mh-z web-log

I picked this book up rather randomly because I like Zahn’s style based on a couple other readings, and I wasn’t disappointed here. This is pure spaceship science fiction, not too hard and not too soft, almost like an elaborate Star Trek episode. Well, a ten-hour long Star Trek episode, since the level of detail in the book is quite high and film/TV would necessarily chop out most of the plot. The story is essentially an elaborate murder mystery chase told in first person from the perspective of a starship captain who doesn’t know what his cargo is or why at least one entity is trying to sabotage the ship. The captain explains his thought processes in detail every step of the way, and unlike throughout other stories I never found myself wondering he didn’t make a certain (obvious) observation or take a certain course of action. In a manner of speaking, I “trusted” the characters.

Zahn’s style is matter-of-fact and completely plot driven; he doesn’t try to be poetic or describe anyone’s feelings in magnificently flowing metaphoric prose, like "crystalline dewdrops clutching perilously to the thin serrated knife-edge of a trumpet-like fern vibrating in the face of a quiet yet forceful breeze…" to describe someone’s feelings, of course. No, nothing like that. I don’t even know what that’s saying, and I wrote it, for… Tom Robbins’ sake.

Some elements in the world/universe the story creates are a bit silly, like a race of aliens who communicate semi-telepathically with ferret-like creatures (I picture woodchucks) that sit on their shoulders and can run off to provide an extra couple sets of senses. But the silliness wears off… The characters become real and vivid, and it’s a charming little story, continually finding new and unpredictable threads and slowly, surely and neatly tying them all together.

Amazing visuals, and if all that was done with just actors (and a few props) in front of a blue screen, I’m duly impressed. The lighting of the backgrounds combined with the lighting on the characters almost made this seem animated, Final Fantasy style, though with a huge upgrade to the realism with which the characters moved, because they were, of course, real actors. I had to remind myself of that fact, now and then. The visual quality of this movie is like raytracing… The raytraced scenes at IRTC (Internet Ray Tracing Competition) convey the same feeling.

Technical achievement that Sky Captain was, I hard time sitting still through through it. Maybe because I had just finished digesting my lunch and getting through an associated food coma stage, thereby arriving at the energetic stage, and needed to be doing something other than sitting still in a theater, although mental stimulation (which the movie didn’t provide) would possibly have worked. The characters spoke too slowly and there wasn’t any truly witty or interesting dialog, for example. Jude Law’s character was all right (when he wasn’t talking), but everyone else was annoying, particularly the reporter / love interest (Gwyneth Paltrow). I kept wanting her to fall into a ditch or out of an airplane or at least do something, anything, to get herself put out of the way. Not that I saw any chemistry between the two, either. The "bad guy" wasn’t particularly scary, and the coolest effect in the movie was one of the "good guys" getting fried/melted into an instant skeleton. Sort of like the guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

To sum it up: beautiful effects, but a movie ruined by a comic-book style story (fine, if that’s what the writer/director was going for) too simple for even the simplest comic book and mostly annoying characters who talked too slowly and did silly things like spend 30 seconds just standing there kissing when there were 60 seconds left to impending disaster… Wouldn’t that make you annoyed, too? Oh don’t go trying to tell me that sort of thing is sweet, the world was going to be destroyed! How would you feel if the world were blown up because some people were kissing when they should have been saving it?

Oh no, Liz sends me an email with the subject line "beat this. :p" and the following image attached:

I’m working on it, but as yet haven’t been able to beat her score. I think she just got lucky!

Sp ceMarine: A full day of concert-going while tired? Good luck with that… I hope you brought a comfortable pillow "just in case", you know…
Sp ceMarine: No pun intended, too.
Sp ceMarine: I love it when that happens.

Keeping you all informed of the highly productive activities which I am currently taking part in, my Squares high score is now 113 squares. Elizabeth emailed me with a screenshot of her 111 high score and of course I had to go and beat that…

…Nice work Liz, but in short order I got this:

You’ll have to try harder than that!

I went from:
"This is the coolest thing on the entire Internet!" to
"This is the most addictive game ever!" to
"This is clearly an alien plot to take over my mind!"

My high so far is 107 squares.

I’m going to sleep, now, to inevitably dream of squares…

Squares.

The beginnings of a fascinating and highly intellectual conversation:

(Used without permission, credit not given where due.)

(Sue me, I like it!)

This is stupid. I received a random message in my Outlook inbox with a .zip attachment. Being curious, I opened up the zip and this was the name of the enclosed file:

Important.txt .exe

Now, it’s important not to click on this stuff. But hiding file extensions as Windows does by default is the primarily stupid part…

My goal is to be able to run at a steady 10 mph for 30 minutes, at which point I’ll be in good shape. I started at 8.0 mph and finished a half hour at that, and my plan is to increase my speed by 0.1 mph each time I run. I completed 8.1 mph, but 8.2 is proving a bit hard. Not because it’s much different from 8.1, but because my stomach cramps up after about five minutes, and I can keep going for another five minutes (and more after that, maybe even the whole way), but I figure I’m in pain for a reason, and slowing down is a big relief. Actually the same thing happened with 8.1, but I kept going all the way to the finish; internal organs were not happy. Something less than 8.0 mph (like 7.5) doesn’t cause this problem, so maybe, although I’m not getting tired or out of breath at higher speeds, I have to start at a slower speed and build up gradually to get the rest of my body used to the exertion.

I have my little Virgin Pulse MP3 player (128 MB model) to keep me company. Good sound quality, plenty of memory, lasts a long time on one AAA battery, has FM tuner, equalizer, and SD card expansion slot. I bought a pair of canalphones which block out most outside sound and sound almost as clear as the huge pair of headphones I have at home, but I have to wrap the cord around my neck in a very specific (and odd-looking) way to keep it from tugging on the earbuds (uncomfortable) as I run when the cord bounces. I bet I could use a bulldog clamp (that’s what those black paper clamps with folding handles are called) to solve that problem, also.

My only complaint about the MP3 player is that the software for managing song downloads to the device is buggy: It often gets stuck in the middle of a transfer and the process needs to be killed. I bought a 256 MB add-on SD card and an SD card reader, so at least I can bypass the player’s software and view the SD card as a disk drive and copy files to it using Explorer, but the USB 2.0 card reader device doesn’t cooperate well with Windows and causes some corruption in the files I copy. I’ll try hunting down better drivers, but still the downside is that I can’t access the 128 MB of memory built into the device other than through its own software.

In my experience it has been very typical that good, solid products come with lousy computer software to interface with them; the same was true with my Canon SD100 camera, though a Compact Flash card reader was a simple investment that not only made downloading pictures straightforward but gave me a transportable "disk drive" that worked right away when plugged into most computers, since Windows itself had good built-in drivers for it.

Something from the past, so I have an easy post today. I was experimenting with particles in this program, way back when I first learned C++: It’s a VGA (320×200) firework simulator. Runs nicely under any version of Windows.

Download

Keys: ‘n’ for a normal explosion, ‘m’ for a big explosion. Although the resolution is low, high frame rate (70 hz, where each animation frame is sync’ed with the monitor) and anti-aliasing ("algorithm" created purely by trial-and-error) make the animation look smooth.

It’s cool! Play with it. If you hold down ‘n’ you’ll feel like you’re in the shower.

Observations. When I write text messages on my cell phone (perhaps more frequently than some) it’s much, much easier for me to use full words than to use those abbreviations like "me 2" and "how r u" and "2b or not 2b wher4 r u juli8". That’s because most of the time I can type a word using "T9 mode" on my phone (figure-out-ive text input) as it’s really spelled and it’ll come out correctly. I don’t have to think about how word should b spelled in txt-speak, and more importantly, I don’t have to keep switching modes so I can type words that aren’t in the figure-out-ive text dictionary. If I’m in the direct input mode where I can type arbitrarily-spelled words, on rough average I’m using two keypresses to enter each letter (since there are three letters on each key) as opposed to one keypress per letter in T9 (plus a bit extra to hit the "next matching word" button for the number sequences that correspond to an initially wrong word). (Or for direct input again, even more than two keypresses on average, because to get to the numeral it takes FOUR keypresses. A->B->C->2.) So, unless txt-speak lets me write 2x shorter msgs, it takes extra effort to merely key in the same idea (more keypresses), and that’s disregarding the time it takes to figure out cr8v word spellings.

The one thing txt-speak might help with is in compressing a message down so that more can be said within the 160 character limit. But, I find that even with fully written words and long sentences, the limit has never been a problem. Editing the grammar of the message eliminates words easily if your sentence is too long to fit, and anyway, that’s a very long and convoluted sentence we’re talking about, and if you have something that long to say to someone you ought to "pick up the phone" (which is clearly an idiom, since you’d already be holding the phone in your hand, having picked it up minutes ago to try and enter this monster text message before realizing that you really should just call) and just call.

The places I generally see cr8v txt message spellings emphasized are in ads. (In fact, I think Verizon Wireless started using "txt" in the first place.) This makes me wonder whether people in the real world use such radically abbreviated spelling or if it’s cell phone companies trying to pick the one thing that makes text messaging different from instant messaging on the computer (namely, that it’s a royal pain to enter letters) to try and market it as something different and therefore cool/hip/romantic. (Oh how I hate the word "hip", though. It makes me think of glossy magazine editors (yes, the editors themselves are glossy) and stuffed olives and ersatz cocktail parties and people who try desperately hard to qualify their hip-ness or hiptitude and sentences which repeatedly use "and" instead of commas. "Hip" is a word people who aren’t part of the thing use to talk about something that would never use the word to talk about itself; or else, that thing is fake. Know what I mean?)

The point of all that was, that advertising companies are trying to make text messaging into something hip (in their abstract minds, because remember, hipness only exists in a thing to people outside of the thing) by skewing its fundamental character. It’s not; it’s just a convenient way to communicate sometimes when a call isn’t necessary or will use up your allotted minutes. Also, entering letters is not as much a royal pain as you might think. Although I’m a somewhat seasoned (though not yet grilled to perfection) texter, and I have skills in the art of touch-typing the letters on a phone keypad, this skill took maybe 20 messages to develop in the first place.

Speaking of predictive text input, it’s interesting to notice how certain sequences of numbers correspond to related words. For example, 5477 produces both "kiss" and "lips", and, oh, I forgot the others noticed, but that was one of the best ones.

> 2b or not 2b wher4 r u juli8

> o ro i wan2 5477 ur sw8 5477

Yes, so romantic…

(1) "You can’t take it with you." (Referring to money and death, but I believe this extends to everything.)

(2) "Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it." (From Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though it might not be verbatim.)

3) "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." (I don’t know the source of this.)

Quoting myself here, though I realize this isn’t as elegantly worded as it could be:

(4) "Whenever you find yourself faced with a choice between doing something and not doing something, and you’re undecided, always make the choice that involves doing something."