Stupid vs. Stupid
January 22nd, 2009
This is hilarious. Dumb vs. Dumb
Categories: Entertainment | Tags: humor | No Comments
Song of the Week
January 19th, 2009
This week we have a classic from one of country music’s biggest stars.
“Amanda” - Waylon Jennings
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Song of the Week
January 12th, 2009
The Song of the Week is back! This week’s tune is one that means a lot to me. My dear wife sent it to me a long time ago. I am so lucky to have her, and this one perfectly describes our relationship.
Categories: Entertainment | Tags: song of the week | 2 Comments
Movie Review: Hancock
January 9th, 2009
Our first three Netflix DVD came in the mail Wednesday. Hancock was the first one we decided to watch. This movie stars Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman. The main character Hancock is played by Will Smith. Hancock is a superhero. He has powers like Superman basically. Unfortunately this is where the similarities end between he and Superman.
Hancock is a drunk and has a horrible attitude. He does stop crimes and save people’s lives, but usually destroys a bunch of stuff in the process. In his opening act of social justice, he stops some thugs in an SUV from getting away. In the process he trashes a highway, half a dozen cop cars, and several skyscrapers, with damage estimates totaling about $9,000,000.
He has a real PR problem. The people pretty much hate his guts. Enter Jason Bateman’s character Ray. After saving Ray from a train collision, Hancock has dinner with Ray’s family. Ray then gives him a business card and tells him that he can help with his image problem, as he is a PR agent.
I won’t spoil any more details of the movie. The story is deeper than just the movie. I found it to be a great story about human frailty, and how we treat each other. If you have not seen this one yet, check it out.
Categories: Entertainment | Tags: movies | No Comments
Netflix
January 5th, 2009
Part of our new financial cutbacks in our household included acquiring a Netflix account over the weekend. We won’t be buying DVDs, or going to the movies much this year. Adding a monthly subscription fee to our bills may seem counter-intuitive at first glance. The fee will be paid for by my giving up of my Morningstar premium service that costs about the same. So we are not going to be spending anything more for it, and we will be cutting out our DVD purchases for now.
My wife had been a Netflix customer for years, and enjoyed her experience immensely. I have heard nothing but good things about the service for years, and finally took the plunge this weekend. The bonus that convinced me to do so, is the new Netflix streaming ability that is now available on the X Box 360. This allows you to stream Netflix’s Watch Instantly content via the X Box, on your TV.
I was not familiar with this aspect of the service, so we decided to try it out. Once you download the Netflix software on the gaming console, you simply create a new Netflix account if you do not already have one. After a few minutes of going back and forth between the X Box and the computer all was ready to go.
You simply add a title from the Watch Instantly library, to your instant queue via Netflix’s website, and within seconds the title pops up on your Netflix screen on the X Box. It is a pretty neat setup really.
After watching a couple of movies, and becoming more familiar with the process, it became apparent to me, that this is just an OK setup. First, the video quality is not the greatest. It is not unwatchable, but it is certainly not as good as even a progressive scan DVD.
It is like watching decent quality video via the internet. The first movie we watched, had a shuttering problem. The video had a very slight shutter to it throughout. Again, it was not unwatchable, but it did irritate me a bit.
The shuttering was not a problem on any of the other movies we streamed. The picture quality was not awesome by any means, but it was adequate. Fortunately most of the available titles, aren’t titles that one really cares about seeing in high definition anyway.
This unfortunately leads to the second, and possibly bigger problem with streaming Netflix movies. The selection kind of sucks. There are supposedly twelve thousand possibilities, but we struggled to find content that was interesting. There are not hardly any new titles, and the titles that are available are generally not the best. It states this on their website, and I am on a free trial at the moment, so no great loss, just disappointing really.
It is a neat bit of geeky tech, but not of great use. As a value-added service from Netflix, sure it is worthwhile. If one was looking at getting Netflix just for this service, I would advise against it.
We received our first DVD from Netflix very promptly after adding it to our queue. It worked flawlessly, and was very easy to repackage, and put back in the mail. This aspect of the service is going to be a wonderful thing it seems. They have a massive catalog of movies and TV shows to chose from.
Categories: Entertainment, Tech | Tags: movies | 1 Comment
Book Review: A Farewell to Arms
January 5th, 2009
A Farewell To Arms
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Scribner (April 1, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684837889
ISBN-13: 978-0684837888
A Farewell To Arms is another book from my reading list. Ernest Hemmingway wrote this semi-autobiographical tale of his experiences as an ambulance driver during World War I. The story is told by Tenente (Lieutenant) Frederic Henry, an American, driving ambulances for the Italian army. Henry is a man’s man. He drinks a lot, but never seems to lose control of himself. He is tough, unassuming, and doesn’t think overly highly of himself. The man has a good sense of morality, while not being a religious person at all.
There are several other officers that Hemingway develops into interesting characters. There is the Italian surgeon, Rinaldi, who is a larger than life happy Italian that loves booze, women, and surgery. He is Henry’s best friend and roommate in the story. Then there is the often brooding captain, that is concerned with the future of his men, and his responsibilities. Another major fixture, especially early on, is the priest. He is an army chaplain, and is totally dedicated to God. The others consistently chastise him for this, but the Godless Tenente often takes up for him. Henry is not anti-God, so he is able to respect the dedication of the priest. At times one gets the feeling that the priest represents an ideal that Hemmingway would like to fulfill, but is not able to.
The life near the front for these gentlemen is rather comfortable. They are housed in a nice villa, always have some sort of wine or brandy to drink, and are well fed. Apparently the Italian military even maintains a brothel for the men’s use if they so desire. During the beginning of the story, Frederic Henry meets Catherine, a British nurse that works in the village’s hospital. He is quickly smitten by her, and she returns the admiration at first reluctantly. Her fiancé has died in the war, and she is reluctant to get involved with someone new, because she fears the same thing might happen to him.
Catherine is a wonderful character. She comes across as someone that is constantly looking for the approval of her mate, but not in an irritating way. Her and Henry fall in love fairly quickly, before he is sent to run the ambulances at the nearby front.
I guess I must pause to explain just what sort of book this is. It is an anti-war book to be sure, and it does a good job of illustrating the horrors of such an event. Hemmingway hated war, after he experienced it, as most do after being in the same situation. The love story between Catherine and Frederic ends up overshadowing the war however. We end up with a wonderful love story, written in a way, that is just beautiful, and totally interesting. I am no great fan of love stories, but this book contains enough manly meat to make it very worthwhile to read.
Actually, love stories can be very entertaining. The distinction between a great tale of love between two people, and a dime store romance novel could not be greater. The cheap fluff of the romance novel, is what I have no use for. There is none of this here. This is an intricately woven story, of love found in the midst of ugliness.
Alright, where were we? Oh yes, so Henry goes to the front . He and his crew are injured badly, when a trench shell goes off in their foxhole. Henry ends up convalescing at a hospital in Italy, were Catherine becomes his nurse. Their relationship blooms into something wonderful, and eventually Henry is sent back to his old post.
I don’t want to ruin the entire plot of the book, after having told much of the story already. Let’s just say, that things take a strange turn upon his arrival to his previous post, and leave it at that.
This story will not be forgotten by me, as so many often are. A person like myself, reads many books over the years. Most are fairly enjoyable. If they are not, they don’t get finished. This is one tale that will stick with me throughout my remaining years, and I fully expect to read it again at some point. Very highly recommended.
Categories: Books, Entertainment | Tags: military, novel, reading list | 2 Comments
Book Review: The Trial
December 11th, 2008
The Trial
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Schocken (May 25, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805209999
ISBN-13: 978-0805209990
After reading several of the books on my list, there will be no more opining about how great they are. They are all great. These books are on a top 100 novels list for a reason. Undoubtedly some will not be so great to me, and I will make note of that fact. The Trial is not one of the not so great to me books on the list. It is of course great, as one would expect. Oops, I said it.
This is the story of poor Josef K. A tightly-wound bank manager that has a very normal life. My impression is that he has a stringently normal life. He works, he goes home, and he goes back to work. Occasionally he throws in a romp with his favorite prostitute, and that is the extent of his life. The story starts on a not so normal morning for Josef K. He awakens to find two rather bumbling agents eating his breakfast and placing him under arrest.
This would be disheartening for anyone of course. The strange twist is that they don’t know why he is under arrest, and tell him he is free to go about his business while under arrest. He is to go to his job, and continue his daily routine until he is notified to appear for interrogation. Throughout the story the enormity of the system he is being forced to deal with becomes more and more apparent. There is no way for him to find out what he is being charged with, how his case is progressing, or even who his accusers are.
This is a cautionary tale. It warns of the horrors of totalitarian bureaucracy. The court that Josef K. finds himself embroiled in, is a terribly complex system of redundant parts that serve little or no purpose. The court moves like molasses, and apparently ignores most input from lawyers and defendants.
Only those who have the appropriate connections have a chance to influence the court’s overly pompous judges. Years are wasted by the defendants trying to figure out if they are successfully influencing their cases, and what exactly their cases are about. It drives many of them to madness.
Another aspect that Kafka illustrates very well about totalitarian regimes is their amoral status. This lack of any morality is multifaceted. The court has no problem with driving its victims insane. The employees of the court are also treated unfairly. There are no rewards for doing good work, so the majority of the time, the employees strive to fly under the radar, and not ruffle any feathers. Mediocrity is the goal.
The most shocking element is the lack of interest on the part of the public. They seem happy to go about their daily business regardless of the fact that this nightmare has risen up amongst them. All of them are subject to having a case arbitrarily brought against them, yet they don’t seem concerned. They assume the government is doing it’s job, and that the defendants must have done something wrong, or if they were innocent, surely the court would find that out and drop their cases. The court is so massive that no one seems to know anything about it, and it has been installed so long that it is just accepted, almost as if it had always been.
This translation seemed very good. I don’t speak or read German, so this is just a guess. The translator did a good job, as there are no strange sentences or structures that don’t make sense. The book was an enjoyable read, and I found myself not wanting to put it down. Highly reccomended.
Categories: Books, Entertainment | Tags: novel, reading list | 2 Comments
The Video Game - Part I
December 9th, 2008
This may not be true, but it seems fairly certain that nothing has pushed hardware manufacturers harder, at least manufacturers of computer hardware used in the home, than the video game. Sure a lot of the technology may have been born for other uses, but much of it has been optimized and pushed to it’s limits simply for improved video gaming performance.
The overclocking and computer customization craze is almost exclusively the domain of gamers. No one risks popping a $1,000 processor so they can run Microsoft Word faster. The hardware manufacturers have no doubt built super-performing hardware for business and scientific reasons. I am not saying games are the reason we have fast computers, simply that they drive the home computing market and have for a long time.
History Before My Participation
The very first video games were created by scientists as early as 1947. Wikipedia has a good article on the beginnings here. The first high performance computerized video game, was Spacewar!, which was created by a trio of geek heroes at MIT in 1961 on a DEC PDP-1. The wiki article on the PDP-1 is fascinating as well. We owe much to the guys that pioneered so much using that machine.
All of the early examples of what would become known as video games were created by really geeky men in lab coats. Their computers filled up whole rooms, and a modern iPod shuffle’s computing abilities would put them to shame. The men worked with what they had, and more often then not used their simple games as a way to interface the public with their expensive sci-fi hardware.
Early commercial games started appearing in the early 70s, with Atari’s first game Pong being the first success commercially. All kinds of games, good and bad started popping up.
In 1978 Tomohiro Nishikado came up with the most awesome Space Invaders. He had to customize the hardware, because existing hardware could not keep up with the game. It was based on an Intel 8080 CPU, and was a groundbreaking game at the time. Nothing like it had been seen before.
The home video gaming front was opened by Magnavox in 1972, when they released the first console named Odyssey. It was a weird device by today’s standards. It ran on batteries and had no sound.
The Beginning
My first memory of a video game of any sort was William’s 1980 release Defender. I was four at the time and my Dad was quite the Defenderplayer. I remeber standing next to him and watching him play the game quite a bit. Every once in a while he would waste a quarter and let me play for the several seconds it took me to lose all my lives.
The first video game I ever really played was probably Space Invaderson the Atari 2600. The Atari version of the 1978 original game featured simplified graphics and different game modes. The game created a video gamer for life. My Dad’s Atari 2600 spent many a weekend with my cousin and myself at the helm. A few of the games I remember specifically include, Activision’s Stampede, Atari’s Combat, and Parker Bros. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I always owned my cousin at Combat for what it’s worth. 
I lived with my Mom and Step dad while growing up so the Atari was only available to me when I went to see Dad. This was supposedly to be alleviated when we got an Intellivision. The Intellivision console was technically superior to Atari’s 2600 at the time in several ways. The problem with it however was that it used different games and had fewer games available. This hurt the console’s appeal with me. There were lots of nice sports and board games, but I wanted to play Space Invaders or Stampede. The extra buttons, flashier graphics, actual 16 bit processing, and the additional 9 controller buttons didn’t mean squat to me.
Finally there was an adapter released that allowed you to play 2600 games on the Intellivision. It was great, and my first game purchase was Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is one of my most hated games, seeing as I have never made it past the third level. Before we could get any other games for the console, power supply was left plugged in overnight and it burnt out! My Step dad decided not to get a new one, and that was it for the Intellivision. It sat up on a shelf in our den for at least fifteen years. My Mom probably threw it away at some point.
This began a long drought in my video gaming. I still played the Atari at Dad’s house, and played games on my TRS-80 that I had to type into the machine in BASIC every time I wanted to play one, and any available Commodore 64 machines. This corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the video game console crash of 1983. The PC became the domain of video gaming for several years. At the tender age of 8 my funding abilities were severely underdeveloped, so these obsolete options were all that were available to appease my lust for electronic gaming action.
Actually, let me take a step back here. That is not entirely true. My gaming activities were limited during those years at home. The best games were still only available at the neighborhood arcade anyway. Many of the best games were ported to the 2600, and other consoles, but the ports were generally of much lower quality. This was fine with us little kids, as we didn’t have many quarters to go around anyway. The teenagers at the arcade were pretty pushy, and always occupied the best machines indefinitely.
Once the crash went down, all the new awesome games were only available at the arcade. You could also get a quick fix at your local 7-11 or skating rink. They usually had several cabinets set up. Even grocery stores would have something around occasionally. The mall arcade was my Mecca at this time. We went to the mall quite often, and sometimes my Mom would actually give me a dollar or two to “waste” in the arcade.
Some of my favorite games at the time included Pac-Man(already a classic at that point), 1942, Spy Hunter, Galaga, and multitudes of others that have slipped my mind permanently. These machines were everywhere. A dedicated kid did not have a hard time find a video game to play in those days.
Pizza Hut usually had at least one sit down Pac-Man or Donkey King to mess with. The movie theaters had their own mini-arcades, and some industrious youths actually told the start time of movies to their parents wrong intentionally. This allowed them to get there early and get a few games in before the movie.
One of the biggest day’s of the year for me, was my birthday of course. This meant it was time to go to Chuck E. Cheeses and have a birthday party. The greatness of this place was not their automatons stuffed animals, or their crappy pizza. The place was full of arcade games of course, and the birthday boy got pretty much all the tokens he could ask for. I remember getting in trouble for ignoring all the kids that were invited because I was too engrossed in playing some game. Another favorite memory involved a lesson in honesty.
So I was strolling along looking for the next cabinet to feed, and saw a token sitting on the floor. After picking it up, I spotted a man working on one of the machines. After presenting it to him, and telling him that it would be stealing to just take it, he reached into the machine he was working on, and grabbed a handful of tokens. This nice guy proceeded to drop them all in my token cup, and my eyes probably began to bulge with excitement. After he told me that was a reward for my honesty, I thanked him, and ran along my way. These little tokens may as well have been krugerrands to me.
Well, this is enough for now. In the next installment we will take a look at the most amazing thing my young self had ever seen. It would change my life, and reinvigorate my at home gaming. The infamous, awesome, and still extremely cool Nintendo Entertainment System.
Categories: Entertainment, Life, Tech | Tags: geekery | 5 Comments
Song of the Week
December 9th, 2008
This week we have something from the everchanging Herbie Hancock. This is from his 1973 release “Head Hunters”, and is named “Watermelon Man”. It is funkalicious!
Categories: Entertainment | Tags: song of the week | 2 Comments
Song of the Week
December 3rd, 2008
Unfortunately a couple of weeks were missed here for my Song of the Week. After thinking about posting three songs to make up for the shortage, I decided not to. Those weeks are gone, and will never be regained. So without further delay, here is the song for this week.
Continuing the jazz theme, although in a totally different genre of jazz, we have the classic “Take Five” by the Dave Brubek Quartet.
Edit: OK I gotta add one more. This is my favorite house jam from back when I actually went clubing, which seems like a lifetime ago. Hearing it now, brings back a lot of memories, both good and bad. This song is funky!
“New Jersey Deep” by Black Science Orchestra
Categories: Entertainment | Tags: song of the week | 3 Comments
