Tsaiberspace

Eastern Promises promises (heh) to be a different kind of gangster movie, but it doesn’t really offer anything interestingly new to the genre, not even the twist towards the end. In fact, it even provides the cliched segment where the police detective goes into a lecture of describing what the various kinds of gangster tattoos mean.

Basically, the movie faithfully follows a gangster-film formula - gritty atmosphere, hard-core criminals, crime-family politics. Viggo Mortensen adds nicely to his diverse repetoire of leading roles (though nowhere near as diverse as that of Kevin Bacon), playing a limo driver for a crime family.

The server died last Wednesday. If a blog server crashes and no one reads it, does it make a sound?

For the past few years, tsaiberspace.net was running on a series of recycled computers, first a P2-400MHz, then a P3-700MHz. Then it mysteriously gave up the host. The machine wouldn’t boot, with nary a BIOS error on-screen.

After half a week, I finally transplanted the brains (the hard drive) to a better, stronger, faster machine (another hand-me-down) - a P4-2.6GHz with hyper-threading - and there weren’t any failure messages in the logfiles in the last minutes of life. Oh well.

tsaiberspace.net, web site. A site barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first tsaiberspace blog. tsaiberspace.net will be that blog. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

The Banana Chase is a family-friendly 5k/10k race that starts at Kezar Stadium and loops around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. As far as runs in the city go, it isn’t that special; most of the others (Bay to Breakers, Bridge to Bridge) have some oceanside views, or some tradition to make it unique (costumes in Bay to Breakers).

What the Banana Chase has going for it is a gimmick: the race organizers have people dressed up in banana costumes running the course; the promise to the runners is that each banana passed is worth a chance at winning prizes.

The gimmicky implication (to my imagination, anyway) is that runners are tackling big yellow banana costumes along the course, scalping them to collect trophies, and turning them in at the finish line for raffle tickets.

In reality, I suspect each banana maintains a pre-determined pace such that the organizers only need to look at a runner’s finish time to determine how many bananas were “passed”.

This was also an attempt to get back in to running shape. My last run was the Vineyards in Carneros 5k, where I ran 5k at a pace of 8:53. Today I ran the 10k to get my money’s worth (5k and 10k entry fees were the same), and finished the 10k at an even more-leisurely pace of 10:09 (includes two bathroom breaks).

A few members of the cast of Breaking News return for Exiled. Exiled is a typical Hong Kong gangster action movie, where plot, characters, and action sequences are all completely and absurdly stylized and glamourized. Exiled starts out with a typical-enough story: a former gangster hitman has gone straight to raise a family, but is paid a visit by some old associates. The movie somehow meanders into a tale of stolen gold and wifely revenge.

Meh. One doesn’t watch this movie for the plot, and the choreography and style more than satisfy.

We saw this movie at the 4 Star Movie Theater, an independent theater in San Francisco known for its Asian fare and an Asian film festival it hosts every summer; it is the only theater in the United States that shows first-run Hong Kong movies within days of release.

I got to feel good about myself for having a nice Chinese dim-sum lunch ($10), for supporting inexpensive local independent theater ($8.50), and for getting a cool T-shirt (the design is what is on the theater home page; $8).

The Google-ification continues.

What was once known as the “Links” category will most likely become defunct, in favor of my Google Reader Shared Items list (see right; its feed is here). Clicking the “share” button from the Reader is just too simple (for me), and besides, who has time these days to blog about a simple link?

The latest shared item links to a pretty cool demo video about the Jawbone Bluetooth headset.

San Francisco parking meters are free on Labor Day.

We drove downtown intending to see the Cartoon Art Museum, and then to the Metreon to see Da Vinci - An Exhibition of Genius. However, it turned out the Cartoon Art Museum was closed on Mondays (as are many of the museums around that area), so we walked around the Market Street area, then went to see the Da Vinci exhibit.

The exhibit was actually very good ($20/person). It is a traveling exhibit intended to showcase replicas of many of Da Vinci’s writings and mechanical designs. The exhibit has a no-photography policy, so I have no pictures. The codices weren’t that interesting to look at - they are just replicas of the little notebooks Da Vinci kept. Some trivia about the codices:

• Da Vinci kept his notes in a “secret” code - mirror writing. I can’t read Italian, but I think the exhibit would have been more interesting if there were little mirrors next to the books, just to see what non-mirror writing would have looked like.
• Bill Gates owns the only codex currently kept in a private collection; the rest are all in museums and such.

The more interesting part of the exhibit is the collection of recreations of many of Da Vinci’s mechanical civil- and military engineering notes. There are interactive wooden models demonstrating gears, flying machines, machine guns, and submarines.

The coolest thing was Da Vinci’s “safety bridge” - it was a bridge designed to be buildable by soldiers in times of emergency using only pieces of lumber as might be found near a river, without requiring nails or rope. I wish I could have taken a photograph to describe what I saw. This is all I could find (picture links to some random website). In some ways it’s the perfect photo because it was also apparently taken at the Da Vinci exhibit:

The other neat thing I learned today had to do with The Last Supper. Christ was painted non-traditionally, without a halo surrounding his head. Instead, Da Vinci used lighting and perspective to make all the lines from the doors and windows radiate out from Christ’s head, to suggest a halo (the photo links to Wikipedia, which contains lots of other interesting Da Vinci Code-like trivia about the painting):

Finally, on our way back to the car, we passed by the carousel outside Yerba Buena Gardens. I hate making these kinds of observations, but the carousel very locked down. It’s hard to see from the photo, but the carousel is completely surrounded by pedophile-proof glass windows and emergency doors, with only one entrance and one exit. The eerie effect is that you have a completely silent merry-go-round where one can observe laughing kids and such, but not hear them: