Reviews

Just finished David Owen’s dense-yet-inspiring biography of Xerography and its inventor, Chester Carlson, entitled Copies in Seconds In his first few chapters, Owen tries to imbue his fascination for the ordinary (to those of Generation X and afterwards) office copier. Frankly, his treatment of the development of copying is boring. I don’t care about scribes, Gutenburg, or Ditto machines. He spends inordinate prose on the distinction between “copying” and “duplication”, and why the idea of ‘copying’ is so important. ...

Currently listening to a book on tape of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, encapsulator of Victorian England, its middle class, and the plight of young, bored women looking to get married. Reading, or rather, listening to this book, I’m reminded why the Romantic Movement of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats was so big: It was vital and alive. The rest of England is dead. These women–LITERALLY!–have nothing to do but sit and plot their marriages. Their families are rich enough to spare them hard labor, so there they are, twittering about to no good use. ...

Just got through with Dashiell Hammett’s famous The Maltese Falcon, the prototypical and oft-imitated detective novel. It’s a quick read, at only 217 pages, with good characters, some murders and a little mystery. Overall, I didn’t like it…long way to go for an elliptical story and characters I didn’t care about.

Amid getting my MINI its 45k mile service, I’m driving a BMW X3 as a loaner It’s AWFUL! The ride is brittle and uncertain. The thing is so stiff-legged that Ohio roads are a real pain. It’s not roomy at all, and this base, base, base model lacks even cruise control. I left my cell phone at home, so I was forced to drive all the way back to G’town so I can know when the Pup is done with its overhaul.

Lots of randomness today: Something irks me about “The Western Whitehouse,” George Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The man’s the leader of the free world and commander of the most powerful army the world has ever known, but he’s still AN ELECTED OFFICIAL. We the people pay his salary, and he has a nice place to live near that’s in proximity to the rest of the government…the ACTUAL whitehouse. (Pic taken at the aforementioned WWW:) ...

Watched The Whole Ten Yards up at Whitney’s on Saturday night. It’s embarrasingly bad, as neither the plot nor characters make any sense. There were maybe two or three funny lines in the whole movie.

If nothing else will convince you, Allison Krauss’s voice will assure you there’s a God. Nothing so pure, sweet, and perfect could come about by accident. Whitney and I went to The Louisville Palace last night for a performance of Allison Krauss and Union Station at 7:30. Being the last night of their two-night engagement at the Palace, the band was relaxed and playful, taking the audience through a setlist that ranged from haunting ballads to hard-thrumming bluegrass to more contemporary Country, mixing light banter and anecdotes along the way. ...

I’m struggling with this latest technical book I’m reading, J2EE Development without EJB Basically, it’s hard to digest, with lots of high-level enterprise construction pieces, but not much to hang it on. I’ve never built applications the way the author has for the past 5 years, so things he finds as a matter of course, I don’t intuitively understand. I’m blogging about it, basically so I can try to synthesize what I’ve read in the book so far. ...

Josh, take note: I finished a Dave Barry book, Boogers are my Beat It’s a bit of fluff, but militantly so: Barry sets us straight at the beginning that he sometimes does journalism, sometimes does reality, but most often prefers the hilariously mundane. His columns about his Miami-fried hide landing in Grank Lakes, North Dakota during January had me laughing for minutes at a time. Still he can be serious: His essay about Flight 93 was worth the price of the book alone. ...

Got back on the Book-reading bandwagon the past few days, this time with a technical slant: Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied This book is sort of a meta-meta-patterns book, that is it’s a book about a book about patterns. You see, computer software is a science of building abstractions; at the lowest level, computers execute a series of instructions, one after another, at blazing speed. If you group these instructions together from start to finish with one purpose, you have an algorithm. If you factor-out common parts of several agorithms, you have subroutines, functions, or procedures. At this point, you’re two “levels of abstraction” away from the way the computer actually works. ...

Zardoz Key learning: When your somewhat-off, reminds-you-of-your-freaky-ex-roomate friend at work says a movie is “kinda weird”, don’t watch it. Sean Connery wears a diaper (or sumo garb, take your pick) throughout, and basically the screenwriter creates a vision of “Brave New World” crossed with “A Clockwork Orange”. Definitely some cool moments, but not worth much. Thankfully, with netflix, it’s free. :D

Requiem for Alex Kingston, who’s leaving ER after 7 seasons. She’s never been one of my favorite characters, but seems she’s leaving the show on bad terms, the suits at NBC deciding her character was getting too old and dowdy to attract the 18-35 demographic. So now, we have the new rock-star wannabe resident. Lovely.

Ronin This movie is alot of flash for not much substance, but it’s watchable, with Robert DeNiro doing his best Sean Penn impersonation and statuesque eye candy from Natascha McElhone. The car chases are incredible, and make a decent spy thriller exceptional. By the end, nothing seems resolved, save many dead, stereotype characters.

Random “Apprentice” complaint: Okay, so you set-up the only woman with a molecule of leadership skill to fail, then you FIRE HER!? Disgusting.

Moved to wretch about the latest TV disaster, LAX It’s AWFUL! It’d be one thing if they played it kitschy like they do on “Las Vegas” (Baywatch in a Casino, table for one?), but they’re playing this “drama” like it’s CSI or something… Okay, let’s look at the facts: - Heather Locklear is past her prime, and couldn’t act when she was in her prime. And this material is just a bit heavier than “Melrose Place” ...

Okay, it’s a Swedish movie (with subtitles) that describes a budding romance between two lesbian teenagers, but for some reason I love Show Me Love The film’s a grainy wisp of a story, shot hand-held with no budget, but I find both the main characters captivating in their own way: Agnes, the misfit who’s a hopeless romantic, and the instensely beautiful, utterly bored Elin. I guess the film hits home with me because of the way I fell in love with my darling, on a long cold night nearly 5 years ago. We were from two intensely different worlds, destined for two different (yet reconvergent) paths, but I can still remember the shockwave that went through me when she told me she loved me. ...

This has been probably the best literary week of my life, at least since I left college: I’ve read two software books and one pure pleasure book, a light football-theme paperback called The Way We Played the Game. The book describes football in a small Michigan town in 1903, when it really was a deadly game: No pads, no face guards, no hard helmets, no neutral zone, no forward pass. It was a pure running sport, with a few lateral passes thrown-in. People died all the time from internal injuries, concussions, and the game itself was probably the most violent ‘sport’ since the ancient Greek pankration. ...

I’m reading Evan Thomas’s eponymous biography of John Paul Jones (“Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy”) and came across a passage that reminded me of the phrase in English that I hate most of all: Elders and Betters As in, “Respect your elders and betters,” the corollary to the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard”. I have no problem with the ‘respect your elders’ piece, but ‘betters’ irks me. I hold, and always shall hold, that there is no one in this country intrinsically ‘better’ than anyone else–No lords, laidies, dukes, vicars, or kings, nor pope. ...

The second day of olympics coverage and an interesting conversation with my beloved kept me up WAY past my bedtime, and caused me to be very tardy to work today–9:45. The olympics coverage has been excellent, though for once, I wish I had cable (MSNBC, CNBC, and Bravo) so that I could watch some of the other events. I’d really like to see some of the equestrian stuff, and I’ve heard good things about fencing this year. Matt Fagenbush (sp?), one of my autocross buddies, is a competitive fencer, and after he explained the sport to me (3 blades–foil, epée, and saber), seems like it’d be amazing to watch. ...

Watched Stargate last night. I’ve seen it before, of course, but it seemed like a neat addition to my Netflix queue. I watched the ‘Ultimate Edition’, and it should’ve been called “They didn’t edit anything” edition. Scenes dragged on and on, but overall a very worthy movie to watch if you happen to come across it on basic cable. Side note: You can see the wires they used to “fly” the model flying machines around during the blue screen scenes at the end.