Category: Uncategorized

Driving around the city after Christmas, I heard a bit of David Cronenberg on Fresh Air, as Terry Gross was doing her 2005 retrospective of her favorite interviews. Cronenberg was answering questions about his most recent film, A History of Violence, which I haven’t seen.

Later in the day, I was in Borders, taking advantage of a holiday gift card, and I picked up the graphic novel A History of Violence. I had no idea this is where the story started (in 1997), but with all the comic-to-movie conversion over the last decade-plus, I’m hardly surprised.

The graphic novel is written by John Wagner, with art by Vince Locke. Reading it took 40 minutes or so, but left me thinking much longer. I now wonder whether or not I could stomach the movie, which is getting rave reviews. The story stuns. The violence is brutal, but it’s part of the tale. Only the full-page image of Richie on p.268 lingers too strongly, though. Made me think of something from Sin City (the movie) or maybe Silence of the Lambs. Gruesome, iconic, and barely human.

I think I’m going to have to see the movie at some point. The story is just too strong, and I’m curious about the differences. Moving from one visual medium to another should be less jarring than print to screen, but the menacing mood will have to be built differently in the movie, without the black-and-white starkness of the novel.

Christmas afternoon, we ducked out for a matinee showing of Shopgirl, the Steve Martin-Claire Danes film. The theater was small, but it was quite full shortly after 1pm. We weren’t the only ones taking a break from the holidays, or maybe we simply joined those who don’t celebrate this one.

Made from a novella, the movie is also relatively brief. Claire Danes is a lonely 20-something Vermont sometime artist working behind the glove counter at Saks in Los Angeles. Steve Martin is a wealthy elder software businessman, jetting between LA and Seattle. The third corner of the love triangle in this tiny story is a young man who transforms from a bewildered, struggling, emotionally tone-deaf font artist to a self-assured, empathetic boyfriend. Martin is left on the outside at the end.

One scene was vivid for not being in Los Angeles: Danes’ visit to her parents in Vermont. Think every snow, sweater, weatherbeaten-house stereotype come to life, if only for a few minutes of screen time. Such a caricature it had us laughing even after the movie was over.

The mood of Shopgirl felt like LA Story, which was also written by Martin. LA is romanticized, and the voiceover from Martin in Shopgirl is reaching a bit. LA Story was funnier, even in its odd pseudo-mystical moments.

Still the Metacritic score of 62 seems low to me. I’m slightly curious to read Martin’s novella, and I’ll be happy to see other Martin films that are a bit more serious than the Cheaper by the Dozen collection.

I started the holidays by reading Interface, a thriller by Stephen Bury.

Who is Stephen Bury?

Neal Stephenson.

But the marketing of this 1994 book has clearly morphed over time. At the URL above, you’ll get no details on the author. The paperback copy I bought new has a red promotional circle on the cover saying it was co-written by Neal Stephenson.

Interface was re-released in May 2005 with two new authors: Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. No mention of Bury at all.

I would guess that J. Frederick George is also a pseudonym. Why switch from one pseudonym to another, as a co-author? If you’re going to put your name on the book, finally, then why not stand alone? I’m sure there are some good reasons for doing it this way, but I don’t know enough about the marketing of books (or perhaps book contracts) to understand.

The book cover touts the Seattle Weekly blurb “A Manchurian Candidate for the computer age.” Not a bad overview, though it’s not why I bought the book, even if the original was such a recent read.

Instead of the Soviets, the powers behind the conspiracy in Interface are “the Network,” a group of multinational investors out to avoid a threatened default on the U.S. national debt. Instead of brainwashing and solitaire, the Interface candidate is controlled by a computer chip inserted into his brain, ostensibly to help him recover from a stroke (which it does, but there are, ahem, side effects).

A critical part of the story is the development of a way of measuring representative voters’ reactions to various messages and advertisements: a biophysical focus group, constantly monitored by a bulky wristwatch TV which also measures pulse, etc. Jal noticed that like most science fiction, this idea is fascinating because it’s not that far off… it simply combines several currently separate threads. Using M.R.I.’s to See Politics on the Brain is the NYTimes article from April 20, 2004 which caught Steven Hall’s eye.

When the representative in representative democracy is only a puppet for the visceral strings of the voters, watch out.

Monday before Christmas, we did dinner and a movie with friends. The movie? Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I’ve seen at least two of the three previous films; I think I missed Sorcerer’s Stone. But I didn’t feel lost at all. The appeal (and curse) of sequels and series is that everything is familiar. Not bland, necessarily, but comfortable and connected. The exterior of Hogwarts felt and looked different than its previous incarnations. Here, the campus is set by a bay, not a lake, and it’s overall less gloomy/spooky from the outside. Aside from that detail, I’m ambivalent. The boy and girl need to be a bit older, and preferably read the books first.

Metacritic score of 81 is higher than I would have given, but it’s a fine movie.

Typical movie website…

The movie website doesn’t have distinct URLs for each film, so in the future, that URL will go to the wrong place. I continue to wonder why the people who market films think that’s a good idea. There are no links to the books or the previous films… I would expect at least an attempt to sell me the DVDs of the previous movies.

Oh well.

I suppose I’ll rail against these small details forever. Compare the Metacritic URL above, which includes links to games, books, other websites, etc. I’d be impressed with a movie website which pointed to Metacritic for all reviews, not just the selectively cited and quoted positive comments.

Cleaning out the Safari bookmarks from the past year or so, and dumping those worth keeping into my del.icio.us account. Along the way, I came across SFPD CrimeMAPS. This page describes the San Francisco Police Department’s CrimeMaps service, where you can view crime data mapped against the city. I think this was originally rolled out in 2003 or 2004, and I bookmarked the site before ChicagoCrime.org was announced. The SFPD site says Windows only, but it does work in Firefox 1.5 on a Mac. Awkward interface, considering what we’ve all come to expect.

But CrimeMaps is an ancestor (known or not) of ChicagoCrime.org from Adrian Holovaty. I see that Sgt. Tom Feledy of SFPD Crime Analysis Unit, the contact person for CrimeMaps, commented on Holovaty’s blog about the ChicagoCrime announcement back in May. I hope they worked something out and San Francisco can get a similar treatment. I searched for such a thing and didn’t find it, so if it already exists, please let me know.

I ordered the Project Aardvark movie as soon as Joel announced it. Still, it took me a few weeks to sit down and watch the 80-minute DVD before Christmas. Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks isn’t a video version of The Soul of a New Machine (read that if you have not). But Aardvark’d is a glance into a world that isn’t much visualized. There is a reason for that, of course: pictures of people typing, or visuals of computer code, don’t make for compelling film. The filmmaker avoids those cliches, smartly. The people are the story here, although I was more interested in the process and decision-making, which was less obvious in the film than in the blog. Only watch if you’re in the industry and want to recognize some personality types, or see Dan Bricklin and Paul Graham make their (effectively) cameos.

Joel mentions Code Rush and Startup.com as two other recent documentaries about software development. I haven’t seen them. Thoughts?

Kinja seems to have been reborn as an amalgamation of every statistic and tool publicly available about weblogs. The appeal is to the individual blogger, at first, more than then general public as a “reader” — which is probably quite smart. The reader space is just oh-so-crowded, even though it remains nascent in many ways.

Anyway, now each blog gets a page, and then a “card”. Here’s the Kinja card for clock.

When this is visible without editing your hosts file, then I’ve successfully switched DNS and clock is now running on WordPress 1.5.2 at TextDrive.

3:00am
Success! (At least for the website… e-mail is still dodgy.)

Comments and TrackBacks are enabled on a go-forward basis, and more tweaking can commence.

Now comes all the small stuff.

• Old feed redirect (.htaccess file) DONE
• MeasureMap script implementation DONE
• Check out the image references in the few posts which had them, uploading images/fixing references as necessary.
• Redirects for all the old URLs (more .htaccess work… ugh).

E-mail looks to be the most troublesome, so far, of the DNS switch.

What worked well

• Radio Userland exporter script which I learned about here… much easier than my previous attempts/methods via the more generic archive files.
• WordPress import of a MT file (categories excepted, small price to pay)
• FeedBurner instructions for WordPress with the wonderful FeedBurner WordPress plug-in which works as advertised (easily).
• EasyDNS tools for switching all the DNS… with the pesky confusion of MX records, which I am considering avoiding altogether.

9:00am Wed
More updates to come.

Other than the grey rain, it’s quite a Merry Christmas here in San Francisco. Hope you have a merry one, too, even if it’s not as dinosaur-centric as the five year old’s holiday.

I’ve saved page D1 of the December 7, 2005 Wall Street Journal for two reasons. The professional reason was the review of mobile web sites, which includes on the D4 jump a reference and “pseudo-screenshot” of CNET Mobile (http://m.cnet.com/). The personal reason was more important.

In an article “Many Colleges Ignore New SAT Writing Test,” documenting the acceptance (and lack thereof) by admissions departments of the new essay portion of the SAT, this howler leads off the fourth paragraph.

But some admissions officers say the essay’s predictive value hasn’t been established, that it tests a narrow skill–writing quickly–that isn’t core to a college education.

I tend to believe that writing quickly was the sine qua non of a college education. It may be a narrow skill, but so is breathing! 🙂