Being shocked by this is about like watching Reven… Jeff Roberts - Apr 3, 2008 Being shocked by this is about like watching Revenge of the Sith over and over and being surprised each time Anakin turns to the dark side.

* From the “not worth reviewing” file: Beowulf was awful. How do you take a blood-soaked elegiac epic and turn it into, essentially, The Devil and Tom Walker. Plus, the CGI was good, but not quite there. * A cold snap has hit, with frosty mornings and cool, windy days. * I’ve *got* to stop staying up late to watch bad movies on DVD. A netflix queue reordering is…er…in order. * Everyone’s doing well. Whitney’s recovered from her stomach virus last week. Maria’s managed to no maim herself lately, and seems ready to break-out running any day now (with injuries to follow, no doubt). Joey’s school year is winding down, and he’s enjoying baseball on his very good coach-pitch team, the Reds. (“Communism was a red herring”) ...

 Link In lieu of going skating with Joey and Whitney yesterday, I put Maria down for a nap and watched Cate Blanchett reprise her role as Good Queen Bess in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. As the story opens, it’s 1585, and Elizabeth has been on the throne 27 years. Still, intrigues surround her throne, as the Catholic Spain seeks to remove “the bastard whore” from the throne and put Mary Stuart (“Queen of Scots”) in her place, or so it seems. ...

I liked the movie…lol. Susan - Apr 2, 2008 I liked the movie…lol.

There’s a market out there for old, efficient cars. And somebody is going to figure-out how to fill it. Let’s face it, cars used to be more efficient: The Honda CRX HF from 1990 was rated at 50mpg, and was a simple, dead-reliable transportation appliance. Cars also used to be less expensive and less complicated. Here’s the secret–new cars can’t be made like cars from 20 years ago. Regulations won’t allow it. Today, you must have airbags, side impact beams, stability control, etc. ...

There’s something awesome about going to a real city, staying in a great old hotel and eating at a darn good restaurant Bella really outdid herself this weekend…first class stuff all the way from the room and its appointments, through the champagne and fruit tray. I particularly enjoyed the Art Deco throughout the great old building, which served as a model for the Empire State Building (same architectural firm). Through it all, I enjoyed my darling’s company…that was the best part.

21 was great, if you like ill-paced movies with recycled plotlines. After enjoying other such pictures about genius kids (Real Genius) and breaking the bank at Las Vegas casinos (Ocean’s 11), I hoped for a tight, enjoyable romp, with a good “nerd + hot chick” love story and lots of nerd-rific references–sort of like War Games in Vegas. Yeah, not so much. The elevator pitch is dynamite: MIT students act as a team to count cards at Vegas blackjack tables, facing opposition from the latest technology (biometric scanners) and old-school Vegas security men, as well as internal turmoil. Somewhere between there and adapting the bestselling fact-cum-fiction book Bringing Down the House, this movie becomes a mess of recycled ideas and predictability. By the end, I was rooting for security guards to nab the lot of them. They’re just annoying people we’re given no reason to care about. ...

My wife just turned her permanent age: 29. That’s a good number. It think she’ll stay there awhile. It’s been a big year for her, and it’s been gratifying to be her husband and watch her grow. This year she saw Maria through infancy, and planned + executed our first family vacation. She dealt with her first summer without Joey, and Maria’s burn and recovery. She dealt all the issues I had this past year–changing jobs, frustrations, dependency, Mom’s cancer. I was horrid through most of that. She supported me, and kicked my butt when necessary. ...

This is kinda “duh” stuff, but here goes: What does all professional software have in common? What attributes do all non-trivial programs share? When you’re in school and you write assignment programs, often, they’re command-line, single-execution processes. These toy programs exist as drivers for some concept you’re trying to grasp–string operations, numercal calculations, or Object-Oriented programming. An example might be: “Read a file that contains a maze and print out the steps to find the exit as coordinates.” ...

empty printer boxes to get for bart and bridgette…. Whitney - Apr 2, 2008 empty printer boxes to get for bart and bridgette…… I vote for VI++, except that sounds like a hopped-up text editor.

How is it that I’ve lived 29 years (21 of those a gearhead) and not seen Vanishing Point? This film is hard to pin down. It’s like: Easy Rider, in a car Smokey and the Bandit, but no midget and it’s not funny Cannonball run…no Dom DeLouise, and it’s not funny. Apocalypse now/Heart of Darkness but no jungle Homer’s Odyssey but no boat More precisely, this film has the same overall theme as “Cool Hand Luke”–an ordinary man comes back from war (in the case, Vietnam), knocks around awhile and gets into trouble, and pays the price. As the audience, we’re supposed to identify with the main character, and see how “the man” and “the squares” are hell-bent on destroying the utopian hippie vision of freedom and love. ...

You win your first event in 2 years In the cold, in the rain, the Beamer was awesome. I set the tires at 35psi front and 40psi rear, and let ’er tailslide around the 4 on-course sweepers. This was CKR’s first points event of the year, and it was an inspired and safe course design, using the small dump-truck training pad to the utmost. Braindump of me out there: _ First gear, rev to 4k…sidestep the clutch. Okay, wheelhop, wheelhop…HOOK! Pick-up your slalom cone, now BANG second. Both hands on the wheel. Floor it into the braking zone for the first left hand sweeper. Brake, okay now crank your neck left to pick-up the second cone on the slalom. WOOOO…feel that rear come around. ...

Wow, I understood like 25% of that, but the happy … Jeff Roberts - Apr 1, 2008 Wow, I understood like 25% of that, but the happy happy joy joy I got :-)

Mmmmm… 15x7. Correct offset (+25mm). Correct hubcentric diameter (57.1 mm) Shine-y. White car w/black rims…SHINE-Y!

R-r-r! Jeff Roberts - Apr 5, 2008 R-r-r!

Professor Djikstra–Mister Syncronization! So, I’ve been doing some heavy work with multithreading on windows lately, and I must say I’m impressed. Win32 went whole-hog for the multithreaded model, and has great Kernel support for some very useful primitives: If you want to work within your process exclusively, you have Critical Sections, which give are ways to ensure only one thread is executing in a code block at any one time. Nice, but nothing too exciting. ...

Brrrrrrrrring “This is Harold” “Hey, Honey! Listen, where would you and Joey like to sit at the Legends Opening Day Game tonight?” Blink. Blink. “WHaaa…?” “I’m getting you guys tickets to the game. Where would you like sit?” * * * Yes, I have the best wife in the world. Don’t know how she knew, but it was great. The team this year is so-so. Well, so-so…so far. The starting pitcher made it into the 5th inning, but the middle relief guy (Koons) got tagged early and often, including a classic “throw it to first but brain some guy in the stands” error that lead to a score 1 play later. Fielding was uneven, with two more errors leading to scores or extra bases. ...

Watched Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers, and don’t quite know what to make of it. Told as a series of flashbacks about the American assault on Iwo Jima, the film follows the novelist son of one of the flagraisers on Mt. Surabaci from this famous picture taken in 1945. The film is a fine piece of work, and the acting in it is tremendous–Ryan Phillippe shines–but I didn’t like it at first. It’s not the deep immersion of Saving Private Ryan. Where Ryan was a gritty, sweeping story about a platoon amid the massive invasion of Normandy, Flags feels very small, almost claustrophobic. We’re rarely in fire-fights; mostly, we see the fearful anticipation or the horrific aftermath. A few days after watching it, I realized: The hardest part of surviving WWII was living with what you’d seen and done. ...

Lots of randomness from an awesome weekend: Saturday was the Georgetown College Academic Team (GCAT) tournament at my Alma Mater. I served as scorer in the Division I room, alongside my old pal Joe Guillory and the delightful freshman, R. (Did I see R. making eyes at Joe? Perhaps!) Georgetown’s dominance and capability stunned me–this was a team of depth and quiet competence, obviously playing a level above their competition. They’re going to Nationals (College Bowl?) and I expect they’ll do well. ...

a.k.a. Nothing like brake fluid that’s so old it’s green…. Installed the new Brembo rotors and Akebono ceramic pads from the Tire Rack yesterday on our 2000 Camry, and for once I did it right. - I jacked the car up one night. - I disassembled everything another night - I did the install, brake bleed, tire rotation, and power steering belt adjustment yesterday. Nice having zero pressure to get the Daily Driver back on the road before morning. I took my time, read through the Haynes procedure 3 or 4 times, and did each piece meticulously. I regreased the pins the caliper slides on, and made sure I put plenty of Moly-Lube on everything as it went back together. ...