May 2003 Archives
Today's As the Apple Turns scene features the PowerPC 970 CPU in a pile of feathers. I sure hope IBM's got something better than this for promoting the chip; Intel had some bunnies and the Blue Man Group—I don't think some feathers is going to cut it.
Jim Carrey's latest movie, Bruce Almighty, suffers from trying too hard. The first few times Carrey qua God uses his powers, it's pretty funny. After the two dozenth situation, it gets overdone. "Okay, okay, Mr. Screenwriter, we get it—Jim Carrey is God and he is omnipotent." I didn't expect too much from the movie and it wasn't a disappointment.
There were some absolutely hilarious parts in the movie. The scene where Bruce manipulates his anchor nemesis on camera had me laughing harder than I have since the scene in Greedy where Michael J. Fox whaled on Phil Hartman. I was having trouble breathing and tearing up. It's been a long time since that's happened. The other funny scene (that stands out at least) is when Bruce loses it live on TV when he's informed that Evan got the job he so coveted.
Overall, the movie was a bit hamfisted. Selfishness bad. Bruce selfish. Bruce bad. Bruce discover he bad. Bruce be unselfish. Unselfishness good. Bruce good. The only problem with that equation is that a) it's completely trite at this stage in America's philosophical development (it might have been interesting during the Depression...wait, didn't Frank Capra do his movies in the Depression era? I think Carrey et al might be pilfering Capra. ;-)) and b) it suffers from an utterly conventional view of selfishness, where it's shaft or be shafted. As Ayn Rand and others have shown, selfishness doesn't have to be that way. I myself prefer a view of selfishness closer to Aristotle's eudaimonia where you live your life with your own life as the standard by which you judge actions and choices and is the basis for the definition of virtues and values. Bruce is unselfish by this standard because he consistently pursues a self-destructive path.
On the other hand, the movie did deal somewhat with the issue of free will. In the movie's conception, God cannot alter or influence humanity's free will. Bend the laws of physics? No problem. Make someone fall in love with someone else? Whoa, no way! It's a little hard to swallow and I think, in the end, that it is more of a plot device than a well-thought out opinion.
Overall, it's good for some laughs. If you've caught the hype, see it at a matinee showing. Otherwise, wait for video release.
Arnold Kling has a great comment in his blog, The Bottom Line. The irony is smile-inducing and is the natural result of our twisted, asinine anti-trust laws.
The Salt Lake Tribune published today a tour of Pixar. "We have fun here at work and hopefully the fun will rub off into our work." Amen to that, sister! It sounds like a really great place to work.
The title is "Is the Seeking of Lost Skills/Arts a Hacking Analog?" and the discussion is fascinating. The article suggests that the temperament that furthers programming is the same that has an interest in so-called lost arts, which are really just doing things the old way and really getting your hands dirty. I've found myself more than once desiring to delve into lithography and pre-computing printery. I'm also fascinated by gardening and the control available there. I find them all quite analogous to programming. Unfortunately, I don't have time for printing or gardening (plus, I'm not a big fan of gardening in 115 heat here in Phoenix).
One underdone art/science that I'm diving into more is cooking. I'm a big fan of Alton Brown's Good Eats cooking show and I love his book. I've just picked up a couple of meta-cooking books from the library recommended by Alton Brown and am currently reading On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee.
I just added a page to hold some lists. The current lists available deal with recent movies I've seen, books I've read, and books I'm reading. Eventually, I'll add funny lists but I doubt that it'll be as impressive as McSweeney's or David Letterman's but I'll do what I can.
[NOTE: I'm sure that I've forgotten some books and movies, but I make no pretense at it being accurate historically.]
Last week, I was in Portland, Oregon for some training. I commented a couple of times on the training itself, but I never collected my thoughts on my experiences outside of the training.
As mentioned earlier, we wanted to go to the Japanese gardens and rose garden in Portland. Well, we went and took a boatload of pictures. I'd say that I'd post them, but I know myself way too well and I know that I probably won't for a long time (if at all).
The Japanese garden was simply amazing! It was 5 1/2 acres divided up into five separate areas. My two favorite areas were the strolling pond and natural gardens. The strolling pond garden features a beautiful Upper Pond that offers tranquility with stones leading directly to the water's edge. The Lower Pond is crossed via the Zig Zag Bridge that takes one out into the water mere inches off the surface. The natural garden, on the other hand, is a meandering path through several different gardens, all exemplifying the crafted nature of a Japanese garden.
The rose garden was disappointing because we came probably two or three weeks too early. There were buds aplenty, but few blooms. In my mind's eye, I can imagine what it must look like. I just wish there was some way I could go back in early June; I bought some post cards that show the gardens in full bloom, so I guess that'll have to do.
Aside from that, the only place I saw outside of my hotel room and a few restaurants (none particularly noteworthy) was Powell's, the world-famous bookstore. It occupies an entire city block and is made up a bunch of confusingly laid-out rooms on a number of levels. The books are a mixture of new and used tomes, but the prices don't reflect the usual discounts associated with used books. I bought some good books nonetheless and spent $100 (about $200 less than I could have, mind you). I didn't get a chance to visit the technical book store two blocks away, but that's probably a good thing.
Overall, Portland was an interesting city but suffered woefully from poor, narrow highways combined with slow-ass drivers. The lights are timed so that you can't actually make two in sequence. The downtown surrounding Powell's has relatively few stoplights, opting instead for stop signs. I liked that a lot. I didn't interact with a lot of Portlanders but they didn't strike me as unfriendly or slow (James Duncan Davidson found them really friendly).
I finally saw Run Silent, Run Deep—thanks TiVO—the last in my submarine flick click. I guess I still have to watch K-19: The Widowmaker for completeness's sake, but that can wait.
RSRD is a story about a submarine commander relieved of his command after losing his submarine. He's given a desk job and goes stir crazy, a normal condition for those used to the cramped quarters of a sub. An opportunity for another command arises and the captain, played by Clark Gable, seizes the chance to insert himself at its helm. Unfortunately, the XO had assumed that he would take charge of the sub and shows his resentment over the situation at every turn.
It gradually comes out that the captain plans to use the submarine and its crew to avenge his old boat by taking it right back to the straits where the previous one was sunk. He wants to attack the destroyer that he thinks sunk his ship. The still-XO, played by Burt Lancaster, catches on to his scheme and fears that the same end will befall his boat. After fomenting some discord among a crew embittered by a pitched battle that nearly sinks them, Lancaster deposes Gable and states his intention of returning to Pearl Harbor.
Events prove that Gable wasn't as unstable as Lancaster et al considered and he returns to fight the destroyer. Sinking it, he encounters the true menace of the straits: a Japanese submarine. The story unfolds as one would expect and the opposing submarine is sunk with the captain's help.
The special effects were probably advanced for its time but pale miserably in comparison to any more modern submarine movie. However, if the dive sequences and scale models were accurate to World War II realities, then it makes the achievements of the WWII submariners even more amazing because of the primitive nature of their tools. I think that that is the best part of the movie, the unintended realism of its cheesy effects.
In some ways, RSRD is formulaic and follows a predictable pattern. However, this was one of the first movies to examine life under the sea. Crimson Tide and The Caine Mutiny tread ground that it broke. The imminence of death and underwater entombment makes every move, every action of paramount importance. You get the sense that usurping the captain's authority is not undertaken lightly, for it too might have incalculable consequences.
This is definitely a movie to watch at least once. I don't think I'll be buying it, but I will watch it whenever it comes on television and I will definitely think about it when I watch its descendants.
I have an utter disdain for Microsoft PowerPoint, and I'm not alone there. Edward Tufte, the famous information design author, just came out with a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.
I'm debating about buying the book. I'm sure it's excellently done and compelling, but I just don't use PowerPoint if I can help it. And normally I can (so can most if they try hard enough). I've purchased Apple's Keynote but I have yet to even start it up. Why? Because when I give presentations, I give what's called verbal cues about my outline and where I'm at in the presentation. I don't need slides to give an effective speech.
Perhaps, though, I could use slides to give my presentations more visual appeal. I guess I'll have to look into Keynote a little deeper.
[UPDATE: Aaron Swartz posted The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint recast as a Powerpoint presentation. Ironic.]
[UPDATE 2: Peter Lindberg just posted his review of Tufte's booklet. He generally likes the tome, but thought that it should be about how to make better cognitive use of PowerPoint instead of deriding slides instead of paper handouts. Personally, I've found Tufte to be something of an antiquarian about such things.]
In my class we're working in VisualBasic. What a wretched language! It's not as bad as AppleScript, but it's verbose and seemingly without structure (or the kind of structure I'm used to in Java). Don't even get me started about the Studio versus jEdit! I'll grant, however, that it's a far sight better than VBScript.
Good postings on Peter Lindberg's blog today on becoming a better programmer. He suggests doing a mind map of what you regard as important; I've got to look into mind mapping—there's too many smart people using them for there to be nothing of value there.
Also, if you've got a couple of days to kill, read through his archives. He's been posting thoughtful, insightful entries for years now.
Today I went to Powell's Books, specifically the main City of Books location, and bought a lot of books:
- The Onion: Dispatches from the Tenth Circle
- Essentials of Cooking
- Serene Gardens: Creating Japanese Design and Detail in the Western Garden
- The A List: 100 Essential Films
- Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
- Oxford Lectures on Poetry by E. de Selincourt
- The Poetry of Robert Frost
- Hercule Poirot's Casebook
- The New James Beard
I know what you're thinking—"How the hell is he going to get all of those books home?"—and I've already thought of that: I have no freaking idea.
In other Portland news, I had sushi for lunch. I decided to try something new. Previously, the extent of my sushi experience was California rolls from Samurai Sam's so I ordered the combination platter. This smorgasbord of sushi had maybe eight different types of sushi including eel and octopus! The eel was surprisingly good, but I almost puked on the suction cups from the tentacle. Ugh, I'm getting a little choked up thinking about it—steamed cartilage is very, very chewy and gives you ample time to ponder exactly what it is that you're chewing.
[UPDATE: I'm now quite hooked on Jamba Juice. I only had 15 minutes this morning to make it from my hotel to the JJ store to Corillian. I drove so fast that I actually made it in 9 minutes. That's the depths of my newfound addiction.]
This site showed up in my log files. There are times like this that I'm glad I don't speak or read Dutch.
My trainer is in his own little world. He's completely abandoned any pretext of guided instruction and started writing code at the pace you would do during development. He's copying and pasting with wild abandon and flipping between source files looking for pieces of data while muttering inaudibly about what he's looking for. He's also completely forgotten that we may not have caught up to where he is.
The perils of pedagogy—or, more properly, the perils of non-pedagogy.
What is it with morning television shows? You know, the ones with a trio of anchors aflutter with the need to chit-chat publicly. I thought the Phoenix ones were bad enough, but this Portland crew is the worst I've seen.
This morning, they had a segment on a local lady who was arrested for not returning a video game rental for over six years—the usual newsworthy stuff you see on these programs. The main anchor—he did most of the talking in the show—responds to the voiceover comment of "Why did she go to jail?" with "You know it wasn't because she was sexy." At this point, I double-taked. I cannot believe that he said that. The other anchors also paused for a split-second then they started gyrating in their chairs and saying "Snap!" etc. Snarky, though completely unprofessional. My local talking heads would never have acted that way and they're pretty bubbly. In fact, that seems harsher than anything that my previous candidate for worst morning show, Good Day LA, would do.
This comment (and the general rowdiness that preceded and followed it) strikes me as mean-spirited and wholly unnecessary. Granted, these shows are mainly just filler but shouldn't they still rise above the common rudeness of everyday life?
I saw The Matrix Reloaded last night. This, for those of you just coming out of a coma, is the second part of the story of Neo (Keanu Reeves, luckily speaking only marginally more than in the first one) qua The One. All of the regulars from the first one reprise their roles for the sequel (and presumably will for the third part as well since they were filmed more or less concurrently). I didn't find it terribly difficult to follow, but that could stem from just having seen the previous one two weekends ago. It's hard to express my opinion of the movie because most of what I said in my earlier review still applies. When I think of The Matrix Reloaded two things immediately spring to mind, one a sound and the other a word: "Enh" and "tedious".
"Enh" is my catchall expression of indifference. It's usually accompanied by a shrugging of shoulders and cocking of head. I didn't find myself worried for Neo or Trinity or any of the other characters in the movie as they faced virtual peril. First, I know there's a sequel coming and that completely blocks any thought of Neo's imminent death. Second, all of these characters have morphed into superheros in a world ungoverned by any laws of physics. Trinity falling off a skyscraper and Neo's 500 miles away in the mountains? Oh, well, he'll just fly faster than the speed of light to catch her. Neo getting zapped by Agent Smith and about to be turned into one of his clones? Oh, well, he can push Smith's magic hand out of his body, unlike any other virtual person in The Matrix. These deus ex machina moments force the incongruities of the movie into your awareness. Rather than flowing seemless in a comprehensible world, the events are jerky and require some thought to understand what even transpired. Plus, they make you feel like the writer couldn't come up with a believable or valid transition and copped out. Finally, these characters aren't growing at all. They're the same people as in the first one. Their world is in imminent danger and they're facing an overwhelming force. What's their reaction? Calmness, ease, nothing. The closest we get is Neo's trouble sleeping. Oh yeah, Councillor, he's definitely human.
"Tedious" stems from the movie's interminable pacing. "Interminable" doesn't quite express my boredom last night. The tedium took form in two ways: action and dialogue. The action was way too lengthy and often unnecessary. I know that action brings in the dolts, but they could easily have shortened the scenes quite a bit. I remember actually yawning during the so-called Burly Brawl between Neo and the multiplicity of Smiths and the freeway scene, though well-crafted, should have ended before the blond Milli Vanillis came (by the way, who the hell were those ghost guys, why hadn't they confronted Neo before, and why do they have special powers that no one else does? Oh wait, they're special programs. I can just picture FreakyBlondDreadlockTwins.exe or The Architect coding in their TurnIntoGhosts() methods. Uh huh, deus ex machina.) The wire fighting is getting very old, the pinnacle was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it's all been downhill from there. If you've seen the first movie, you've seen the fight scenes in this movie—only the locales and weapons have changed.
The dialogue suffers from the same problems as in the original. It's ponderous, stilted, and pretentious. It sounds deep at first blush, but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I'd give examples but I can't remember any of the lengthy speeches offhand. I do recall thinking that Morpheus' speech at the Zion rave—where were the glow sticks?—was mercifully short though not terribly inspiring.
There were also countless issues that I found myself pondering while watching the movie, but I won't go into those details because they come from plot hole and we're supposed to suspend disbelief. Okay, one gaping one: if these damn machines are smart enough to craft sentient sentinels, burrowing machines that can reach the center of the earth, and the most complex virtual reality ever imagined (including, tellingly, power plants to supply the city with electricity and that need to be taken out of commission in order to get to the source), why the hell can't they create their own electrical generating plants that would surely create more electricity than billions of humans and the virtual reality "needed" to keep them alive? One commentator on the Web suggested that they (the machines) should have used cows instead of humans since grassland is a much easier virtual reality to construct. Too true!
[UPDATE: There have been some good reviews out there on the Web: check out Jason Kottke's brief review and the tons of comments it generated to see a broad selection. From there, I particularly liked this review and this one.]
[UPDATE 2: One other gripe: what is with the clothes/rags and environs in Zion? These people burrow beneath the earth and construct space ships, defense systems, and life support machines but they can't make decent clothes or design some cleaning machines? Strains belief.]
[UPDATE 3: I'm still not sure if I think Carrie-Anne Moss aka Trinity is pretty or not. She looks really good in her leather bodysuits, but the close-ups emphasize that her hair is that weird length between short-cute and short-weird. I definitely think she looked prettier in Chocolat and Memento.]
Just when I get excited about Java again, James Duncan Davidson rekindles my interest in Objective-C.
I think I'm just going to stick with Java and move to Objective-C once I've got my bearings right. Can't hurt, right?
I'm at Corillian for some training (as I've mentioned before) and this place seems like a typical dot-com environment, except that it's survived the dot-com crash barely. There's interesting furniture aplenty, free beverage station, pool tables, foosball tables, ping-pong tables, and fancy everything.
I am most intrigued by some of the seating options. There's a long, cylindrical vinyl stool that looks like it wouldn't be comfortable but really is. My favorite are these stools that look like old-style tall ashtrays or largish dumbbells standing vertically. The seat has minimal padding and the base is bevelled in such a way that it maintains stability with about 30° of movement each way from the perpendicular. Sitting on it, your legs basically form the seat's other supports and it is really comfortable. I'm sure it's insanely expensive, so it won't be making an appearance at the physical home of the BBIC, aka the Brown Manor.
It provides an interesting contrast to both my current employer and the Corillian I visited two years ago.
I think that tomorrow or Tuesday I will go see The Matrix Reloaded. I've seen enough crap on TV and read enough reviews on the Web to want to see what all the fuss is about. I didn't like the first one, but I'm all about benefit of the doubt. Naturally, seeing this one will force me to see the next one—stupid Wachowski brothers.
There's a good article on Java performance myths at developerWorks. Slashdot provides some interesting context.
My favorite is myth #3 that immutable objects are performance killers. I was just having a discussion with a developer from our online banking system vendor and he mentioned that some of the code in our existing implementation uses straight-out string objects instead of string buffers. I realize that VB and VBScript is a little different from Java, especially since very little of the language seems to be optimized and string concatenation does seem expensive.
It's always worth emphasizing design before performance. I'll admit that I'm guilty of it on occasion as well, but articles like this chip away at that optimization part of my brain. Some day I hope to not even think about performance until 1.0b!
I'm currently writing this while flying high (35,000 feet) over Nevada en route to Portland, Oregon for some training. I'm also listening to Superchic[k] on my iPod.
I'm busily annotating my recommended daily links, something I had never really planned on doing because it seemed like such a waste of time for little return. However, there's something different about flying: it feels like doing that is more productive than just sitting here listening to my AACs. I don't know how many I'll get through since this is only a three-hour flight—and I'm sucking down complimentary OJ like crazy so I anticipate that some of that three hours will be in the first-class john.
The guys from DirecTV—actually Ironwood Communications (no link), a subcontractor—are here and they're getting me hooked up. The TiVO unit looks breathtaking: resplendent in shiny, silvery goodness with more hookups on its back than the humans in The Matrix. The installers are really nice—complimented me on my house's smell—and they're giving me an upgraded dish that can output four different signals and is ready for HDTV should I ever decide to upgrade my TV.
Regrettably, I'm going to be out of town next week and I have to work later tonight for a SAN outage, so I'm going to have limited TiVO time until then. If any of you readers has any special features or tricks that I should know about (or links to the same), I'd really appreciate it if you'd send them to me.
If there is a hell—and I don't think there is—then I think an especially putrid level should be reserved for those moronic cow-orkers who use corporate mail systems to generate unsolicited commercial email aka spam. What sort of mentality thinks that everyone cares to read their drivel? At home, I can get rid of the spam but at work it's not often obvious when something is spam since people craft sucky subjects.
In the last week, I've had some idiot asking 10 departments if anyone plays Halo, about five scalping tickets to Diamondbacks games, and one this morning—IN ALL CAPS, NATCH—soliciting a home for a "SWEET AND WONDERFUL COCKER SPANIEL" of indeterminate gender ("HE/SHE IS ...").
I've set up Outlook rules to capture most of the common variations (tickets, ticket, Diamondbacks, Cardinals—like we get any of those, dog, dogs, cats, cat), but the morons keep changing their wording. Just like their Internet brethren.
I just made a good comment about a post in the Signal vs. Noise blog. I'd repost it here, but you should really see in its original context.
I've spent the last day and a half in a series of requirements-gathering meetings with our online banking vendor. Normally this would be the part where I express my loathing of meetings. But I can't help it, I'm really excited about this project to redesign our online banking system after four years of near-stagnation.
First, the project itself excites me because the original was designed before our department existed or I had any responsibility for its maintenance. That means that it's mostly been a royal pain in the ass for me and my co-worker. There are all sorts of design decisions that we wish they had made differently and the code is mostly of the fettucine variety—a little thicker and more bloated than spaghetti. We can make some significant usability improvements and make the whole user experience much, much better. That is, if we don't screw up the opportunity (which we have done in the past).
Second, the project team from our vendor has espoused some views that are philosophically consonant with my beliefs about the software development process. Namely, they have advocated the use of CVS instead of VSS and test-driven development. We have too long done without robust source control and adequate testing. Lead by our vendor, we can perhaps get our development process started on the right foot and taken to greater heights over time.
Finally, we may be redoing our site in .NET, specifically ASP.NET! I know, I know: it's Microsoft and it's Microsoft at their copying best. However, I have seen the future and I want to be at the forefront of it, rather than the caboose. After nearly nine years at my current employer, I suspect that I'm not going anywhere soon, but it never hurts to have a backup plan or to maintain your marketability. The decision is still up to my manager and he's a little risk-averse in this situation, but I'm going to work on him. We're going to have to migrate to it eventually, so we might as well do it now.
I just got done watching Crazy/Beautiful and I am really impressed. I think Kirsten Dunst is an underrated actress who hopefully has a very long career ahead of her. She is convincing as both a spoiled daughter of a Congressman living self-destructively and as a troubled teenager coming to grips with her feelings.
On the one hand, it's a typical teen flick about the seeming life-altering impact of being in love at that age. Nicole (Dunst) falls in love with Carlos (Jay Hernandez), a kid bused in from a poorer neighborhood with ambitions of making something of himself. A rich, white girl falling in love with a poor, Latino boy from the wrong side of the tracks has certainly been done to death.
What was different about this movie was the realism of the portrayal. The gritty, raw performance of Nicole's descent struck a chord with me. I got involved with her character; I believed that she was really going through the events in the story. When she finally hit rock bottom and realized the consequences of the path she was travelling, I actually cared. I finished the movie genuinely happy that she was going to be alright.
In sum, I consider this a really good movie that is worthy of rental and purchase. I would rent it just to make sure that it doesn't bother you and then purchase it once you discover what a good movie it is.
I know that today is the release of The Matrix Reloaded and that many people really, really like it, but I watched The Matrix this weekend and I didn't care for it. Okay, ignore for a moment that I went four years without seeing the geek's movie and that I am expressing a controversial opinion.
My dislike of the movie stems mainly from its flaccid rehashing of an age-old philosophical paradox: how do we know that we're not just dreaming and that reality isn't really like this dream. It's a tired question posed in every PHI101 class in the world, but the principle that it ignores—the primacy of existence—is so compellingly self-evident that I am repulsed by anything that posits the contrary.
The other major issue I have with the movie is the notion of machines taking over. This is yet another tired cliché that should be stamped out. It's been done so many times that it's become trite. I'll concede that the whole organic control of the human minds is an interesting take, but the banality remains. Advances in AI notwithstanding, I can't believe that machines will ever acquire the sentience and cleverness to overwhelm humanity. What's more, if machines could acquire intelligence—and I'm not conceding that possibility—why must they oppress man? I would think it more likely that they would assert their rights and that court cases would decide that they were citizens or something. That's an original movie idea!
Finally, Keanu Reeves is on my short list of actors I can't stand. Others include Nicholas Cage, Brad Pitt, Susan Sarandon, Kevin Spacey, and John Travolta. I liked Speed in spite of him. Mercifully, he has few lines in this movie but he just doesn't exude action hero to me (or sophisticated computer hacker, for that matter). Laurence Fishburne, from this movie alone, is teetering on the brink of joining his co-star and would be there were it not for Boyz 'N the Hood.
On a sidenote, there was one line in the movie that infuriated me entirely: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure." The only good thing about it was the voice of Agent Smith; it had a cadence and tone that was haunting.
I'm in currently in the depths of installer hell. On my second attempt to get DirecTV installed so that I can have TiVO—ahhghhahhgggh, TiVO—and end the Dish Network nightmare, the guy shows up way later than expected. Last time, he showed up way earlier than expected.
I've now got to go to work for an important meeting and next week is the business trip. When will I ever get that TiVO-satisfaction I crave?
I just recently encountered a comic strip produced during the height of the dot-com boom, The VC. It's pretty crudely drawn, but spot on in its humor. I especially like the ones about VC control, dumb consultants, herd mentality, Jerry Maguire moments, vacuous VCs, and funding fads. Good stuff.
Today, my co-worker and I received our finalized itinerary for our impending trip to Portland (Hillsboro actually) for some training. I haven't really mentioned it because, though we knew we were going last month—maybe even earlier—we didn't have any details. In fact, the date flip-flopped around a bit.
We're going to our online banking product vendor for some training on the latest version of their flagship product, Voyager. Yes, we bought it awhile ago, but we're just now getting ready to start development. It's going to be a huge project and I ask for your forgiveness in advance if blogging gets spotty.
The good news is that we're flying to Portland via America West in first class. Oh yeah! Bill Brown is living large on the company dime! What's more, I called the hotel where we'll be staying and they've got high-speed Internet access in every room; I'll be bringing my trusty sidekick Thor along and plan to make use of the time to get the BBIC cleaned up a bit.
I also plan to see the Portland Rose Gardens and Japanese Garden, taking pictures aplenty. No one can accuse me of not stopping to smell the roses!
I'm getting my TiVO installed tomorrow (hopefully) and I've already got the first program to record lined up:
Late Night with Conan O'Brien in Clay
That Conan, always pushing the envelope of broadcasting!
Mmm, tasty!
Below is a picture of the latest addition to my cubicle; I think we're going to have a lot of good times together:
In case you can't quite make it out, it's a Rival rice cooker and it's currently steaming my lunch.
I cannot believe my eyes. In fact, my retinas are only now adjusting to the non-suckage as I close the site. At first, I thought it was one of those well-conceived examples of what not to do ever. Unfortunately, this North Dakota bank is near its centennial and protects $265 million in assets. It is, without a doubt, the worst looking site I've ever seen.
I could rattle off a laundry list of bad design decisions, horrible usability, gaffes, and mistakes but I think it's putridness is self-evident. I don't normally demean site designs because I know that it's hard work and often compromises and concessions must be made, but this is beyond the pale.
With that introduction, I present you the aptly-titled WOWBanking site—I guess they decided against JawDroppinglyBadBanking—and apologize for any retinal damage it might inflict on you.
[One sidenote: don't miss the Kids Zone, which is exactly what I thought the main site was when I first saw the link.]
Last night, Sandi and I ate at a small French restaurant in Cave Creek called Le Sans-Souci. The restaurant was cute and the ambience was well-crafted. Our waiter spoke well-accented French and I, a marginal French speaker, believed him to be of French origin—hopefully not Québécois. After perusing the menu and considering the frog's legs, we opted to have the petit filet mignon dinners as a sort of test of the restaurant's mettle. We've had filet mignon at many restaurants and it's a pretty good gauge of quality.
The dinners are served in courses at prix fixe, so we started out with the soup. Sandi had clam chowder and I had the Vichyssoise. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the chilled potato and leek soup, which I had previously had at a long-gone French buffet downtown and on our cruise to Mexico. Next were the salads: the greens were fresh and the dressings homemade.
The entrées were plated quite elegantly. The filets mignons had melted butter on the top with steamed asparagus, steamed cauliflower, and scallopped potatoes on the side. The chef steamed the vegetables exquisitely, rendering them firm enough for dipping in the Béarnaise sauce—which was like a lemony Hollandaise—but supple enough for crushing against the palette. The potatoes had an excellent combination of seasoning that made it delicious beyond expectations. Finally, the filets (I can pluralize it because I finished off Sandi's portion) were tender and juicy. There was nothing particularly exceptional about them, but they were of a quality consonant with the filet's cachet and any other filet I've experienced.
The final course was, of course, the dessert. A tray was rolled over with the available desserts. It was a veritable smorgasbord of glutenous delights. Sandi opted for the cheesecake and I inquired about flour-free items. The attentive and helpful garçon pondered the question and came back with something other than vanilla ice cream: the crème caramel. Joy! The caramel sauce was crisp and the flan was spongy. I quickly scarfed it down and got a rumbling in my stomach—an indication of gluten intake.
Reviewing the meal in my head, I narrowed the possibilities down to the Béarnaise sauce. Why didn't I remember the usefulness of flour as a thickener for sauces! Cursing my oversight, I figured that I might as well pile on the abdominal distress by sampling Sandi's cheesecake, which looked heavenly. I scooped up a good piece of it and mashed the most delicious cheesecake I have ever had between my teeth. An overflow of sensations swept through my taste buds from this homemade delectation. I suffered later for the extra gluten, but it was worth it. Oh was it worth it!
So, Le Sans-Souci definitely merits a return visit. It was a little pricey (meal cost with generous tip: $72), but the meal was memorable and exquisitely prepared.
[UPDATE (10/2/04): We went there a second time tonight and my waiter suggested that the crème caramel had a smidgen of flour in it. I guess that case is solved.]
Google, the search engine of choice at the BBIC, is set to offer a blog tab on its main search page. The Register has more details.
I think that this is a very good move. I, too, am sick of the importance garnered by blogs in the search results—even though I am a recipient of expedited indexing. It will help people, like myself, who sometimes just want to search blogs and sometimes not blogs. It also gets Google out of the bind it's gotten in by the skewing of results by concerted blog efforts.
[UPDATE: Evan Williams, Blogger founder and current Google employee, dismissed Orlowski's musings recently.]
[UPDATE 2: Eric Sink has an open letter to Google on this subject, summed up thusly: "As much as possible, we want you to show us the web without affecting it, and index the web without organizing it." Good stuff!]
I'm a prankster by nature. One of the most fun pranks is making a sign and hanging it somewhere, waiting for the fun to occur. In general, I've had to use Word and AppleWorks to execute my devious schemes.
St. Claire's is a sign manufacturer that has an awesome tool for making them online: SignBuilder. The possibilities are limitless and the output is quality PDF.
Enjoy!
It's time to select a smattering of the weirdest search requests I've received:
- can dustin hoffman play the piano: Amazingly, I'm the tenth result for this search because of a blog entry about the Grammys. Unfortunately, I don't think the searcher got the info he or she was looking for.
- chief executive when william howard taft was president: umm, maybe William Howard Taft?
- is the American Robin of economic importance to man?: I see someone is looking for an unusual business opportunity. Friend, I suggest you look into tiny classified ads instead because I don't think the American Robin is of any economic importance to man.
- truth about AIDS monkey god: This one has got me completely baffled. I'm glad I show up after result 40 in this search, but I'm a little concerned that this searcher thought I was worth clicking on. If you're hear about your monkey god and you want to know the truth about AIDS, please keep moving. It's not here.
- live pictures of a doctor doing a pap test: This one sickens me all over again. I'm glad that I had absolutely nothing to offer this man or woman.
- height colledge english language text: I'm #1! Woohoo! What the hell is this searcher looking for?!
This is, as I said, but a smattering of the searches through which people find this site. If you've come here via some funny search, welcome! I really hope you find what you're looking for. If you didn't, please feel free to email me and I'll see what I can do.
Regular readers of this blog (Hey Steve and Google!) know that I am truly a Google Friend and avidly follow any news of my favorite search engine.
Happily, I stumbled across an interview with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt [parts two, three, and four]. I'll admit that I was very skeptical back when Schmidt was hired. Coming from Novell, he seemed like the very last person to lead a rag-tag bunch of computer scientists at the Googleplex. He comes across very well in the interview and seems to really understand his and Google's place in the wider Web.
In light of my earlier entry, I think the thing that most excited me was the reminder that the job-creation engine has moved into the small business market and that the "barrier to entry for a small business entrepreneur has dropped by an order of magnitude or more."
In support of its new iTunes Music Store, Apple is, of course, preparing some ads for television. They're very Switch-like and feature various people singing their favorite songs.
Jacob really disturbs me. I'm not sure if it's the fact that he's singing Eminem's "Lose Yourself" or his voice. Whatever it is, my face tightens every time I watch it.
There's no Ellen Feiss in this batch and the closest for comic relief is Nic singing Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back".
I've decided that I want to be wealthy. I want to have enough money to live virtually debt-free, buy cool things without thinking about them, support my growing family, and secure my children's education and our retirement. In short, I want to be financially independent. So I've got the why and I just need the how. I know that retail isn't the answer—well, it's not my answer at least.
As I see it, there are only a few easy, ethical ways to wealth that don't rely on natural talents. Oh, there's definitely more than that but I'm looking for things that are within my sphere of interest and don't require years of re-education and re-training. My goal is to get wealthy doing something I love that isn't going to require a paradigm shift. I'm not afraid of a challenge or hard work, but I'm also too old to completely re-orient my life. Once I become wealthy, then a lot of possibilities for such re-orientation open up because I won't have to worry about making a living at the same time. I'm just tired of busting my butt (or wasting my time) doing other work for other people for their benefit. As far as I'm concerned, it's high time that the revenue Bill Brown generates goes back into the pocket of Bill Brown.
Looking around the world, it's clear that there are plenty of really rich people out there. If you want to get rich, look at what other people are doing to get rich. You can then discount the people who are unique phenomena, whose experience isn't readily repeatable. I don't think it's possible for me to break into car manufacturing, for example, or create the equivalent of Wal-Mart, for another.
My first thought is software, naturally. It's what I know and it's what I do. There are tons of opportunities for completely new products and even more for innovations on existing products and markets. I am learning Java apace and I've already got enough other knowledge to get something started. By fruitful cooperation with others, I think I could secure what skills I don't have. The difficulty is coming up with an idea that is within my domain of knowledge so that I don't have to spend an inordinate amount of time filling my brain with the vital minutiae of a new industry. Unfortunately, my entire domain of professional knowledge spans financial services and academia, specifically history. The former is quite lucrative though heavily saturated and the latter is virtually unsaturated but unremunerative. I've got some ideas, but I'm not sure that they're the best and most viable options available.
My next thought is screenwriting and/or movie production. I am thankful to Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Partners for the latter notion. I have always considered screenwriting an option because of my writing interest, but her blog entries settled my mind about independent films. It had honestly never occurred to me that a low-budget film might be a wealth-building tool. I've got one screenwriting idea, but it could only be effectively done on a substantial budget by a major studio. I've got zero film ideas, but I think that's because I only first considered the notion this morning. Of the two, I know that screenwriting is the most sensible and least risky unless you've created My Big Fat Greek Wedding or The Blair Witch Project—and I don't have enough confidence in my fiction-writing ability to believe that I could come up with either or those out of the gate.
Finally, I'm considering writing in general. It's very difficult to wrap my head around this one because it seems lucrative and not lucrative at the same time. On the one hand, J.K. Rowling is richer than the Queen of England. On the other hand, how many famous authors have died penniless? I wouldn't do fiction at first since it's not really my field. I hesitate to even ponder doing computer books because the one language I know best already has a bunch of books of every conceivable stripe written about it. I could write articles, I suppose, but I seriously doubt that those represent a path to riches. I could write history, but how many history books have you purchased in the last year? Still, there are many wealthy writers who also have the satisfaction of having written books—a value to which I've always aspired.
For maximum wealth creation, I'd probably like to do a combination of the above. It would also diversify my wealth portfolio so that a faltering market for software would be subsidized by movie or book royalties. Okay, I'm dreaming a little bit here but you never know what you can do till you try. I've just got to sit down and brainstorm ideas along the aforementioned three lines.
Reading through the comments on Slashdot about Apple's press release announcing 1 million downloads from iTunes Music Store, I came across one entitled "iTunes Man", a parody of "Piano Man" by Billy Joel. It's witty and absolutely hilarious!
[UPDATED: On a related note, TidBits—a long-running Mac 'zine—has a thoughtful and excellent article on the iTunes Music Store's present and future.]
Excellent article on entrepreneurship from Eric Sink.
I really like the idea that competition isn't an automatic barrier to entry. That's easy to remember from an economic standpoint, but very difficult to believe. When you see competition—no matter how inept—it's hard to visualize how you're going to bring something new to the table that the competition won't just immediately copy.
Arnold Kling makes a similar point in Under the Radar about how upstarts usually lack the encumbrances of existing codebases and processes of an established competitor. His point is that these upstarts—flying under the radar—can do a better job at serving the customers and can often unseat the competition at its own well-established game. It's a very good book, by the way, though it could have been half as long if he had trimmed out the repetition of his war stories.
I especially like Sink's formulation that "The existence of a competitor indicates the existence of paying customers."
[He also has another neat article on feature creep.]
[UPDATE: Tech Central Station also has another good article on entrepreneurship out that I forgot to link to earlier in the month.]
I just found a whopper of a Safari bug that reveals your Keychain password in the address bar in plaintext. I don't know if that makes it programmatically accessible, but I still don't see why it would be there at all! I'm sending a bug report to the Apple crew. I would show you the screen shot I sent them, except that that would require compromising my entire system security. Thank you, but no.
This madness has got to stop. It was one thing to rename Squaw Peak, but to name the Squaw Peak Parkway the Lori M. Piestewa Freeway is wrong-headed. As I said before, it should be named the Triple-P—Piestewa Peak Parkway—because the highway is named for the mountain it wraps around.
Piestewa Peak is annoying, but I guess it's got a lot of political currency. To honor a woman dead less than a month (maybe two) whose only accomplishment is being the first Indian woman killed in combat is ludicrous. The mountain and the freeway should have been renamed to honor Barry Goldwater, a true hero who accomplished so much for Arizona over his entire lifetime. Or even Jack Swilling, the Confederate entrepreneur whose Swilling Irrigation Company started the settlement of the Salt River Valley. You certainly don't see much around Phoenix honoring him.
Of course, we shouldn't expect much from a town that gives all city workers a paid day off to honor Cesar Chavez, but not for Columbus.
The most recent issue of eWeek features an analysis/paean to IBM's Power4 chip. The quote that lept off the page and floored me was the following:
The two CPU cores on a single Power4 chip share more than 100GB per second of bandwidth to their shared L2 cache and more than 55GB per second to memory. Personally, I overflow on numbers that big; perhaps, like me, you'll find it easier to think of 55GB as 26 hours of DVD video—a stupefying amount of data. And the IBM eServer p655 series, shipped late last year, can hold four- and eight-processor blocks that stack up to 128 Power4 processors per frame.
Okay, so the Power4 chip is mighty in its power and those new p655 servers must be the bomb. What's that got to do with me or you? Well, there are longstanding (and credible) rumors that Apple is going to go with the PowerPC 970—a Power4-derived CPU—as its G5-series processor. If that happens, you can finally expect some serious firepower under the hood of your Mac.
I agree completely with Robert's sentiments about iPod v2.0. If this is a temporary oversight, then I can live with that.
What I fear is that we're seeing a genuine branch that won't ever get merged—kind of like 9.2.1 and 10.2.5. We'll see iPod software versions 2.1 and 1.4, the latter permanently shut out of alarm clockiness and on-the-go playlistery.
Makes you kind of want to go Discount Tire on their ass—except that that would hurt an innocent iPod.
I'm too tired to blog all of the buzz about the new iTunes Music Store, but there's a ton out there.
This entry is to focus on one particular comment and one particular blog of note: Bill Palmer and his comment on the Third Coming of Jobs. I don't know how that guy writes so much every day and keeps such an excellent focus in each entry. I just wish he had an RSS feed so I could use NetNewsWire to follow along better.
In honor of my friend Stephanie's taking home of her bunny, here's what happens when rabbits meet cables. <via boingboing>
I never weighed in on the whole Squaw Peak controversy as it was unfolding because I didn't have the time to prepare a thoughtful, well-reasoned response.
I still don't have time, so don't expect anything now. I just want to go on record as saying that the renaming of the Squaw Peak Parkway as the Piestewa Peak Parkway will never capture the public mind and that I propose that we call it the Triple-P for convenience—spread the word. If it catches on, you read it here first.
In related news, I just noticed that the new SR-51–L101 interchange completion date has been moved up to June 2003. My quality of life will improve significantly with this glorious event.
