Pictures from Jeff Peggy (wedding this past weekend in New York): Posted in Photos on Tue Sep 26, 2006 at 12:21 pm by Rob | Leave a comment Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life? is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all citizens are required to take regular doses of the emotion-suppressing drug Prozium , in the belief that suppressing emotion will suppress conflict and thus avoid any future horrific wars. The premise (art) sounds pretty good: Christian Bale plays John Preston, a law-enforcing Prozium-popping Cleric First-Class trained in the deadly art of gun kata, and spends lots of ammunition in the pursuit of peace for all.
I prepared myself for some hot 1-on-30 action, but my life instead unfortunately imitated the wrong part of the art. is a double-dose of Prozium. The lack of a story hinders more than helps this movie (even for one of this genre, where one doesn t want a story to get in the way of the action).
The monotonic Christian Bale is more snooze-inducing than stoic; even his record-setting 118 kills cannot save this movie. Posted in Movies on Fri Sep 22, 2006 at 1:06 am by Rob | 1 Comment I just started a new job two weeks ago. Standard issue for engineers at the company is a choice of laptop: Dell (Windows) or MacBook Pro (Mac OS X).
Already being very familiar with Dell and Windows, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to kick the Apple tires. The hardware is very nice: bright widescreen LCD display, stylish silver finish, pleasant-to-the-touch keyboard, and the very retro one-button trackpad. However, I have been more annoyed than enthralled by everything else that is Mac: Everyone raves about the great UI, but while it might be good for completely novice computer users, it s not so great for anyone who wants to actually get any real work done.
Particularly annoying is the motif of a single menu bar at the top of the screen. If I move my application window down to the bottom of the screen, I still have to move the mouse all the way back up to the top of the screen to activate the menu. In Windows, the menus appear within the application window, so the menu bar is never that far away.
The single menu bar at the top of the screen saves some screen real estate, but I m more interested in getting work done than I am in watching my desktop background change colors. There is no convenient keyboard-able shortcut system to activate the menus: one must know either the undocumented Ctrl-F2 keystroke to reach the menus, or the pre-built shortcut keys for various functions (open, save, cut, copy, paste, quit, etc.).
In Windows, the menu is easily accessible via Alt , and the hot keys are denoted with underlining. The trackpad is neat: one can pan around windows with one hand by holding one finger to the trackpad and using another finger to issue a scrolling motion. However, shipping the laptop with just one button?
A single-button trackpad and single-button mouse might look more stylish, but Apple needs to just invent the stylish moral equivalent of a two-button mouse. Anyway, there are already lots of websites out there that complain about similar issues (and just as many that tout the superiority of such issues ), so I ll just say that those are the top-three annoyances. The whole suite of iLife applications (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.
) is probably fine and very nice, but at least for normal engineering work, I gave it a shot, and didn t like it. So I ve spent the past week getting my MacBook Pro to work and look just like my Linux desktop (this is where I will admit that I like the OS X part of Mac OS X ). It has been a much more fruitful exercise bending the MBP to my will, than teaching this old dog the new Mac tricks.
Posted in Computers on Sun Sep 17, 2006 at 3:09 am by Rob | 4 Comments The second import from Tony Jaa (Ong Bak) features the stuntman doing all his own spectacular stunts wires, computer graphics, camera tricks, acting, drama, and plot. There is less to enjoy than in the first movie, mostly because it seems like the movie producers decided to drop all pretense of a plot, and thus of any motivation for any chase scenes, and just skip straight to the video-game fight scenes.
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