Monthly Archives: March 2006

Movie Review: The Fourty Year Old Virgin

The film The Fourty Year Old Virgin fills one with dread. A movie about a 40 year old overgrown geek, Andy Stitzer played by Steve Carell, whose co-workers suddenly decide that they must help him bust his cherry.

And yet, this film managed to be funny without being disgusting or insulting. It did not resort to cheap and stupid laughs, instead it managed to reach the line, dance on it like a tightrope walker and stay on it. The first 3/4 of the film are about the desperate attempts Andy takes to finally rectify a 25 year old itch. The last 1/4 of the film is a romantic commedy. The first 3/4 is better, but the last 1/4 satisfies the moviegoer.

This is a fun movie, that’s a date flick for the happily married or happily settled …

Movie Review: Good night and good luck.

The Red Scare of the late 40’s and early 50’s was the product of fear and cowardice. Fear of the American public and cowardice of it’s leadership. Senator Eugene McArthy capitalized on this moment to destroy lives and to send America to precipice, before courageous people were able to pull America back from the brink.

One of those individuals who helped America pull back from the brink of mass hysteria was Edward P. Murrow. At least I suppose he was one of those heroes. In the film Good night and good luck we are sent back into the past to watch the events of that era. It’s unclear from the film, however, what we are watching. Are we watching the journalistic process? Are we watching good fight evil? Are we watching a couple caught in the wierd rules that CBS had about married couples? Are we watching George Clooney shoot a black and white film for his final thesis in his directing masters?

The film focusses on a set of critical broadcasts, Murrow’s attack on McArthy and McArthy’s attack on Murrow. By shooting the entire film in black and white (technically: The film was shot on color film on a grayscale set, then color-corrected in post) and using original footage, the impact and drama of those broadcasts is not lost. What is lost is why did Murrow do it. What motivated him to attack McArthy? Why did he, unlike everyone else, go out on a limb to attack a madman? The film suggests that it was his own natural outrage, but then why did he feel so outraged? Or was it that he was a great journalist and like all great journalists saw that there was a great story to be told?

We’ll never know.

And that’s the problem with this film. At no point do we understand why Murrow did what he did, and at no point do we get a feeling for why what he did was so important and at no point do we get the drama of what he did. Instead we see a collection of journalists pursuing a story against a madman using TV to destroy his reputation.

Ironically, Edward P. Murrow’s main contribution may not have been his attack on McArthy, but his persuasive demonstration that by editing and cutting footage you can construct a case proving anything. From the See It Now episode on McArthy there is a direct line to Michael Moore’s Farhenheit 9/11 and television’s Survivor. The message is no longer controlled by the speaker but by the editor of the message.

Maybe the soundbite culture emerged when McArthy blew it on television.

As a film, it’s an interesting exercise in directing skills, but the story is best read on your favourite web site where more color and texture can be added to the tale.

In a year of weak movies, this may have squeaked by because the Academy is always impressed with someone telling them how heroic they are, and because Clooney as a director did a good job.

Movie Review: The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener, is a movie based on the book written by John LeCarre. John LeCarre was cast adript by the end of cold war, much like the Easter Bloc. Fortunately, the Eastern Bloc transformed itself to a better place, John LeCarre did not.

The problem with the book is that half is a flashback, followed by a story in the present. The flashback starts when the wife, Tessa Quayle, of the protagonist, John Quayle, is found raped, and murdered on a road in Kenya. Initially we suspect the mysterious Kenyan doctor that she hanged out with, but he is too virtuous to convince anyone but the characters trapped in LeCarre’s book. The second half is the explanation of why Tessa had to die. And being an annoying activist trying to save the world is not a good enough explanation. It takes about 15 minutes to understand that there is an evil conspiracy involving drugs, the government and money. The horror! The horror!
The agonizing exposition of the wife’s work reminds me of Ralphe Fienne’s other work (The English Patient) with it’s soft light, unbearable slow pace, pointless sex scene involving and demure and quiet vocals (my speakers were maxed out and I could still not hear them or was I nodding off?). Once the exposition is complete we turn to the present moment. It’s 1944… oops wrong movie.

In fact it’s the 1990’s and the big pharmas are trying to make a quick buck by doing TB tests in Africa where simple things like clinical trials don’t have the same controls as they do in the US or Western Europe. Thanks to those clinical tests, the drugs will be adopted in Europe in time to save us from the coming TB plague! Why? Because the tests will doctored up just enough.
So wait. This movie ignores basic science and process around how drugs go to market and reflects society’s ongoing ambivalence of how drugs are manufactured. The basic science infuriates me, the ambivalence irritates. For how drugs actually get tested and the kinds of process that are involved check out the FDA’s website.

But for the ambivalence, let me stress, that as part of the development of drugs, people die, little fuzzy animals die, and some people make a lot of money. It’s a faustian pact that allows our lives last a little longer on the backs of thousands of dead lives both in the animal and human kingdom. Some of the folks who die or suffer do so under informed consent, and others do it for a fast buck and others because of their location in the food chain. But the reality is that without clinical trials, we would never have invented the millions of drugs we do have.

And if you want to understand the imapct on our lives, watch Lost. Everytime you got cut before antibiotics were invented you died. Think about that. Every single time. In the first world war, the survival rate for abdomen wounds was 1%.

So big pharma should make money. And we should encorage them to make even more money. And we should think that for the most part there are watchmen watching the watchmen.

But all of that subtlety is lost in this film. Instead it’s bad evil corporations trying to make even more money in the drug lotteries of this messed up world. Oh and the sad tale of love found and lost and death and the circle of life.
Pass on this one.

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

The ongoing saga of the wizard and his charming little friends continues. The story is well known. Harry ends up at hogwarts, Voldemort concots a bizarre, convuluted plot to get Harry to do something absurd, Harry partially foils the trap and the scooby gang of Hermione and Ron help Harry wherever they can.

Spoiler so please skip next paragraph.

In this installment of the story, Voldemort, concots the most elaborate scheme of them all. He gets Harry to enter the Triwizard contest, helps Harry win the contest, just so Harry can grab the Triwizard trophy and end up at graveyard where his blood is the key secret ingredient to finally bringing Voldemort all the way back.

End of spoiler.

Amazingly this plot took JK Rowling more than 100 pages to write. Further confirming my wife’s comment that within each book there is a good book.

As for myself, I am not a Potter fan. I find the books to be poorly written nonesense that might amuse children, but can not be called literature, more like trashy fiction for the under 12 set.

But the movies, are a different story. The movies are flights of fancy where the visuals can collapse hundreds of pages of description into seconds of screen panning. The characters continue to have a vitality and energy. The story continues to amuse, as long as you avoid thinking at all too deeply.

One discordant note, the computer graphics in this installment, were not as good as they could have been. For a movie that makes a billion dollars, they could have tried harder to get their water effects to look more real. But maybe I am being churlish. This is fantasy, not reality and who am I to say what a carriage full of girls being pulled by Pegasi looks like…

Book Review: The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Five times I have read this book. Everytime I read it I learn to appreciate it a little bit more and a little bit less.

On the positive side, the depiction of the mafia, fictionalized as it is, the twisted logic of the world it inhabits continues to fascinate and disturbe me. There is something very twisted about how Don Corleone and his family live their sociopathic ways. How the Don is pleased how his family takes care of it’s own during the depression. How the Don simultaneoulsy helps Johnny Fontane and hurts him.

Micheal Corleone summarizes our ambivalence to the Godfather when he walks in Sicily and observes how if the Don’s world were to take over, the Sicily would be the outcome, and that that was not a pretty outcome.

On the negative side, do we really need to learn about vaginal tears, vaginal reconstructive surgery, and Nino Valentine’s manic depression? The entire side story involving Johnny Fontane and his crew in Hollywood seems bizarre, odd and irrelevant. It’s almost as if Mario had some extra material about Hollywood in the post-war era, and felt compelled to share it with us.

On the further negative side, the endless speaches by characters as they expose their feelings reads like Ayn Rand. And that’s not a compliment. Michael’s speech before the assissination of Solazzo, although informative is a soliloquouy. The belief that a bunch of tough guy gangsters would have enough patience to listen to Michael spew, when I have barely the patience to read the spew breaks the spell the book has.

I suspect that I read it most recently because the Soprano’s started again. And if you’re going to watch Tony, you might as well read about Michael.

1367 Ramon Drive.

1367_ramon_drive.jpg

When I moved into my nice little neighborhood in July 2005, my realtor, Ann Sorger, took one look around and said: Your house is going to be the smallest house in a few years.

What few years!

Just today, another house went on sale. It’s another stucco pastel box with 5 bedrooms, a bay window and a three car garage. My charming little house is going to feel like driving a honda civic on 101 in a few months at this rate.

Peet’s Coffee: Kenya

Month 2 of my 12 month coffee tour of the globe.

In this month, Peet’s Coffee has decided to ship a Kenyan coffee. Kenyan black coffee is what coffee is supposed to taste like.

It has a strong smell, no lingering aftertaste once it’s imbibed, not too bitter or acidic. Just right.

The colour of the grounds and the coffee is very dark.

When talking about tastes, it’s important to compare it to other coffees. This coffee has more body than the guantemalan coffee that was sent last month, more flavor, but still as smooth. This version of Kenyan coffee is more full bodied than the Black Apron blend that Starbucks had on sale, Kenya Kirinyaga, but still not quite as good. There is a certain amount of roughness in the taste of the Peet’s Coffee blend that the Kirinyaga blend simply did not have.

My wife continues to be the greatest wife ever by indulging me in this obsession.

No-way Jose.

It doesn’t seem possible, but only four years after rescuing this franchise with his incredible goaltending, jose theodore is out. And of all places: he’s going to Colorado. You’d think that GM’s in Montreal would be forbidden from trading French Canadian goaltenders to Colorado after Patrick Roy went there. But you’d be mistaken.

Free Blogging Software.

In 1994, a friend of mine introduced me to Linux. He said that Linux was the only real way to surf the internet. That real hackers used Linux. So I tried and almost succeeded at installing the Linux 0.92 Kernel and XFree86.

The experience taught me two things.

  1. Free software has very poor documentation
  2. Free software is only as free as your time.

When I went to SGI in 1996 I avoided Linux like the plague until 1999 when I quite SGI to Network Appliance, where I once again started using Linux. In the intervening 5 years, I was actually impressed with the amount of progress that had been made in simplifying the installation and set up of Linux. So much so that I actually used the product for about 2 years, until I discovered the power of cut-and-paste in Windows.

But what does that have to do with blogging software? I wanted to do a full disclosure. I am not a free software advocate. I am an advocate of using tools that work and that are supported and that are well documented.

When Yahoo! announced that they supported a real-blogging tool, I was hooked. I could have a real blogging tool that was really supported by a real company.

Argh.

Yahoo! did an extraordinary job of making it easy to install and uninstall MoveableType and WordPress. And for that I commend them. And it was a good thing too. Because in a desperate attempt to configure my blog, I ended up destroying the configuration about half a dozen times.

Unfortunatley the ease of use of Yahoo!’s installater/uninstaller was not matched by the ease of use of WordPress and MoveableType.

WordPress and MoveableType are two separate blogging software packages that are supported in two distinct ways. WordPress is clearly a community supported system, involving hundred of volunteers who incrementally improve the product. MoveableType is backed by a real company that has real dollars that is trying to turn a profit.

And it shows.

The commercial company that supports MoveableType has a significantly more robust and easy to use management interface for managing your entire blogging infrastructure. Their target market is not a single blogger but a collection of blogs at a site. MoveableType’s documentation is superior and complete. Furthermore, MoveableType has a lot of features that make integration with plugins and extensions a lot simpler. Again an indication of a company that is trying to create an ecosystem around it’s product.

The community supported product WordPress, on the other hand, clearly feels like the kind of a tool a lone blogger at a web-site would use/maintain. It’s infrastructure is not designed to natively handle multiple blogs. However, because it’s targetted at the individual, the customization interfaces are a lot simpler to get at. Individuals want to make their blogs look unique. That’s why the install WordPress. If they wanted a generic blog they could just use any one of a thousand blog hosting sites.

WordPress unlike MoveableType has incomplete documentation, a difficult to use plugin/style system. Again designed around the assumption that the management of these things is done by one person and optimization of installation is not necessary since this is an infrequent event.

What’s interesting is that MoveableType has more plugins, but WordPress has more user-defined templates. In fact WordPress’ template scheme is substantially better designed/architected than the MoveableType. In WordPress each blog has a set of templates/stylesheets that can be individually modified. MoveableType replies on generated templates/stylesheets and providing true per-blog customization is significant chore.

Why did I choose WordPress? Because, in the end, I was not setting up 10 blogs but one blog, mine. As a result the robust set of interfaces of MoveableType were a lot less interesting as compared to the hundreds of blog templates I could study and steal to build my blog.

As for the documentation? WordPress is a community sponsored project. So that’s improving very quickly. In fact between the time I started this exercise and today, WordPress has added enough new doc’s to call it a draw.

And why the frustration? Because I tried to use MoveableType to customize my one blog, and only after fighting for 5 days, did I realize I was using the wrong tool. Once I moved to WordPress and learned the mechanics of php, cascading style sheets and html, it was a breeze to configure.

Why Special K?

If you look up Special K in the wikipedia you get four distinct references:

The article Special K describes the breakfast cereal manufactured by Kellogg Company; several additional things have adopted this name, including:

So how did I end up with that moniker?

Here’s the story

In 1998 I was working at SGI (aka Silicon Graphics) in the Kernel group. At the time a Director of Engineering had gone off with a bunch of our principal engineers to go and architect a brand new operating system to address the fundamental buisiness bind that SGI was in.

I was at the time, junior flunky number #456 working on this project.

Since the Director had little faith in my abilities (and I would to given the group I was hanging with), he assigned me to one of the senior engineers.

The engineer and I were supposed to be working on this core testing platform for the new OS (called TestOS).

So in one of our staff meetings, the following happened:
Director: Your status?

Kostadis: Got TestOS to boot.

Director: Good. What was the other guy’s contribution?

And for reasons that I still don’t understand I said:

Kostadis: He supervised me.

That set off the director who ripped into the senior engineer. The senior engineer then decided that I had shown too much mouth and he had to get back at me. So the next morning, upon arrival at work, I discovered that all of my bugs had been re-assigned to “specialk@sgi.com”.

Since all bugs at SGI went to one newsgroup, that the entire company monitored, it was equivalent to telling the world kostadis’ nickname is specialk@sgi.com.

For years I fought against the nickname. But as we get older some things that were not funny in the past become funny again…