<p> From <a href="http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/28/transformers-dark-of-the-moon-review/">a review</a> of <em>Transformers: Whatever the Subtitle Is</em> on <a href="http://www.bleedingcool.com/">Bleeding Cool</a></p> <blockquote> <p>The main action of the film revolves around the good guys slowly coming to understand the monstrous improbability of the villains&#39; plan while Bay smashes all his action figures together and makes the smaller ones say annoying Jar Jar Binks stuff.</p> </blockquote> <p> Heh.</p>

<p> So, I posted about my feeling that <a href="2011/05/13/the-pop-music-of-my-youth-isnt-getting-rehashed">pop music today was a retread of stuff that wasn&#39;t even the best there was the first time around</a>. I got some pushback on that, to the effect that I, being over 40, would have to be an exceptional specimen to appreciate music that wasn&#39;t of my youth, and of course I thought things might sound like other stuff, but that was just a natural consequence of having listened the first time around (tell me if you think I&#39;m mischaracterizing your argument, Chet).</p>

<p> OK, so that&#39;s not actually the whole story.</p> <p> In fact, I <strong>love</strong> the magazine <em>Cook&#39;s Illustrated</em>. I learn all sorts of stuff, they have great recipes, good reviews–on all technical fronts, it&#39;s a winner.</p> <p> But there are few organizations that make me regret being their customer as much as <em>Cook&#39;s Illustrated</em> does. In fact, I can&#39;t think of any. Charitable solicitation annoys me, but I&#39;m not their customer, so it&#39;s sort of a different thing.</p>

<p> Well, I guess it&#39;s technically not finishing it, since there&#39;s now an 8th book on the way, scheduled for next year. And I may well read that when it comes out–checked out of the library, of course–but the seven books I read were obviously the main story.</p> <p> I appreciate the first four books a fair amount. In part, I suppose, because they were the four that still felt…/lean/. The first two because I don&#39;t think he&#39;d yet gotten into the habit of writing long books. The third book starts to get a little piggy, but as I was still getting immersed in what&#39;s going on, I didn&#39;t find it as noticeable. By the time I hit <em>Wizard and Glass</em>, the text is perhaps a little more Stephen King-y (which is not necessarily a negative, in my view, but it&#39;s a marked contrast to the first two books)–though I think even <em>Wizard and Glass</em> may have been reined in by the fact that he was, in many ways, working in a genre that was not his own.</p>

<p> I guess you could say this was my &#34;rebound book&#34; after the heavy commitment of King&#39;s <em>Dark Tower</em> books. As it is a novella, I suppose it really just constitutes a fling, which seems about right.</p> <p> John Scalzi goes all omniscient-third-person-+which is a departure from the &#34;Old Man&#39;s War&#34; series, which is basically everything of his that I&#39;ve read-+ on this tale of betrayal. It&#39;s a fun, fairly light read. You can infer all sorts of Deep Thought About Religion if you so choose, but I think that might be going a little far.</p>

<p> It had slipped my mind that last weekend while Anne was out of town, as part of my Festival of Dubious Movies, I also watched <em>Kick-Ass</em>.</p> <p> In its comic-book form, this was the title that finally made me realize that I mostly don&#39;t like Mark Millar&#39;s writing. It&#39;s not sarcasm-over-a-layer-of-caring like Warren Ellis (<em>Transmetropolitan</em>). It&#39;s not dark and compelling like Frank Miller in his heyday (<em>Elektra: Assassin</em>, <em>The Dark Knight Returns</em>). It&#39;s not dense like Alan Moore (<em>The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</em>), or deep and beautiful like Neil Gaiman (<em>Sandman</em>). It&#39;s not convoluted and mystical and self-referential like Grant Morrison (<em>The Invisibles</em>, <em>Doom Patrol</em>). It&#39;s not clever (even if it never quite delivers) like Brian K. Vaughan (<em>Y: The Last Man</em>, <em>Ex Machina</em>). It&#39;s really just middle-of-the-road superhero comic stuff–the sort of thing that Geoff Johns (<em>Green Lantern</em>) or Brian Bendis (<em>Avengers</em>) do, and do pretty well–but with a big old helping of <strong>super-violence</strong>.</p>

<p> Insane Clown Posse would be just another act that I didn&#39;t care for–in a world littered with them–except for the Gathering of the Juggalos. Just watch the apparently legitimate &#34;informercial&#34; for the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos:</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5gKE67L97SA?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> (Incidentally, life must be rough for Vanilla Ice).</p>

<p> the fool who makes the bad movies, or the fool who watches them?</p> <p> While Anne was gone, I spent my Saturday afternoon doing the thing I always seem to do while she&#39;s away: watching bad movies. And boy were some of them bad.</p> <p> First up, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1220634/"><em>Resident Evil: Afterlife</em></a>. Remember: if the Director is married to the Lead Actress, the movie is going to be horrible. Yeah, sure, you can come up with a couple of possible exceptions–<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107616/"><em>Much Ado About Nothing</em></a>, perhaps (though it still had Keanu Reeves in it), maybe others–but in general, you&#39;re in for bad news. In fact, this fourth installment in the already-three-movies-too-many <em>Resident Evil</em> franchise amazes me in that it even got made. That there&#39;s a fifth on the way leads me to despair.</p>

<figure> <img src="/espresso.jpg" alt="/espresso.jpg" title="/espresso.jpg" /><figcaption> Straight espresso </figcaption> </figure> <p> Then you have to rough it.</p>

<p> Like the release of a new version of Windows, or a movie that&#39;s undergoing Yet Another Rewrite, <a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/23/doomsday-leader-flabbergasted-that-the-end-didnt-arrive/?hpt=C2">the end of the world has been pushed back 5 months</a> to October 21st. At least I&#39;ll make it to another prime.</p> <p> (Truly, I feel sorry for these people. Who could pine for the end of the world? What does it even help to know when it might come?)</p>

<p> Ars Technica has an article about a <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech.ars">dentist&#39;s office requring you sign over the copyright of any statements you make about them online</a> before you may receive treatment. There is apparently a company that is dedicated to making this a regular feature of all of our health-care encounters.</p> <p> Ars&#39; dissection of why the contract cannot fulfill it&#39;s stated purpose is spot on: the dentist&#39;s office says the contract is supposed to prevent &#34;competitors and disgruntled employees&#34; from posting fraudulent reviews–but competitors certainly will not have signed the contract, so how could it govern them? Disgruntled employees might well have signed such a contract, but given the semi-anonymous nature of posting information to the web in this day and age, how could the office make the determination that a particular poster was a former employee in order to request that the statements be removed?</p>

<p> One of the writers on <a href="http://tor.com">tor.com</a> elected to take on Stephen King&#39;s <em>The Dark Tower</em> series. The significant difference is that where most of the posters on Tor are doing &#34;re-reads&#34;–guiding others through the books–this is a read-along, so you get to watch as someone else encounters the book for the first time.</p> <p> Of course, I could do that just fine by myself–I&#39;d never read it, though I remember Patrick talking about it when the first volume was finally widely-released in a trade paperback format in &#39;88–so I figured what the hell, I&#39;d follow along. Unlike my recent plunge into Patrick O&#39;Brian&#39;s Aubrey-Maturin books, though, I decided I would take advantage of my local library. I don&#39;t necessarily see these as being evergreen re-reads.</p>

<p> Nobody does it quite as well as Pixar. The Minions amused me, though.</p>

<blockquote> <p>…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don&#39;t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.</p>

<p> The original was the first thing I ever recorded on our TiVO, something on the close order of 9 or 10 years ago (I probably just jinxed my HDs, and should expect them to fall over any moment, I fear).</p> <p> Still, I should have known better. Jennifer Connelly looked good and tried hard, but everything else in that movie sucked.</p>

<p> I caught a chunk of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373926/">this movie</a> while channel surfing a week or two ago–from about 15 minutes in for about 20 minutes–that seemed pretty decent, so I TiVO&#39;d it.</p> <p> I am not all that discriminating a movie viewer–which is funny, because I don&#39;t bother to watch them very often, either–and I have to say, this was horrible.</p> <p> I mean, it would be cruel to suggest that this movie actually killed Sidney Pollack, but I was thinking just that an awful lot, especially toward the end.</p>

<p> So, to counter the extremely negative review I just did, as well as the one I&#39;m about to do, from the department of things that I would like to recommend: <em>The Middleman</em></p> <p> I wrote about <em>The Middleman</em> <a href="http://tendentious.org/2008/08/28/im-sad-to-hear-middleman-isnt-doing-well/">a few years ago</a>, shortly–very shortly–before it got cancelled. The ABC Family network it was broadcast on never even re-broadcast the original episodes–I saw two and three quarters episodes, and that was it.</p> <p> At some point, I noticed that Netflix had the DVDs of that lone season, so I put them in the queue. They finally came up.</p>

<p> TL;DR: You kids get off my lawn!</p> <p> From 1981-1986, I was a devoted listener of Casey Kasem&#39;s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Top_40"><em>American Top 40</em></a>. We were living in (West) Germany at the time, and that broadcast on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Forces_Network">AFN</a> was a primary means of keeping in touch with music back in the &#39;States–though MTV was rising to power back home, we didn&#39;t have it there, and besides, the alternative was hearing <em>99 Luftballons</em> <strong>again</strong> (remember, Nena was German, and (rare for a Continental act) had a hit in the US. It was inescapable, and to this day that song still makes me cringe).</p>

<p> when I&#39;m reacting, instead of responding. Thoughtless action that you know is just going to bring you unhappiness is such a waste.</p> <p> That is all.</p>

<p> It&#39;s interesting how simultaneously humbling and empowering it can be to realize that people you know assume that you can achieve something about which you yourself are still uncertain.</p>

<p> One of my long-time students mentioned that she had been away visiting family, and took a yoga class with a local Anusara-Inspired teacher during her trip, and that she had really enjoyed the class.</p> <p> Now, I&#39;m sure there are yoga teachers out there who so self-assured that they know that if a student doesn&#39;t show up the next week it is obviously an issue on the students part, but I don&#39;t know if I&#39;d enjoy studying with any of them, personally, because I&#39;m not sure I&#39;d be able to fit in the room with their ego.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/">Fred Clark</a> comments on an article <a href="http://www.ethicsdaily.com/news.php?viewStory=17824">regarding the incongruous support among the Religious Right for <em>Atlas Shrugged</em></a>, a novel written by a woman who had nothing but withering scorn for Christianity.</p> <p> What made me laugh, though, was <a href="http://www.patheos.com/community/slacktivist/2011/05/05/theyre-spreading-blankets-on-the-beach/#comment-198080978">this comment</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Yeah, that&#39;s always been one thing that boggles me, that folks thinks you can hold a Bible in one hand and a copy of Atlas Shrugged in the other. It&#39;s like they want to hurry American Christianity into it&#39;s final resting place as The First Church of Kicking People When They&#39;re Down. They&#39;ve almost got Christ completely removed from their teachings, he&#39;s just the name on the letterhead you keep for tax purposes.</p>

<p> To say that David remakes &#34;Andy Warhol&#34; in this performance is kind of an understatement. I mean, I love the original, but if I wanted to listen to that, well, I&#39;ve got the CD. This is something that lives only on this tour, perhaps only in this moment.</p> <p> &#34;Andy walking, Andy tired, Andy take a little snooze.&#34;</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0hSVpFQDaOI?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> A little over two years ago, I wrote <a href="2009/01/26/web-server-software-on-linux">a post</a> about my view of the web server software landscape under Linux, concluding with how I&#39;d ended up sticking with Apache despite having tried most of the other reasonable candidates because they all seemed lacking.</p> <p> It&#39;s interesting in part because I never recorded when I moved that server from Apache to Cherokee (which I had tried to poor results, as noted in the post), which would have been not too very long after I wrote that post. Oh, well.</p>

<p> Done. Enjoyable. There&#39;s a sense of humor in these three books that I don&#39;t remember from any of his prior novels, though it&#39;s been an admittedly long time since I&#39;ve re-read any of them.</p> <p> That said, the distinguishing feature of the trilogy begun with <em>Pattern Recognition</em>–and <em>Zero History</em> make sure you know that it&#39;s truly a trilogy, with the three books tied quite firmly together–seems to be that when I&#39;m done with them, I don&#39;t feel like I&#39;ve really been presented with anything new. More like I&#39;ve been given a tour of exotic locales, with an interesting plot to tie them together, and characters who interest me. But it&#39;s a stark contrast between this and, any of the Sprawl books, or even the eschaton presented in the Bridge novels. That&#39;s not bad, but it confounds my expectations somewhat.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/27/how_goldman_sachs_created_the_food_crisis">Investment banks create food crisis</a></p> <p> Heaven help us if someone figures out how to put a price on oxygen.</p>

<p> And I have to say: &#34;So what?&#34;</p> <p> As many of the news stories are pointing out, many thought he&#39;d been dead for years.</p> <blockquote> <p>On a long enough time-line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.<sup class="footnote-reference"><a id="footnote-reference-1" href="#footnote-1">1</a></sup></p> </blockquote> <p> The question is, are we doing what we need to do to be safer, and considering that large parts of American foreign policy <strong>still</strong> revolve around shooting at people, I suspect the answer is still, &#34;No.&#34; Considering that large parts of American security theater is ineffective and pointless, I suspect the answer is still, &#34;No.&#34;</p>

<p> Now that <em>Zero History</em> is out, I decided to go back and re-read the prior two Bigend Books.</p> <p> I first read <em>Pattern Recognition</em>, on a trip to Miami in 2003 just after it came out. At the time, I thought it might be my favorite of William Gibson&#39;s books. Now…well, I still enjoyed it, but it felt a little light on substance. Perhaps it&#39;s that it was trying to posit something changing just a little too close to the present, and as a consquence, it seems more glaring when it misses the mark. The whole idea of the Sekrit Footage, when considered in light of YouTube just doesn&#39;t quite have the resonance it did 8 years ago.</p>

<p> From <em>Pattern Recognition</em> I moved on immediately to <em>Spook Country</em>.</p> <p> I enjoyed this more the second time through, though if I hear the phrase &#34;locative art&#34; again, I may scream. It&#39;s another one of those ideas that doesn&#39;t seem to have gotten any traction in the last four years, and in the end just served as an annoying distraction from the rest of the book, which I quite enjoyed. It made me look forward to <em>Zero History</em>, which I started yesterday.</p>

<p> I finally found something to make me want to wail and gnash my teeth.</p> <p> Having exported the content from Movable Type, I spent some time working on a script to clean up that content–I had made some errors when I move to Movable Type that meant my articles were often not in the format I wanted them to be, so I took the time to correct that, getting everything moved back to its original Textile source, and even converting some things that had started life as hand-written HTML to Textile.</p>

<p> If you&#39;re inclined to love the software, you&#39;re going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to see how wonderfully it performs, and end up staying up late.</p> <p> If you&#39;re inclined to hate the software, you&#39;re going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to find that one thing that it does so horribly wrong you will <strong>have</strong> to remove it, and end up staying up late.</p>

<p> So, the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html">had an article about sugar</a>.</p> <p> Much of it wasn&#39;t news to me–I knew about the interactions of fructose and the liver, for instance–while some of it was embarrassing for me not to have realized, like the fact that refined sugar is, effectively, 50% fructose (so, in that sense, those commercials the pushers of HFCS have been putting out lately are are right–there&#39;s very little practical difference between cane sugar and corn sugar, though the fact that the fructose in HFCS isn&#39;t bound up with anything else may mean it puts more stress on your liver).</p>

<p> There isn&#39;t a lot of love lost between me and Wordpress.  There are things that it sometimes seems to do specifically with the intention of driving me out of my mind.</p> <p> But I am quickly getting to the point where the only other option I might consider is writing my own blogging software, again (that would be round 3, I believe), and I&#39;m not quite prepared to fall off that particular wagon.</p>

<p> The best buttermilk pancake recipe we know of is in the August 2009 issue of Cook&#39;s Illustrated. They even call it that.</p>

<p> Looking for Scala web frameworks, I came across the following projects:</p> <p> <a href="http://liftweb.net/">Lift</a></p> <p> <a href="https://github.com/scalatra/scalatra">Scalatra</a> (Sinatra-like)</p> <p> <a href="https://github.com/pk11/pinky">Pinky</a></p> <p> <a href="https://github.com/mardambey/spiffy">Spiffy</a></p> <p> <a href="http://bowlerframework.org/">Bowler</a></p> <p> It&#39;s not a comprehensive list, and I think some of them may actually<br> be moribund, but at least lift and scalatra seem active.</p>

<p> I wouldn&#39;t claim to have read everything Greg Bear ever wrote, but I&#39;ve ready a lot of his books. Generally I have found them intriguing, or at least compelling. Unfortunately, <em>Hull Zero Three</em> just didn&#39;t do it for me. I read through to the end, but it felt more like work than pleasure.</p> <p> A shame.</p>

<p> Incomparable:</p> <blockquote> <p>Love the world. Work for nothing.<br> Take all that you have and be poor.<br> Love someone who does not deserve it.<br> Denounce the government and embrace<br> the flag. Hope to live in that free<br> republic for which it stands.<br> Give your approval to all you cannot<br> understand.</p> </blockquote> <p> <a href="http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC30/Berry.htm">Go read all of it</a>.</p>

<p> Runs through how to set things up so that you can easily put together a number of packages for different distributions, architectures, etc.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.davromaniak.eu/index.php?post/2011/03/03/The-ultimate-package-building-system">Go read it</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2011/02/pearls-before-swine.html">Oh, my, it just doesn&#39;t get better than this.</a>.</p>

<p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vPnehDhGa14?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> The one thing the video glosses over is that there&#39;s no way that you would ever do this in real life, since you were almost guaranteed to have had to reinstall Windows at some point.</p> <p> <a href="http://mischeathen.com/2011/03/im-having-nerd-nostalgia-palpitations.html">Heard it from Chet</a></p>

<p> The only sad thing is that this is a cross-stitch pattern, not a T-shirt, otherwise I would totally be buying this.</p> <p> <a href="http://sneakykitty.com/index.php/2009/02/22/cross-stitch-fillerbunny-and-cthulhu/hello-cthulhu/">Check it out</a>.</p>

<p> I don&#39;t generally hang around on Reddit, but this thread is full of useful info about where to get good grown-up clothes that&#39;ll last. I think it&#39;s pretty credible because I, too, have had insanely good experiences with Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/f9fa7/im_a_man_and_need_nice_work_clothes_wtf_do_i_do/">Give it a browse</a>.</p>

<p> Julien Danjou talks about how its ability to do partial checkouts on large quantities of files makes it easy to keep a subset of music on his laptop while the majority stays on his server.</p> <p> <a href="http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_collection_with_git-annex">Give it a read</a>.</p>

<p> I just ran across a mention of my name in the Changelog to memcached, from 2004. I had forgotten ever contributing anything. In fact, I was having a hard time figuring out what I would have been working on in 2004 that would have been using memcached.</p> <p> Mind you, I remembered after a moment or two, but it took some serious thinking.</p> <p> The interesting thing is to realize that I was apparently a fairly early adopter–the entry for my bug report is almost exactly one year after the first entry in the changelog.</p>

<p> somehow the Wachowski Brothers succeeded in making a movie of <em>Speed Racer</em> that was even more creepy and inexplicable than the original cartoon series.</p> <p> What I don&#39;t understand is why they thought they would ever make any money off of it.</p>

<p> Has the capability to test a number of systems that we use regularly. Worth remembering.</p> <p> <a href="http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/">Check it out</a></p>

<p> An alternative to the moribund and largely unmaintained BBDB codebase, using Org-Mode files as the storage location for email contacts.</p> <p> <a href="http://julien.danjou.info/org-contacts.html">More things from Julien</a></p>

<p> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_of_Rock#1983_2">Here is a link</a> to the Wikipedia entry for the 1983 German Monsters of Rock concert, which was my first ever concert.</p> <p> I have vague memories of <em>Whitesnake</em>, but couldn&#39;t even tell you what they played.</p> <p> <em>Blue Oyster Cult</em> was what I was there to see, though I remember it being somewhat anticlimactic–I think I knew a lot less of their music than I had thought. I would probably enjoy it more now.</p>

<p>

<div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/19819283?dnt=1" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" allow="fullscreen"> </iframe> </div> </p> <p> Ah, the things we can&#39;t see. A number of silly things filmed on a ridiculously high-speed video camera, and then slowed down so we can perceive the things that normally see continuous.</p>

<p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share; fullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/snPQ1z5FoqQ?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> You know, I haven&#39;t seen any ukelele covers that have been less than respectful of their source material. Sometimes they are obviously showing off technical acumen–there&#39;s a couple of places in this video that might qualify–but it all seems done with a lot of affection for the original.</p>