Lots of laughs, not the least of which come from the dubbed English voices (Li does not do his own), and good fighting scenes.

Self-publishing or working at Microsoft?

Adam Barr wrote a book about his tenure at Microsoft, 10 years as a programmer, sounds interested and I may someday get a chance to read it. He’s written other things too but I got a great laugh out of Dr. Selfpub, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Amazon.Com, his story of his experience writing and selling the book. Lucky dog, Barr sold his MS options when the stock was over $100/share early last year; I only wish I’d done the same with Sun. I read about Adam’s book and article in Victor Stone’s interesting article Image Problems; Stone also previously worked as a programmer at MS, although not with Barr.

Someone actually published this book! Amazing! Funny!

I’ve never heard of a publisher called Writers Showcase Press (sounds like a vanity press from its name) but they’ve published Hiroyuki Nishigaki’s opus How to Good-Bye Depression : If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? This is just too hilarious. Sample quote: “Besides shooting out a big blank from your buttock, you can feel as if your root chakra leaked sweet hot mucus.” His Amazon biography reads, in part: “A female inorganic ally gave the author the ability of space travel at age of 10 and 56. His first space travel was at the age of 56.”

Getting ready for XP

Microsoft, Court of Appeals ruling in hand, is preparing to release the next version of Windows, Windows XP, on Oct. 25. If you want to get a head start on what XP is all about (besides Hailstorm), check out Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows. Thurott is a writer for Windows 2000 Magazine and he’s put together a large quantity of XP technical and historical information, screen shots, tips and tricks, and more on this site.

The Future of War

Not surprisingly, specialists have been thinking on the changes in warfare constantly improving information technology, such as the ability to better coordinate and more precisely target various forces, can bring forth. Grouped under the rubric of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), it turns out that lots of people are thinking about it. The New Yorker has a very readable article focusing on RAND Corp. icon and current Pentagon Director of Net Assessment (whatever that means!) Andrew Marshall.

The trip to Italy

Part 1 of the trip journal, The Trip Over, has been posted. It was, to say the least, memorable all by itself. Thanks to CR for the transcription!

Yesterday’s movie: Cast Away

Something I didn’t realize until looking this movie up on IMDB bu the title is actually two words–Cast Away–not a single word. Oh, how arty and meaningful! Hanks is Hanks, a great actor, and Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Contact) did a good directing job but overall I just don’t get it. The two (since this movie is almost completely a one man show) spend two hours setting us up for a huge emotional ending and then leave us almost completely unresolved. Granted, the obvious ending would have been corny, smarmy, and completely Hollywood. But the path they chose is no better and I blame scriptwriter William Broyles, Jr. (Entrapment, Apollo 13) and Hanks, who together plotted this film Recommended for big Hanks fans only.

Today’s Movie: Kiss of the Dragon

Jet Li plays a Chinese cop assigned to Paris as liasion on a drug investigation but is set up to be the patsy by the French flic with whom Li has been sent to work in the thriller Kiss of the Dragon. Although I’d initially been put off by a nasty review in the San Jose Mercury News, we headed to the movies on a whim and decided to see if anyway. Glad we did, despite the bad press, because I thoroughly enjoyed it. Luc Besson, who wrote and produced this, also made the excellent films La Femme Nikita and The Professional.

Yesterday’s Book: Genesis Wave, Book Two

Star Trek novels continue to have a hold on me, as I await the fall debut of Enterprise. In the second half of the story, John Vornholt picks up where he left us. The Genesis Wave is blasting through the Alpha Quadrant and life on Earth is less than two days from the end. Picard, Data, and LaForge team up with Romulans, Klingons, and a finally awakened Carol Marcus, finally figure out the moss are the bad guys, and find the way to end the threat. (Of course they do, did you think this was the end of Star Trek and all the profitable publishing?) Oddly enough, the story seems to come to a complete resolution but the PsiPhi database lists a Book Three coming in January, but no description of what the story is.

Microsoft: Buy Belize and put the Feds in your rearview mirror

Columnist Robert Cringely, taking a break from recounting the wonderful tale of his DSL installation, looks at one possible outcome of the Appeals Court decision in the Microsoft antitrust case. This article is more interesting than most of the reporting in the last few weeks. The main focus is the “woeful state of the PC industry,” but he also looks at the possibility of MS moving outside the U.S. to escape jurisdiction:

“The best solution I think would be for Gates and Ballmer to simply buy a small country and declare Microsoft’s sovereignty. Belize would be nice. It’s a small tropical country in Latin America where the dominant language is English and the CIA 2000 Factbook says the Gross Domestic Product is $740 million. Microsoft could easily buy Belize ($2 billion is $400 per acre and would probably be enough) pay off the $380 million national debt, then throw up luxury condos for 20,000 programmers.”

BillSaysThis.com now searchable

Thanks to a reference in JD Lasica’s weblog, I’ve added the site search function from Master.com to BillSaysThis.com. Now when you want to see the last time I wrote about Star Trek or Sun Micro in this weblog, just enter your search term in the Find box and you’ll get a good list. I’m not quite sure how often, or if, Master.com updates my search index, so bear with me if the results are mildly out of date.

Yesterday’s fun: moving boxes and couches

Okay, so it wasn’t quite as much fun as, say, being slapped upside the head by an O.G.. I spent the morning helping a friend move a truckload of an aunt’s material possessions from another relative’s backyard to a Public Storage space. We were told the space was 6’x12′ and that would have been true if the space was rectangular, but it wasn’t. More heavy lifting than I’ve done in a long, long time but oddly enough I didn’t mind.

Yesterday’s Book: Safe House

This novel by Andrew Vachss, is part of the dozen novel Burke series (with a new one due in Sptember). Burke is an ultimate New York hard guy, never had a chance growing up in a series of foster homes and the like and graduating directly into a series of prison terms, but he and his “family” are always willing to work on the side of the righteous for a price. Author Vachss is a lawyer specializing in representation of children and education of the public on child abuse issues, so I’m not surprised that the central problem in Safe House revolves around women plagues by stalkers. Without getting preachy, he effectively works in the stories of several women (usually with children) facing stalkers. The dialogue is harsh and, except for each other, the characters care little for the safety or regard of others. I was taken enough with Burke and his world to plan on reading more.

Fans take on their own Star Trek series

SyFy Portal is reporting that a group of fans are producing their own Star Trek series, at least in the form of original scripts, graphics, and some audio and video. Star Trek: Renaissance begins in 2401, 25 years after the Federation-Dominion war ended, is set on a new Enterprise (1701-G), features a new crew, hopes to combine the best of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 with Gene Roddenberry’s original Trek vision. The episodes will be released weekly beginning on Sep. 8 (35 years to the day after the original series premiered) and the producers plan seven seasons with 26 episodes per season, just like the TV series. Note that this effort is completely independent of the offical Star Trek program at Paramount.

As an aside, here is a weird piece connecting Star Trek to a demonic Illuminati/Masonic conspiracy to take over the world.

Recent books: Sum of All Fears

There’s still no good official Clancy book site but Anders Ericson is kind enough to have supplied a decent one that includes this summary. Sum is a pretty gripping tale, not nearly as extensive with the background material as later works of his have gotten. Mainly, I re-read this now since I thought the Ben Affleck as Ryan movie version was coming out in August; research shows it as a 2002 movie and further that (a) Ryan, a deputy diretor of the CIA in the novel, is being played as just an analyst in the movie and (b) that the main villains are changed from Palestinean terrorists to neo-Nazis. Inside.com reported back in in March that Tom Clancy is so happy that Ben Affleck is the new Jack Ryan, that he’s working on a new batch of “young Jack Ryan” novels, just so Affleck can someday star in the movie versions.