Sunday, September 25, 2005

The Truman Show

Last night I watched The Truman Show (while doing some baking and cleaning). I was quite disappointed. I like movies that have solid characters that you can relate to (in some dimension) as well as compelling story. The Truman Story lacked both.

I've always disliked Jim Carrey. His acting is exaggerated and his characters are over-the-top simpletons, which utilize base humour. I was under the impression that he had received good reviews for his role in The Truman Show and that he portrayed a more serious (i.e. regular, or, perhaps even, dramatic) character. [For example, ...the film really relies on Jim Carrey, and it is his unexpectedly mature performance that elevates it to greatness. [Dan Jardine, Apollo Guide] and If you expect and want to see the hyper-wacky Carrey...you'll hate it... [Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)] (both via Rotten Tomatoes). However, his acting was still exaggerated and Truman was a shallow character, which could be describe at best as average, and certainly not great. And I think his going crazy and running off in a fake nuclear disaster and being subdued by men in isolation suits ranks as wacky. Almost all of the other characters were equally disinteresting. In fairness, I suppose that means that the actress playing his wife did an decent job, as she was playing the part of (faux) actress, but that lack of genuineness didn't help to make the movie captivating. The only character of any interesting was the show's director, played by Ed Harris, but his role was relatively minor and near the end of the film.

The story was subpar also and too confusing. It had a few good moments - in theory, the concept was good and, for example, I liked how a mechanical part falls to the street in front of Truman at the start of the movie and then on the way to work he hears about a plane shedding parts on the radio. Later, it is revealed the he really lives inside a giant set. (Implying that the mechanical part was really a light for TV set and weaving different parts of the movie together). But, what of Truman's (supposedly dead) father showing up, disappearing, and then reappearing in a grand introduction that never got past the build-up of seeing him in silhouette. After all that effort to create the portion of the plot about the return of hisfather, the only time the father was on camera was 30 minutes later when he has a one sentence line (and Truman wasn't even in the scene)! If Truman's life is on live TV 24-7, you'd think that his father, who was lost at sea and presumably dead for 20 years, would warrant some interaction with Truman!

The movie also didn't even try to be believable. At the end, Truman is onboard a boat when a giant storm (created by the TV studio) hits and washes him overboard. He utterly soaked and floating in the ocean. The (generated) storm ends, calm waters reappear and Truman climbs back on the boat (and then the edge of the TV studio). By all appearances, only a couple minutes have elapsed. So can someone please explain to me why Truman, clad in a sweater, shirt, pants, etc. is bone dry, without a drop of water on him?

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Snoqualmie Falls

Last Sunday I went with Suor, Nabeel, and Tom to Snoqualmie Falls, ostensibly to go hiking, but the trail was more like a park trail than a hiking trail and it was only half a mile down to Snoqualmie River from the cliff overlooking the river. At the end there is a boardwalk leading to a look-out point (and lots of fencing along the boardwalk to keep people away from the power generation facilities). At the end of the boardwalk we hopped the railing and scaled down the trees and rocks to get closer to the waterfall, which was kind of cool. Here are eleven photos.

Snoqualmie Falls

Monday, September 19, 2005

SuSE

On Saturday, I installed SusSE 9.3 (Linux), replacing Gentoo (which I installed in February). It look the entire evening, so, at this point, I can only really comment on the installation. Once I have a chance to play around with it a bit, I'll provide some more observations.

The installation is graphical and fairly intuitive, a nice change from Gentoo. However, tweaking things seemed harder than with Red Hat/Fedora and, unlike, most of the times I've installed Red Hat or Fedora, I had lots of annoying problems.

The installation is five CDs, so you have a zillion packages (programs) to choose to install (or not). Being a geek, I went through most of the lists looking for things that I would use. (The "base" installation is for a "regular" user's desktop (does anyone use Linux for that?), so things like gcc, etc. were not automatically selected). Along the way, I noticed various pacakges for xemacs. That got me thinking that I hadn't seem vim listed anywhere. So I went through every single category (KDE, Gnome, Apache, Development Tools, Games, etc.) looking for either vi, vim, or gvim to no avail. After the installation was done, I checked and there is vi and vim. (I have no no idea how they were described in the package list if they weren't under listed under the letter V). But, gvim was not installed. Five CDs and SuSE couldn't managed to included gvim. That seems like a major oversight. (And if it was on one of those CDs, then there packaged descriptions and categories are really bad as it was under neither 'G' nor 'V').

Probably the worse thing about the install was that it hung half way through one of the CDs. Clicking "Help" would toggle the contents of one the text panels and Alt+F5 would trigger a screensaver, but nothing else would trigger any response from the system. (And after waiting nearly an hour - I was cooking/eating dinner at the time - I don't think it was just slow). As a back-handed complement, I guess I can say that I was impressed that after rebooting, the installation was smart enough to resume at the start of that CD rather than kicking me back to square one (or, worse, trashing the system).

Compared to Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE was also less skilled at automatically configuring my hardware. One of the two network cards required me to click through a few dialogs (and select the defaults it provided) to configured it. (So why did it saw it couldn't configured it, if all the defaults it gave were right?!). Futhermore, I am very skeptical that it configured my sound card properly. It picked the wrong driver and rejected the right drivers. Moreover, the installation program didn't have an option to let you try out the configuration before accepting it. (Every version of Red Hat/Fedora that I've used got the sound card right and only Red Hat 7 had trouble with the network cards).

One of nice features of the installation program was it's ability to connect the Internet and magically figure out what packaged had updates and then install them. (It would have been better to do this before reading all the CDs, but that is probably asking too much). Red Hat seemed to do updates okay (but not at part of the installation), and Fedora somehow managed to regress several steps backwards with its ability to update packages. (Fedora was at best Beta-quality, and perhaps Alpha-quality in some areas, so it horrible-ness at updating packages prevented you from fixing these various bugs and annoyed you even more. Hence, I gave up on Fedora).

I almost forgot to gripe about CD #3. At the start there was some dialog about checking the media (i.e. CDs), but after I clicked on Accept, it seemed to keep going and didn't verify any of the CDs before commencing with the installation. (So either the interface was really poor, the installation has a bug, or I'm really dumb). Sure enough, Murphy's Law struck and the third CD was bad. (Windows thought it was okay, but the SuSE installation rejected it multiple times). So I had to re-burn a copy of the CD. (Between the hung installation and the bad CD, at least an hour was wasted).

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Movies

Well, here's my first question. Do you think it's kind of dangerous handing out guns at a bank? Bowling for Columbine is a great movie. If you haven't heard about it you must be living under a stone. I think it was the first documentary that I saw. (Since then I've only seen about a half-dozen documentaries. However, about 15% of my Netflix queue are documentaries). It was on CBC tonight and I watched it again. It was just as thought-provoking and profoundly sad the second time.

Yesterday, I finally got around to watching Braveheart and Mel Gibson as the Scottish renegade William Wallace. I was disappointed. As a movie, it is well-implemented (in terms of cinematography, acting, sets/props, etc.). But, it was insanely long. I was watching it on CBC also, so, including commericals, it was over three and half hours long! That's way longer than my attention span! I also found the story to be too decadent. The story dragged on and on, taking obvious liberties with history, and the characters became over-the-top. If much of the last hour of the movie had been left on the ending room floor, a better story (and movie) would have resulted.

The last two movies I rented from Netflix were both good. Last week I saw Chocolat. Perhaps it can best be described as a "warm and fuzzy" movie. (i.e. What you would call an "exploration of the human condition" in English class). Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche) is an outsider who moves with her daughter to a French village to open a chocolaterie. She then takes it upon herself to try to help the villagers enjoy life. The story and characters make it worth watching, although there are a few minor oddities with both.

The week before, I watched The Untouchables. Kevin Costner is Elliot Ness, fighting prohibition and Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in Chicago with a small squad of cops (including Sean Connery, who earned an Oscar for his role). I really enjoyed it - the story had good pace and a healthy dose of action. The characters were decent too.

Friday, September 16, 2005

Tipping Point

The rocket scientists at NASA say Tropical Deforestation Affects Rainfall in the U.S. and Around the Globe:

...

Deforestation in the Amazon region of South America (Amazonia) influences rainfall from Mexico to Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico. Similarly, deforesting lands in Central Africa affects precipitation in the upper and lower U.S Midwest, while deforestation in Southeast Asia was found to alter rainfall in China and the Balkan Peninsula. It is important to note that such changes primarily occur in certain seasons and that the combination of deforestation in these areas enhances rain in one region while reducing it in another.

...


And even more scary, Global warming 'past the point of no return':

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

...

In September 2002 the sea ice coverage of the Arctic reached its lowest level in recorded history. Such lows have normally been followed the next year by a rebound to more normal levels, but this did not occur in the summers of either 2003 or 2004. This summer has been even worse. The surface area covered by sea ice was at a record monthly minimum for each of the summer months - June, July and now August.

...

Current computer models suggest that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free during summer by the year 2070 but some scientists now believe that even this dire prediction may be over-optimistic, said Professor Peter Wadhams, an Arctic ice specialist at Cambridge University.

...

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Turn Up The Sun

Oasis is one of my favourite bands. Last night I went to their "gig" in Everett.

Kasabian and Jet opened. Kasabian was okay, but not really exciting. I had been expecting a little better. I wasn't really sure if I would like Jet or not, but they rocked pretty good.

Oasis was fairly rocking and put on a good performance. They started with Turn Up The Sun and Hey Lyla from their new album, Don't Believe The Truth. In fact, most of the songs were from Don't Believe The Truth and they played nearly the entire album. (Let There Be Love was the only notable absence). Definitely Maybe received some converage with a rocking Bring It On Down, Cigarettes & Alcohol, and one of my favourites Live Forever. They also played the hits from (What's The Story) Morning Glory - Morning Glory, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, and Don't Look Back In Anger. When they took the stage, Fuckin' In The Bushes was played and they closed with a great cover of My Generation. Perhaps the only disappointing thing was they didn't play anything from Be Here Now, The Masterplan, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants, or Heathen Chemistry. All-in-all I had a good time though (even if the Everett Event Centre was freezing cold).