Hollywood Scifi Going Down The Tubes

It's true. Hollywood is run by a bunch of accountants and won't take risks on sci-fi. It's a small market segment, and a difficult one to please – a bunch of smart, hip, geeks raised on Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Star Wars. So we won't be seeing much good sci-fi from tinsel town any time soon.


Not surprising. Can you name one good sci-fi movie this year? How 'bout last year? Nope. Not a one. Well, maybe Primer, but that was independent.


5-10 years ago I had completely given up on TV (with the exception of X-Files and Star Trek: Voyager) and pretty much only watched dvds. We had The Matrix, The Fifth Element, tons of great shows like that – I was a demographic and loved it. Now it's reversed, all the good sci-fi is back on TV. We have possibly the most imaginative and well-written shows back on the air – Doctor Who. We have the gritty Battlestar Galactica. New stuff like The Triangle, The 4400, and Jericho look good. Recently we had Firefly, Enterprise and Stargate. Great stuff. Add in an HDTV PVR and I may never go to the theater or buy a dvd again. Why is this happening?


The long tail. Basically, TV can budget and sell to a smaller audience and still make money, while Hollywood can't. When on-demand or download becomes big, it will get even worse. Lesson to hollywood: sell to a mass market of one. Namely me.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72192-0.html?tw=wn_index_16

My Wish List

If anyone's wondering what gifts I'm looking for this Christmas/Birthday/Whatever...

Camera:

• Nikon D90 12.3MP DSLR with 18-105mm & 70-300mm Zoom Lens Kit Package. I don't expect anyone to actually buy this for me, but I want to keep an eye on the costs on this one.
  

Scotch:

• Nearly any brand, I'm out of just about everything.
• If you're looking for specific kinds, check out the list of nearly every bottle I've ever bought here.

Books:

• Cigar Aficionado magazine
  
• Moleskine notebooks
  
• Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship
• Memories of the Future Vol 1
• Multitool
  

Misc:

• King sized bed sheets, something to match chocolate brown and white. Ones at Costco are on sale for $40.
  
• Atomic Tarantula T-Shirts : Ono-Sendai, Tyrell Corp, Hal 9000, or AE-35 unit ones especially.
• Cigars. I'm partial to Flour de Copan, Mehari's, just about anything.
• Moleskine Folio
  
• SU-27 Soviet Air Superiority Fighter

The Tron Effect

 

 

Poignant, thought provoking blog post about what many of us (myself included) look upon as the golden years of technology: The early 80's. Movies like Tron, The Last Starfighter, and even the opening credits of Disney's The Black Hole displayed the then-nascent use of computer graphics as special effects. This deeply moved us geeks, and helped us to find each other through these surprisingly popular movies. Do you remember being blown away by the genesis torpedo simulation in Star Trek II?

Coming of age in the 80s was an amazing experience. Technology was very new, and not very well understood by parents or corporations. As a consequence, they pretty much let us run amok with it, I mean, what harm could it do?

I remember touching my first computer. It was an Apple I that my grade 6 science teacher brought in to class for use to check out. He was an amazing guy, showed me how to use a telescope, showed me how to use a microscope, and let me play with his computer at a time when they were very rare and very expensive. This must have been in '81. He brought it in to school in the guise of using it to compute your caloric intake for the week for a biology lesson, but I knew the truth: he was enamored with the machine and wanted to see us play with it to bring it alive. Like most science that he taught, he wanted us to fall in love with it like he did. And I did.

I remember writing my first line of code. It was the next year ('82), in grade 7. God, that means I've been writing code for almost 25 years. We were the first school in Alberta to get a computer lab, filled with about a dozen Apple IIs. It was your stereotypical '10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"'. I was smitten. I wrote hand-designed graphics scripts of Saturn IV rockets blasting off, text games where you wandered from room to room dying gruesome deaths, and playing games like Lode Runner. We were a tiny band of guys, typically good in math and science, typically into sci-fi and typically socially inept. We were geeks, and here in the lab we could be safe and proud of our geekyness. They even gave us fancy transparent cards that we had to show to be allowed in the lab.

 

I remember my dad coming home with a Tandy 100 -- the first computer we had in our home. It ran off 6 AA batteries, had a 40 x 8 character screen and ran Basic. But most importantly it had an internal 300 baud modem at a time when most modems used acoustic couplers. This one you jacked right into the wall. We dialed into all sorts of places, including making lots of long distance calls into compuserve to play games and wander around. BBSs were mind-blowing.

Now here I sit, typing this into a laptop with several orders of magnitude more power than that model 100 updating my blog across a broadband internet connection to my home server. In front of me I have my ipod holding thousands of songs. At my side is my trusty blackberry that gives me my email and internet connection just about anywhere - I've updated this blog from a taxi leaving the Vegas airport. I do a job that didn't exist when I first walked into that lab. I manage a heterogeneous agile application development team. I've been flown all the way around the world to deploy globe-spanning corporate networks. I've spoken in front of hundreds of people at conferences about the implications and effective use of technology. Geeks have arrived.

But, damn it, I miss those days. We're victims of our own success. We've matured and matured the technology along with us, but along the way the tech has become commodotized and rationalized. And we geeks have gone down the same path. We've become a part of business culture. Which is a good in some ways, we've helped drive up the efficiency of our companies and provide competitive advantages unheard of 20 years ago. But I've lost something along the way. My innocence, my simple joy of making new things out of the nothingness of code. I've become jaded and a bit burnt out. Is this the world we wanted to create? Where nothing mattered but the meritocracy of our imagination, where we could see past our social limitations? Somehow it got twisted, somehow we sold out... but at least we can feed our families doing some of the things we love. We changed the world, and the world changed us.

END OF LINE.

 

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/the_tron_effect

Babyshambles: Down In Albion

The Babyshambles are a bit obvious in the Robert Smith "I'm so tortured" kinda way, but still interesting. Folksy but alty if you know what I mean. Decent but not killer.
http://www.amazon.com/Down-Albion-Babyshambles/dp/B000CSUMN0/sr=1-1/qid=1164691453/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

The Arcade Fire: Funeral

I guess I've been under a rock 'cause I had never heard of The Arcade Fire. Barely conscious reminders of Radiohead and Modest Mouse with a touch of the Bright Eye's brilliant rough edges. Great, great stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/Funeral-Arcade-Fire/dp/B0002IVN9W/sr=1-1/qid=1164691309/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

Pheonix: It's Never Been Like That

If you're into Interpol, The Arcade Fire, or The Bloc Party chances are you'll dig Pheonix. Eclectic, silly, retro, and effortless.
http://www.amazon.com/Its-Never-Been-Like-That/dp/B000FC2FVA/sr=1-1/qid=1164691142/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

Razorlight

Kick ass. Great britpop tunes, well written. Love the lyrics to 'America'. Go buy this disc now.

http://www.amazon.com/Razorlight/dp/B000GH2PUU/sr=1-1/qid=1164690405/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

Westlife: A Bunch Of Crap

WTF? Are boy bands back?
I don't know what the hell album I downloaded from these guys, and I don't care. Whatever they put out avoid at all costs. Please do yourself and those around you a favor.
http://www.amazon.com/Face-Westlife/dp/B000BIQKXM/sr=1-2/qid=1164690271/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

Sam Roberts: Chemical City

Sam Roberts is back with the new disc, Chemical City. Good old fashioned Canadian rock 'n roll, but I'd be surprised if it broke through to the US/UK markets. Definitely worth a listen, particularly the anthemic “The Gate” and the mellower socially conscious “Bridge to Nowhere”.
http://www.amazon.com/Chemical-City-Sam-Roberts/dp/B000EZ8ZZS/sr=8-1/qid=1164689970/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0536564-8441766?ie=UTF8&s=music

Teen Creates Fusion

In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/NEWS03/611190639

Novell's Honeymoon With Microsoft Over

It sounds like Microsoft's spin of the IP patent deal has finally sunk in with Novell... Come on, Novell -- they've screwed companies bigger than you over in their sleep. Talk to IBM, Lotus, or Apple. They were bigger, smarter, and faster than Microsoft, and the moment they made agreements with Redmond it was just about over. Dos? Stolen. Spreadsheets? Stolen. Wingui? Stolen.
Besides, even if you survive the deal, your street cred's over. And that's something that even Microsoft can't buy.
Here's what Novell had to say:

"We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents.

Our stance on software patents is unchanged by the agreement with Microsoft. We want to remind the community of Novell's commitment to, and prior actions in support of, furthering the interests of Linux and open source, and creating an environment of free and open innovation. We have a strong patent portfolio and we have leveraged that portfolio for the benefit of the open source community."
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/community_open_letter.html

“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?em&ex=1163998800&en=f02de71136ca5dd5&ei=5087%0A

Star Trek Inspirational Posters

My fave: "Captian Kirk -- I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."

Also, more here. 

http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/star_trek_insp.html

Gosling on Open Sourcing Java

"The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process. In addition, there are massive test suites, and we will do an immense amount of testing. We expect that people who care about reliability and compatibility with the spec will use our version.

The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves -- those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that, and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

So it shouldn't give anybody any concerns as far as fragmentation. We're not just going to let random people check random code in. Just like every other open-source project, we will end up with a set of rules for who's allowed to check in a lot. Everything will get checked and rechecked and debugged."
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/gosling_os1_qa.html

Managing IT

Executives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0611/article/R0611J.jhtml;jsessionid=ZI5G4OQONIVHKAKRGWCB5VQBKE0YOISW?type=F

Communication

It isn't often you get something from your boss that makes you think. I got this tidbit in my MOR meeting a couple of weeks ago and it's been drifting through my mind.
He asked me how many times do you have to communicate something before people get it. Take a guess.
I bet you're wrong. 13 times. Thirteen freakin' times.
Think about that the next time you're rolling out a new app or process. Sheesh.

A Sound Of Thunder

OK.
This wasn't a good movie. But it wasn't a terrible one either.
For those that don't know, it's a very loose adaptation of a Robert Heinlien movie where a bunch of guys go back in time on a hunting expedition where one accidentally steps on a butterfly and alters the timeline.
The effects, acting, writing, or direction weren't good. But the story still was. At least if you read it as a child like me and were enamored with it.
Look, it's science fiction. When it tries to be interesting it's at least worth overlooking the fact that it's not, isn't it?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/

Canada, Germany Lead World In Privacy and Human Rights Protections

Bottom of the list? China, Malaysia, Sweden, the UK and the US.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/phr2005/phrtable.pdf