Tsaiberspace

Pictures from Jeff & Peggy (wedding this past weekend in New York):

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

Equilibrium is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all citizens are required to take regular doses of the emotion-suppressing drug “Prozium”, in the belief that suppressing emotion will suppress conflict and thus avoid any future horrific wars.

The premise (art) sounds pretty good: Christian Bale plays John Preston, a law-enforcing Prozium-popping Cleric First-Class trained in the deadly art of gun kata, and spends lots of ammunition in the pursuit of peace for all.

I prepared myself for some hot 1-on-30 action, but my life instead unfortunately imitated the wrong part of the art. Equilibrium is a double-dose of Prozium. The lack of a story hinders more than helps this movie (even for one of this genre, where one doesn’t want a story to get in the way of the action). The monotonic Christian Bale is more snooze-inducing than stoic; even his record-setting 118 kills cannot save this movie.

I just started a new job two weeks ago. Standard issue for engineers at the company is a choice of laptop: Dell (Windows) or MacBook Pro (Mac OS X). Already being very familiar with Dell and Windows, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to kick the Apple tires.

The hardware is very nice: bright widescreen LCD display, stylish silver finish, pleasant-to-the-touch keyboard, and the very retro one-button trackpad. However, I have been more annoyed than enthralled by everything else that is Mac:

• Everyone raves about the great UI, but while it might be good for completely novice computer users, it’s not so great for anyone who wants to actually get any real work done. Particularly annoying is the motif of a single menu bar at the top of the screen. If I move my application window down to the bottom of the screen, I still have to move the mouse all the way back up to the top of the screen to activate the menu. In Windows, the menus appear within the application window, so the menu bar is never that far away. The single menu bar at the top of the screen saves some screen real estate, but I’m more interested in getting work done than I am in watching my desktop background change colors.
• There is no convenient keyboard-able shortcut system to activate the menus: one must know either the undocumented Ctrl-F2 keystroke to reach the menus, or the pre-built shortcut keys for various functions (open, save, cut, copy, paste, quit, etc.). In Windows, the menu is easily accessible via “Alt”, and the “hot” keys are denoted with underlining.
• The trackpad is neat: one can pan around windows with one hand by holding one finger to the trackpad and using another finger to issue a scrolling motion. However, shipping the laptop with just one button? A single-button trackpad and single-button mouse might look more stylish, but Apple needs to just invent the stylish moral equivalent of a two-button mouse.

Anyway, there are already lots of websites out there that complain about similar issues (and just as many that tout the superiority of such “issues”), so I’ll just say that those are the top-three annoyances.

The whole suite of iLife applications (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.) is probably fine and very nice, but at least for normal engineering work, I gave it a shot, and didn’t like it. So I’ve spent the past week getting my MacBook Pro to work and look just like my Linux desktop (this is where I will admit that I like the “OS X” part of “Mac OS X”). It has been a much more fruitful exercise bending the MBP to my will, than teaching this old dog the new Mac tricks.

The second import from Tony Jaa (Ong Bak) features the stuntman doing all his own spectacular stunts sans wires, computer graphics, camera tricks, acting, drama, and plot.

There is less parkour to enjoy than in the first movie, mostly because it seems like the movie producers decided to drop all pretense of a plot, and thus of any motivation for any chase scenes, and just skip straight to the video-game fight scenes.

There are more nods to other movies:

• We get to follow Jaa fight his way up a building in an extended, single-cut, 10-or-so-minute scene, Hard Boiled-style.
• He fights opponents of varying fighting styles: capoeira, swordsman, big dudes, and whip-wielding dominatrix (Bloodsport, Quest, Game of Death, just about any martial-arts film).
• He takes down a whole room of suit-wearing Agent Smith wannabes, Neo-style.

One never watches these movies for plot, but other inconsistencies still made the movie almost laughable to watch. In particular, the movie felt very much like watching someone play a video game, propelling Tony Jaa from one contrived fight scene to the next. Even more video-game like are the inconsistencies where after defeating one foe and turning to address the next opponent in turn (of course), the body of the first foe somehow disappears, Double Dragon style, to make room for the next fight.

As a side note, the Thai title Tom Yum Goong is the name of a spicy soup dish, which actually does have relevance to the movie (no spoiler; you’ll understand after you watch).

We’re basically unpacked now.

The moving company billed us for a total weight of 4460 lbs. The total weight of the boxes was 3490 lbs. (previously blogged). Generously estimating the weight of furniture and other padding materials (all our furniture, mattress, TV, etc., was wrapped in big heavy blankets), I ended up with 4360 lbs., which is still less than the billed weight, but close enough for me to not raise a fuss. The total charge was $5135.42, which is of course very conveniently just under the original binding do-not-exceed estimate of $5365.48. But I guess I was expecting that kind of shadiness.

The mover in Boston did comment that it was the first time in his 15 years of moving that he had seen anyone label all the boxes with their weight.

The car arrived without incident, although I had to wait a lot longer for my car because the girl who normally drives cars out from the garage to the customer pick-up area didn’t know how to drive manual transmission. This was my second time using Dependable Auto Shippers (the previous time was a California-to-Atlanta move back in September 2001), and there were again no problems. I didn’t purchase any of the extra options (covered transport, top-level transport, or expedited delivery).

There were a few slight problems with the move:

• The local moving company didn’t have any complementary paperwork, so we had to work with our own inventory of items and boxes.
• I’m missing one box that I inventoried as a 15-lb. box of “Dell 2+1 speakers”. Hopefully I didn’t stash anything else valuable in there, which means I’m only out a set of plain computer speakers. This means we have to file a claim for lost property reimbursement.
• We somehow picked up an extra metal support strut for someone’s bed frame. So we have to wait for the local moving company to send someone to pick up this extra piece.

The move was not a total disaster, but the one box could have very easily contained something more important or valuable. Given that there are many many other options out there, I will probably go back to using Wheaton Worldwide the next time I need long-haul moving services.