Samurai Boogie

Posted by Rob in Reading on Sat Mar 1, 2008

[cover]

Samurai Boogie by Peter Tasker is essentially an anime graphic novel in book form. The story itself is fun, something one might expect to read in a graphic novel or see in an action movie. The reader essentially follows around an old grizzled private eye as he deals with Yakuza gangsters, rich and powerful politicians, and other assorted characters.

When 24 the TV show first came out, it had a novel gimmick: the show would cut to a split screen format and show events simultaneously unfold in different parts of the story in “real time”. Over time, that gimmick went away; it remains only in the teaser leading and ending clips just before and after commercial breaks.

Samurai Boogie has a gimmick of its own. The text for the first few pages reads like the text of a graphic novel: short terse semi-sentences, leaving the reader free to draw the frame in his mind:

At the top of the stairs, a logn corridor. At the end, a sliding door with panels of translucent paper. Behind it, a hunched silhouette. Human, male.

Mori takes a half-step backwards. A floorboard groans. The silhouette stays motionless. So does Mori. Stillness. The only soudn the patter of the rain.

Go forward or back? Mori’s instincts decide. He moves down the corridor like a cat, slow motion, rolling his weight over each step forward. At the sliding door, he waits a lifetime. Then his fingernails open a millimetre of light; he lines his eye to the crack.

The gimmick is fun for a chapter or two, but Tasker thankfully backs off and allows the story to tell itself without gimmicky narration.

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Knight Rider

Posted by Rob in Movies on Sun Feb 24, 2008

The entire movie is available for watching here. My thoughts:

  • I think we watched an 80-minute Ford commercial. Kind of like watching 24.
  • Extremely short on plot and character development. So short that Patrika wouldn’t stop bugging me about “why didn’t they explain this?” “why don’t they explain that?” “I don’t understand …”. NBC needs to understand that certain segments of their audience can’t just watch a movie about a car and be happy. So they need to write in some plot to pacify that segment so the rest of us can just enjoy the movie.

Whatever. One signs up for all that when they decide to watch a movie based on a 25-year-old TV show.

[photo]

The one unforgiveable flaw was that this movie about a CAR didn’t highlight the CAR. There were a few nice sequences of self-healing nano-technology (what back in the day would have just been a bulletproof car) and some other low-budget special effects, but NBC promised a super-advanced “weapons system”. Even the old K2000 had a grappling hook (which was removed from the K3000).

Instead, we get a lot of scenes shot inside the car with the two leads talking to each other. Meh.

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Doppelganger

Posted by Rob in Reading on Sun Feb 17, 2008

[book cover]

I like to buy used books for $3 or less. For every few stinkers like W.E.B. Griffin Special Ops, I get a gem like Doppelganger by David Stahler, Jr.

The fact that it was $3 should have been a good signal that it would be good. As a counter-example, I await with trepidation a 1066-page $1 copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.

Doppelganger is a short 258-page read; I finished this book in one week of Muni time. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling it since the story is very very tight, but the story contains what I would expect a good book noir to contain:

  • Enough to make me disappointed that Muni is running on time, for once. For comparison, there were days when I’d rather stand amidst a horde of zombie commuters than work my way through another chapter of Special Ops.
  • A nice, tight noir plot, with a complementary completely unresolved ending. Good book noir is everything that formulaic weekly television is not: no episodic stories that are neatly resolved within a neat 30- or 60-minute time slot.

I suppose Doppelganger‘s story could be described as putting Smeagol into a John Cusack story, in book form.

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Sausalito

Posted by Rob in Photos on Sun Feb 17, 2008

Sausalito is your typical waterfront community; Bridgeway (the main drag) is lined with boutique art galleries and kitschy tourist shopping. There is a stretch where there is nothing but a walkway next to the water; it reminds me of a similar walkway near the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island.

Patrika succumbed to the tourist shopping and bought a puffy white coat for $20:

[photo] [photo] [photo]

If you have nothing else to do and it’s nice and sunny outside, it’s worth a trip.

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Armchair Generalz: El Guapo

Posted by Rob in Photos on Sat Feb 16, 2008

Winning a Super Bowl requires dedication, teamwork, and 110% from every player involved. We are speaking, of course, about the Newcastle Brown, 2007 champions of the Armchair Generalz Fantasy Football League, and winner of the coveted El Guapo trophy (nice job, Commissioner!):

[photo] [photo] [photo]

El Guapo stats:

  • Height: 5½”
  • Weight: ½ lb.
  • Base: marble
  • Noggin: bobble

The secrets to success this year:

  • Key double-up-combo big weeks of Big Ben to Hines Ward.
  • A big-play go-big-or-go-home San Diego Chargers defense.
  • Reliable TDs from Chris Cooley in our peculiar TE-favoring scoring system.
  • T.J. Houshmanzadeh.

Busts this year:

  • Frank Gore.
  • Ronnie Brown and the ineffective Jesse Chatman handcuff.

But that’s not all. Winning El Guapo was only half the battle. Bringing El Guapo home required Sisyphusian effort as well. The trophy was sent to my home address (ask me for my work address next year, please), which resulted in a “We Deliver For You!” slip left at the door and a 5-day delay to wait for the weekend to get a chance to go to the post office for pickup.

I’m sure that the USPS, FedEx, DHL, UPS, Airborne Express, etc., all have similar hub systems where packages go to some processing center before final delivery to its final destination. There ought to be a way for recipients to somehow register with these delivery services so that:

  • I register with USPS or FedEx or UPS or whomever.
  • If someone sends me a package, the delivery service sends me an e-mail telling me something is coming my way.
  • I go to their website or something and provide instructions on what to do: continue delivery, deliver to alternate address (e.g., my office, where I am every day), or hold because I’m on vacation for three weeks and won’t be around.
  • Everybody wins: the recipient doesn’t have to make a pickup run, the delivery service doesn’t have to make a wasted delivery run, and the planet wins because of less wasted gas and traffic.

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Sprint Sucks

Posted by Rob in Rants & Raves on Thu Feb 14, 2008

Yet another “my cell service provider sucks” post.

When we moved here from the East Coast, we wanted to change our number. We were told by the Sprint service person on the phone that it would require signing up for a new two-year contract. We were on a discounted plan (state employee), so we didn’t want to enter a new contract just for a new phone number, and thus we put up with a few annoyances for about a year:

  • Voice mails with East Coast timestamps (I think). Sprint told me that getting the timestamps corrected would require getting a new phone number.
  • The handyman for our house was unable to call us because we were outside his metro calling plan’s range of service (no out of state calls).

Finally we decided to switch to a pre-paid (“pay as you go”) plan (T-Mobile, $0.10/minute), so it was time to cancel service with Sprint. I called them tonight, and:

  • First rep transferred me to the “cancellation department”.
  • Second rep at the cancellation department transferred me to a “special” cancellation department because of the discount plan.
  • Third rep (finally) said that changing numbers would not have required a new plan (oh well), and that they would cancel the service after the billing cycle was over.

So we are now stuck with paying for two more weeks of service we don’t intend to use.

Ironically, when moving to the East Coast, I had switched from T-Mobile to Sprint, and T-Mobile had canceled my service immediately after the phone call. So welcome back to T-Mobile!

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SeatGuru (Airplane Seat Selection)

Posted by Rob in Links, Rants & Raves on Wed Jan 23, 2008

You’re booking a flight online, and you’re at the final step of seat selection: unless you commute on a plane, you don’t know which seats are the good ones, beyond your normal aisle-vs.-window preference.

SeatGuru provides schematics and advice on seat selection for airlines and their fleets of planes (your airplane model is usually known when you book your flight). For example: “rows B, C, and H have restricted seat leg and storage room due to an underseat equipment box”.

Sweet.

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Hyde St. Pier

Posted by Rob in Photos on Sat Jan 19, 2008

Hyde St. Pier is actually part of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The highlights for me:

  • Enough for locals to see, if you like looking at beaches and boats and national historical park kinds of stuff.
  • Enough for tourists to see (it’s very close to Ghirardelli Square).
  • Not as crowded as Fisherman’s Wharf.
[photo] [photo] [photo]

In unrelated news, I’m migrating my photos over to use Gallery. I’m not very happy about it, but I think it’s inevitable. The main reason for going to Gallery is that I want to get some kind of commenting system in place for the photos. But everything else that made me like QuickyPix still makes me sad:

  • Gallery: 1810 files, 307599 lines of PHP and “smarty” template code. QuickyPix: 10 files, 2500 lines of Python.
  • Database backend is required for Gallery, but that’s not a big deal since I’m running WordPress anyway.
  • Gallery themeing looks like it will be a huge pain. I’m already thinking I’m giving up on getting the photos to look integrated with the rest of the website.

On the other hand, I gain:

  • Comments.
  • Lots of other nice little features that I don’t necessarily care about that much, but are neat: random rotating photo, and a few WordPress-related plugins that I might check out someday (I’m pessimistic about my prospects here).
  • Addressability of single photos: individual photos can be linked to; my QuickyPix setup only allowed addressability of whole albums.

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Macworld Expo 2008

Posted by Rob in Computers, Photos on Thu Jan 17, 2008

My first Macworld Expo. I didn’t go to the Keynote speech; I just got a free exhibits-only pass, and went on Wednesday after all the Mac fanatics got their fix.

This is also my first trade-show that was not one geared towards enterprise infrastructure. It was immediately apparent on the exhibit floor:

  • At an enterprise-vendor trade show, everyone pays (albeit employers usually pay), so both the exhibitors and the attendees seem to be more “serious” about the exhibit floor, and everyone is more engaged. It is relatively easy to get into the Macworld exhibit halls for free, so you have lots of “non-serious” browsers. In return, the exhibitors aren’t necessarily as aggressive about tracking down people who are just idly standing around; they figure you’re just a gawker.
  • At an enterprise-vendor trade show, the product is generally available for display, but people aren’t actually selling the product right then and there, since the purchase cycle usually goes through some million-dollar purchasing process, and requires racking some pizza-box machine into a cabinet. At Macworld, there were *so* many vendors of laptop cases, sleeves, iPod skins, headphone accessories, it almost looked like a flea market or some street bazaar. Presumably they are there to sell to retailers (Best Buy, Target, etc.) who would be presumably paying some employees to go check out what is new this year. Although, of the consumer products available for sale, most had an “expo” rate that was up to 50% off their list price.

The one cool thing was some actual space where the new products were being demonstrated – iPhones, iPods, and of course, the new MacBook Air:

[photo]

I was kind of underwhelmed:

  • Heavier than expected. It’s still pretty light as far as laptops and portables go, and it is certainly thin and stylish, but I think calling it “Air” is a bit premature.
  • I’m not a fan of the chiclet-style MacBook-like keyboard. I prefer the MacBook Pro keyboard.

But it is kind of neat to be able to provide a first-person description of it without having to wait two months to see one in an Apple store :).

Am I glad I went? Sure. Will I go again? Sure, there is enough to see to keep any computer geek happy (even a non-Machead like myself). Would I line up at 5am in the morning? No way.

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Firefly Media Server

Posted by Rob in Computers on Sat Dec 29, 2007

My MacBook Pro has been gradually taking over primary-computer-and-storage responsibilities (photos, music, web browsing, etc.). The laptop gets periodically backed up to my main always-on Linux server.

One side effect of the Mac-ification of my life is that my music collection became iTunes-ified. To get my Windows machine into the program, I had to throw out Winamp and install iTunes for Windows.

I started importing all the music into the Windows iTunes, but then realized I’d have to do a re-import every time I added more music. What a drag. Then I noticed that the Windows iTunes was displaying the MacBook under “Shared Music”. That was when the light bulb went on – I should be able to set up an iTunes server on the Linux machine. Then the Windows machine could just remotely play everything and automatically stay up to date with no import pain, since the Linux machine gets a direct backup of everything.

Enter Firefly Media Server (formerly known as mt-daapd). All my research indicated I’d have to download and compile stuff from Apple, ugh. But those articles were all at least 3 years old. Forging ahead:

% aptitude install mt-daapd

I started the ornerous task of dealing with Rendezvous.tar.gz from Apple when out of the corner of eye, I noticed that everything was already working, playlists and all!

[photo]

Quite possibly my least-painful Linux experience ever.

Unfortunately, mythmusic on the MythTV machine lacks a DAAP client, so I’m still stuck synchronizing files over (and using mythmusic’s horrible GUI). Ideally I’d set it up to look like an AirPort Express with AirTunes so that I can push my laptop iTunes to the living room speakers, but apparently there is some still-uncracked encryption involved that prevents this from being a reality.

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