I received three movies today. I purchased each one because I enjoyed them each a great deal. They are epic films–two are over three hours long–and they’re all movies I watched alone in Walnut Creek after Yayoi left last year. So, they have an extra layer of special to me. Looking back, I would say that long, dramatic historical epics are great “breakup movies” to watch alone while contemplating life. Or, well, they worked for me.
As memory serves, the first movie that I saw was “Lawrence of Arabia” in which an eccentric, talented, idealistic, and iconoclastic young man with blond hair and dreamy blue eyes gets mixed up in the Arab revolt against British colonial rule. When you meet him as a young man in an office in the middle of the desert somewhere, he is explaining to his companion, in the third person, how boring his current job is . . . he extinguishes a match against his hand, just because, and when his friend hurts himself copying the move, and wants to know the trick, Lawrence explains “the trick is not to be bothered by the pain.” The movie is about three and a half hours long, which is insane, but then so is the subject matter, and three and a half hours is not so long to find yourself lost in the mystery of Arabia. I believe I watched this movie twice, and my description doesn’t do it justice.
The next is “Doctor Zhivago”, that movie we’ve all heard about but none of us has ever watched. Well, I watched it. I don’t remember it as well as Lawrence, but I do remember that this was another epic 1960’s film in which you could get lost in the lead actor’s face, his eyes. You again have the impression of a remarkable man in remarkable times, and the three and a half hours is spent guiding the protagonist through the vagaries of the Russian Revolution and World War II, ending up in this enchantingly weird “ice palace” toward the end. I look forward to an occasion to re-watch this . . .
. . . the third film–and there’s a good chance that you have never heard of it–is Zhang Yimou’s “To Live” . . . at a modest two hours and thirteen minutes, you witness the story of a guy whose wife leaves him because he won’t stop gambling, and he gambles everything away, and then he’s drafted into the war to fight the Japanese, then he finds himself fighting the Communists, then he finds the Communists have pretty much won, he makes his way home, is rejoined by his wife, and it turns out that having lost his material wealth is a good start for Communism . . . the film just barely starts there, and you travel through another decade or two of their life together under the various kinks of Chinese rule. In that it is an epic that brings you through WWII and a Communist revolution, this movie is a lot like Zhivago, but more focused on action and narrative than on the character of the protagonist. I think it is more approachable.
And, more precious. It is out of print and the DVD was over $50 on the Amazon.com Marketplace!
I am thinking I will have to have friends over some nights for epic movie watchin’. If you happen to be interested in getting in on a viewing, let me know, right?
On my way home on Thursday, I stopped to check out a protest on Market Street. It has been a while, and people were gearing up to protest the President’s recently-proposed “troop surge”. I stopped to take a few pictures, and when I got home I spliced together a short video:
My last camera had a special sensor in it so it could mark the picture it took with Exif metadata indicating the correct orientation. I set my Flickr account to “auto-rotate” the images and everything was groovy, except Windows and the Macintosh screensaver don’t know for EXIF metadata, so some pictures stay sideways when viewed on my computers.
In my new camera, I have to run through my pictures and manually set the rotation before I offload them to my computer. Again, this because the Windows explorer and picture viewer doohickey, which is otherwise pretty neat, doesn’t grok Exif metadata, so if I use Windows to rotate my photos, I will suffer generational loss on my JPEGs.
Anyway, rotating images within the camera is pretty easy, so I just do that before I offload. For Windows, I Googled and found this awesome little utility, that will go through and rotate your images, losslessly, based on the orientation set in the Exif on the camera. You just right-click on an image, or a directory of images, and it will go through and rotate all your pictures just right once and for all!
Well, until you upload the rotated images to Flickr. If you have enabled auto-rotation in Flickr, and auto-rotate your images the right way beforehand, then Flickr will rotate your images again! At least, this happened to me!
So, I turned off Flickr auto-rotate, and from now on, I’ll set my image orientation in the camera before I transfer to Windows, and on Windows, I’ll right-click and auto-rotate before uploading to Flickr.
Of course, this would all be easier if the Windows explorer supported lossless rotation. At least it warns you that it doesn’t when you try to rotate an image. You would think that if they bothered to warn you they could have just stuck a summer intern on the project. Oh well.
In networking we refer to “the last mile” as the most difficult, time-consuming, expensive bit of the journey. I am waiting on a plane that has just traveled 2,000 miles across the continent. We are stuck here on the tarmac because our gate is occupied. I could get out and walk!
“Ladies and gentlemen, our ten minute wait has come and gone, and the aircraft at the gate has called for maintenance. We know there are people making connections from this aircraft and if it looks like the wait will go too long they’ll get us another gate.”
“Why don’t they just get us another gate?”
“We now have a new arrival gate: gate kilo-1. Well be starting that way shortly.”
Anyway, we call it “the last mile” because for the most part, long-haul network routes are like air travel, which moves pretty well between the hubs. It is getting from the local phone company “central office” through the copper wires on the telephone poles and neighborhood junction boxes that sometimes calls for improvisation and creativity.
We are headed toward the gate . . . but now we are stuck again, waiting on the new gate to be readied. However, the engines just started whirring and we are again rolling so . . . I should be at Grandma’s house for Christmas very soon now!
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Chicago. Please enjoy the holidays . . .”
“More than 155,000 American women have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Among their ranks, the Pentagon said, are more than 16,000 single mothers.”
The Washington Post via The Week
My hunch is that a lot of these women are reservists or National Guard, doing a true “hardship” deployment. I imagine than some became single parents while deployed–serving overseas puts a lot of strain on young families, and many families do not survive.
Anyway . . . any veteran who might read this, I say “thank you.”
And, any single parent who might read this, “thank you.”
And, any single parents who is serving or has served in a combat zone? I guess I would add “wow!” And, I suppose “I hope that life will smile upon you. I hope you come home safe.”
Well, I owe a plug, here . . . and a reminder note for myself if this happens again!
My third Canon camera has suffered a death comparable to my second Canon camera. So, I ordered myself a Christmas present today: a Fujifilm FinePix F30 — should be here Wednesday!
Anyway, one thing my second Canon camera did for a very long time was to EAT pictures I had taken. I tried multiple cards but they would just randomly get corrupted in the camera, and Canon went to great lengths to presume that the problem was with me, and not with their camera. (They got sued for doing that–yay class actions!) I am still bugged that I lost pictures of Clapham Junction and of the Eiffel Tower! Grr! Anyway, when I got to Thailand I slowed down enough to find a work-around to the problem of my second Canon: PhotoRescue! (more…)
A toe-tappingly titillating trade, which demonstrates that if you’re going to be a player hater, you should do it with a smile, and hopefully a strumming guitar, so we can be reminded of awful things while chuckling despite ourselves:
Do do do do doo dee do / Clinton got a blowjob!
ObWordPress: If you want to enable embedding of YouTube videos, disable the stupid GUI editor.
Thanks, gapingvoid for a Friday Afternoon Diversion. :)
A little while back, I had the chance to meet Jenny Yee, a fellow dot-com professional who, like me, has also recently moved to San Francisco. I was impressed by the quality of some of the portrait photography she has taken. She explained that she was working to set up a studio at her new place. I have been thinking that as I become comfortable with single life and begin looking forward to finding that special lady, it will be more and more important to look pretty: to put my best face forward.
I am still getting in to the whole projecting-a-self-image thing, and I’m not ready just yet to pay much to look glamorous, so I approached Jenny to volunteer as a “test model” to help her get up to speed with her new digs. She smiled warmly and agreed, and it is time I returned her favor by sharing the experience online. I will start with a melodramatic before-and-after, of High School Danny versus Jenny’s Web 2.0 Danny:
I smile, because while my shoulders have filled out and I have grown the goatee, in both images I see the same basic, good-natured geek. Fortunately for me: geek is now chic! (Some even feel fondly toward the old Napolean Dynamite look.)
Fun, huh? Well, so was the time spent with Jenny. (more…)
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I’m going home . . . to my city by the bay . . . . . .
I left my heart . . .
In San Francisco . . .
High on a hill . . .
It calls to me . . .
To be where little cable cars
Climb half way to the stars!
The morning fog . . .
May chill the air . . .
I don’t care!
My love waits there . . .
In San Francisco . . .
Above the blue . . .
And windy sea!
When I come home to you,
San Francisco
Your Golden Sun will Shine for me!
The song oozes longingly from his lips. And yet, the song itself is easy-going, like the city itself.
The problem, in a paragraph-shaped nutshell, as described by George Packer in The New Yorker:
It is true that the presence of American troops is a source of great tension and violence in Iraq, and that overwhelming numbers of Iraqis want them to leave. But it is also true that wherever American troop levels have been reduced–in Falluja and Mosul in 2004, in Tal Afar in 2005, in Baghdad in 2006–security has deteriorated. In the absence of adequate and impartial Iraqi forces, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias have filled the power vacuum with a reign of terror. An American withdrawal could produce the same result on a vast scale. That is why so many Iraqis, after expressing their ardent desire to see the last foreign troops leave their country, quickly add, “But not until they clean up the mess they made.” And it is why a public-service announcement scrolling across the bottom of the screen during a recent broadcast on an Iraqi network said, “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians not comply with the orders of the Army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
I know that I don’t know what the solution is. I think “bring the troops home now” is irresponsible. And nobody likes “stay the course” either, any more, which is a good thing: we need to get our collective brainpower together to find some less-bad solution to the mess. (more…)
I love worrying less about STDs and unplanned pregancy.
On the other hand, they require a bit of “planning ahead” so that you will not be caught unprepared with your pants down. When you do have them handy, hopefully they are close enough that you will not have to leave the embrace of your partner, hopefully your slippery fingers will find a corner of the packaging amenable to tearing, hopefully you will feel out the appropriate orientation so you don’t waste your effort trying to unroll the thing backwards, and hopefully you’ll pull it all off–err on–quickly enough to minimize the mood-killing time spent away from your lover fiddling with modern packaging.
Then–and while you’re not supposed to tell the skeptical teenagers this–although one might take pride at having managed the condom maneuver well, the physical sensations that ensue are never of the caliber found without a condom. One swallows these modest tragedies for the sake of engaging in quality lovemaking, but wouldn’t it be nice if condoms were somehow better?
Build a better mousetrap . . . alas, build a better condom, and the Internet will beat a path to your door. Pronto condoms has recorded nearly a million hits on their web counter: they have just launched a condom in South Africa with special packaging designed to make it easier to “get it on.” The demonstration video brought a moment of joy to my heart, because at last, the powers-that-be are thinking of people like me and trying to make my sex life better!
All the same, I will be truly impressed when they get that down to a one-handed maneuver. And even with this bit of innovation, there is still plenty of room for improvement for the world’s most popular prophylactic technology! A brighter future awaits! Let us get it goin’ on!
Since July, I have been working at Yelp, a hip young Internet startup located just South-of-Market in San Francisco. We provide an Internet-based Yellow Pages service that is really cool because along with basic business information, you can see reviews written by other customers, which gives you a better “feel” for a place when you’re figuring out where to go.
Now, this has been done before, but one of the things we’ve done really well is to help build a community spirit among the folks who write reviews on our web site. These “Yelpers” tend to be young, urban professionals who enjoy going out, and they enjoy writing about their experiences: the good, the bad, the funny, the odd. They socialize on our message boards, meet up for weekly happy hours, and we invite the “Elite” members to spectacular parties every couple of months.
I am a fan. It is more rewarding to work at a company whose service I enjoy!
Anyhow, the reason I am writing just now is to see if anyone who reads my blog is, or knows, a good Unix SysAdmin, or perhaps a great Object-Oriented web developer. The Unix position requires a senior-level, well-rounded generalist who is comfortable with Linux, tiered network infrastructure, and a the variety of challenges offered by a rapidly-growing startup. The web developer should know how to build awesome web sites, while talking to a MySQL database efficiently. There will be further detail posted online, but I would be happy to talk to friends about these positions, especially the SysAdmin, with whom I will be working very closely.
(Anyway, back to the variety of challenges on my plate for the day.)
[Here in San Francisco] they have these GIANT ballots in English, Chinese, and Spanish. Really neat! Its like a giant scantron, and it is somewhat gratifying to hold this huge five-pages of ballot in the blue secrecy folder between your hands and feel like maybe the participatory democracy thing is of some importance.
Proposition J: Shall it be city policy to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney?
They also do ranked-choice voting for some municipal offices, though it was a bit silly because in both cases there was only one candidate running. I suppose a really enterprising citizen could have ranked in three write-in candidates and that crazy person would already be living here anyway.
And, it is not like I’m really impressed with the Democrats, and their fear of articulating some vision of a better America, but it is nice to see the system correcting itself a bit. The best wisdom I have heard is that at least now President Bush will have a check on his power, and he’ll have to behave a bit more like a President. It seems the process has already started, as the GOP has announced that Donald Rumsfeld is going to resign.
The system works.
As far as impeaching Bush goes, I admit that is a silly ballot proposition for a municipal poll, but it is totally San Francisco, and it is a pleasing break from reading up on school bond proposals and sick leave. Unfortunately, they only had “yes” and “no” as options, I would have preferred “oh, hell yes!” (Though, I’m not sure how well that translates into Chinese.)
