DVD'S

There's not much point to watching America's Sweethearts. Unless you really were wondering what Agador would have been like if he were straight.

M. Night Shyamalan's shtick is wearing thin. His signature device is to distract you from his real point until the climax of the film. The distraction has to be at least engaging, though. He's still on my short list of promising directors though. For starters, he relies on the competence of his actors, prefers stage training, and at least lets the story take center stage, not any special effects. Mr. Lucas, are you listening? You used to exhibit such qualities.

For vintage Viggo, I recommend G.I. Jane.

NetFlix IS worth it. Try if for free for two weeks.

LINKY

• Wallace & Gromit the Movie! I loved the award winning shorts & Chicken Run. This promises to be good. (Hat tip: Bob.)
• My friend Red just got some hot new wheels. Or should I say some new hot wheels?
• Corey Doctorow writes a short story. (Hat Tip: BoingBoing, er, Cory)
• JWZ's insights into Groupware make me laugh.
• New Hitchhiker's trailer. Yay! (Hat Tip: /.)

BOOKS & COOKS

Today while walking on 14th street towards the 2/3 train I passed Bobby Flay. I bumped into Bobby when I still lived on the UWS last year. So Bobby becomes one of those celebs that are on my multiple sighting list, along with Sam Waterson and Steven Hill. (Pretty much the entire cast of Law & Order, come to think of it.)

I'm also reading Corey Doctorow's latest: Eastern Standard Tribe. If you want proof that book and author are targeting the technorati bear witness:

• The book, along with its predecessor, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, are open source and thus, essentially, free.
• The book is available for free download in several different e-book formats.
• The book manages to work regular expressions into the narrative in the first chapter(!)

I enjoyed 'Kingdom and anticipate same for EST. Go get 'em and see fer yourself!

LAPTOP UPDATE

So it turns out that there's a demarcation line after which some PC drive controllers won't recognize larger size hard drives. That demarcation line consists of multiples of 18. So a hard drive controller that works for a hard drive between 18 and 36 gigs may not work for a 40 gig drive. The good folks at World Line fiddled around with my old laptop to confirm that this was indeed the problem with the machine and we settled on a 30 gig drive -which is still a 50% improvement over the old 20 gig piece. I'm happy to report that the old Presario is now humming smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that I wonder if the occasional freezes I was experiencing were also due to the old drive dying on me. No matter, now my wife has a machine to use at home while I'm in the office.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

I remember this post, on Ash Wednesday two years ago. My how things have changed in two years. On my way to the office this morning, there's a bomb scare at the Israeli Consulate one block over. My how things have remained the same in these last two years.

PARIS AND BOB

Paris Hilton hosted SNL last weekend. She was quite capable and I was duly impressed. The episode wasn't a particularly strong one, but was notable for NOT starting off with political (read: Bush is a fool) satire. I'm glad SNL may finally be getting off their soapbox this season. I've always maintained -with the caveat that this is based purely on conjecture- that Paris is a sweet girl. I mean, she's clearly a party animal with some troublemaking friends, but I've never seen her act rude or improper to someone in a public forum. What she does in private is another matter entirely, but that's food for another posting.

Bob Congdon is a good blog read with a handful of interesting posts that satisfied a bunch of interests of mine. There's the iPod shuffle RAID array story (for the geek in me,) the Google maps story (for the directionally obsessed in me) and a link to the facts behind the famous McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit story (for the "let's get to the real heart of the story" investigative reporter in me.)

Geocaching is an interesting pursuit that I may want to have at when the weather warms up a bit. Now that we're bone fide suburbanites, we should try our hands at rustic pursuits, such as hiking and such. Besides, I've been looking for a reason to dust off my old Visor Platinum and GPS module. My old colleague and buddy Chris is into geocaching and even designed the Vermont Area Geocachers' website.

LONG WINDED

<rant>So I was driving home two nights ago after helping my sister with some moving and started to think about Jon's post "Shifting time and folding space." In it, Jon describes the setup he uses to listen to podcasts. Jon also coined the term screencast to describe his video podcasting philosophy. My point is, how does he find time to think? I mean, I love technology and think and dream about it sometimes. I like to suppose I'm on a similar wavelength, but I draw the line at consuming information aurally and visually. Frankly, I love cars as well, but never thought good information on the topic ever translated to the screen or audio well. I mean, have you ever tried to watch speedvision (cars) or techTV (or whatever that channel is called these days?) I prefer my information (professional as well as leisure related) presented to me on paper or computer monitor with a lingual flavor, thank you. More importantly than the flavor or information Jon chooses to digest (all of them, it would seem) is his seemingly unending capacity to absorb it all. I don't know how he does it. I mean, I once had a client who expressed comfort paying me whatever I charged because he knew Jake (that's me) dreamed about doing his job when he slept! So I know a thing or two about being infatuated with a topic. I guess I'm mellowing with age. I've even decided to officially stop lusting after a Treo 650 on the premise that I just don't want or need to have 24/7 access to my work email. E-mail is a queue. I pop messages off the queue when I choose, otherwise I'd never get anything done! </rant>

PURPLE FINGERS

As an expression of solidarity with the imperiled voters of Iraq, I'd like to humbly suggest people dip a finger in purple ink. We take the right to choose our government for granted, these folks are risking their lives to do so.

The laptop has suffered a setback. I'm assuming that the Presario's BIOS doesn't recognize the 40 gig hard drive I bought it. I'll be exchanging it for a 20 gig unit (same size as the failing original) the next chance I get.

In other news, my home continues to be inundated with little girls' clothing and furniture. My brother-in-law and I are contemplating hawking children's furniture. It's just like regular furniture except for the following exceptions:

1. It's painted white or pine.
2. It's festooned with warning lables.
3. It's three times as expensive as regular furniture.

Sounds like an easy gig to make money on, eh?

UPDATE: The purple ink meme seems to have traction all over the 'net.

LAST CHANCE LAPTOP

So I got a new laptop and planned on sunsetting my old Presario laptop by selling it off to my buddy Manny. Unfortunately, the laptop's hard drive seems to be suffering from Alzheimer's or something and needs to be replaced. Considering that I don't think the street value for the machine is more than $300 and a new hard drive cost around $100, strictly speaking the investment doesn't seem worthwhile. Kinda like ponying up a thousand bucks to replace the tranny on the old clunker you're gonna sell for maybe twice that. So the question I have to ask myself is, is it worth it? Well, I think it is, for now, and here's why. I'm currently in transition, so I've been carrying around the new laptop instead of primarily using it in my home office. My homebound wife is currently sans computer in my absence. Yeah, I have some big desktop rigs I can set up, but I don't really have a lot of room for any of them (even though they are compact by desktop standards and I have a sweet 17" LCD display.) So I'll get the old Presario back in fighting trim. When my sister Bena makes her move to Israel, I'll let her have the laptop as my parting gift. I hope she'll like it. So I'm off to World Line computer, which is where Steve gets his parts from, to shop for a new laptop hard drive.

TALK LIKE AN INSURGENT

Or, ebonics for terrorists...

Yesterday, I did my holy duty and drove my wife's grandmother home. Bubby had been staying with us since the baby came and had been a tremendous help. I would have driven her home Sunday, but I couldn't get any crusading whoremongering pigs to do the harlot's duty of clearing my driveway. So my holy explosive device transporter car couldn't leave its filthy infidel garage. The apostates finally showed up to shovel yesterday afternoon. Insh'allah, the snow shall be completely vanquished and it will run from the wrath of the holy shovels like the rejectionist infidel dog precipitation that it is with its tail between its legs.

N.B. I've gotten weird feedback for this post, feel free to comment, it's meant to be humorous. I may take it down...

LOTS TO TALK ABOUT

FIrst of all, we had a beautiful baby girl on Monday, the 10th. Her name is Basya (after my grandmother, OB"M) and mother and daughter are doing splendidly. Sleeping right now, in fact. I couldn't be a prouder husband/father.

I see Paul (son of A. Bartlett) Giamatti is hosting SNL. If I were Paul, I'd have to say the most annoying question I could be asked would have to be "What's it like to work with Frankie Muniz?" Seriously, I've been a fan of Paul's work since he played Pig Vomit in Howard Stern's movie and an FBI agent in Donnie Brasco.

On the technical side, I continue to have trouble trying to grok JXTA, so I'm taking a detour to learn JSF, in an effort to bolster my short term earning potential. Sun's Java Studio Creator looks promising.

I'm starting to get pissed off at Flickr. Their web page said that if I invite x number of users who become members my status would be upgraded to premium. It was, for about two weeks. Now I'm back to being a free account user with the associated limits. Frankly, I don't mind not being able to upload more than ten megabytes of images a month but being limited to three photosets is a nuisance. I think I've found a workaround by sharing keyword pages, though, we'll see how well that scales...

WEIRD BLOG KARMA

check this out: Blogger for sale.

hat tip: Jonathan

I TOLD YOU SO

Now that the word "blog" is Merriam Webster's word of the year and all the hoopla surrounding the blogosphere has officially made us mainstream, I look like a fortune teller to my friends and family (OK, not my cyberspace friends, who are way ahead of me, but my old-school flesh and blood ones.)

Now that food, money and material are pouring in to the afflicted area of the Indian Ocean disaster faster than the logistical ability to process all that stuff, the hoopla surrounding the paltry initial US donation of 35 mil. has died down. The ability to deliver aid is where the real need is. Once again, while the rest of the world sits on their bums or forms action committees and coordination strategies the good 'ole US of A is getting it done. (With a very honorable mention to the Aussies, who are splendid.) And our military assistance carries with it no price tag, real or imagined, to sully the gesture of giving help to those less fortunate with a claim of monetary credit. I did point this out to my Mom (get well soon, Mom!) last weekend over Sabbath dinner before the larger truth became evident in more mainstream media. The maritime corollary to the maxim that amateurs fidget over strategy while professionals know that logistics wins wars is that poseurs pledge money for natural disaster relief while the big boys set sail immediately. Hooah to our men and women in uniform doing right by the victims of the Tsunami.

Special shout out to Wendy, gone for the moment, but no doubt soon to return.

OVERHEARD: BEER-WARE

As a developer of software code, I'm always grappling with issues of what licensing scheme to release my code under. (Thanks tort-lawyers!) Here's the latest candidate:

/*
 * ------------------------------------------
 * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
 * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file.
 * As long as you retain this notice you
 * can do whatever you want with this stuff.
 * If we meet some day, and you think
 * this stuff is worth it, you can buy
 * me a beer in return.   Poul-Henning Kamp
 * ------------------------------------------
 */

hat tip: Jesse

FOF

My good friend Steve recently started experimenting with the built in RSS reader in the Thunderbird Mail client and asked me to recommend some good feeds for him to subscribe to. I scanned through the list of feeds I check daily and culled a few I thought he'd be interested in. I left out poliblogs and milblogs on the assumption that he wouldn't be interested. (We are on opposite sides of the electoral divide.) For the record, I use and recommend the Sage feed reader extension for Firefox, although the beta of Onfolio 2.0 looks promising and works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Be forewarned, though, Onfolio is Windows only and requires the installation of .Net runtimes, which can be a hefty download. In case you are anything  like me and enjoy a daily digest of technofocused conversation sprinkled with topicality and philosophy, here's the list I sent Steve:

Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/index.rss
Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/news/rss2.0.rdf
my work blog: http://ksnet.unfpa.org/jake/devblog.nsf/stories.rss
my personal blog: http://gimleteyes.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Kathleen's blog: http://www.dirtyfez.com/rss.xml (former associate and current personal friend -she's a very good writer)
Jon Udell: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/rss.xml (smart guy, always has something clever to say)
Ned Batchelder: http://www.nedbatchelder.com/blog/rss.xml (former Loti, also smart & interesting)
Jeremy Zawodny: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/rss2.xml (developer extraordinaire at Yahoo, big LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) advocate
Iraq the Model: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IraqTheModel (three brothers living in Iraq)
Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.net/index.xml (the gadget's weblog)
Mozillazine: http://mozillazine.org/contents.rdf
Mozillazine feedhouse: http://feedhouse.mozillazine.org/rss20.xml (clearinghouse for all Mozilla related blogs)

FOF = feed of feeds

THANKS

Sometimes I need to remind myself that I have a lot to be thankful for. Today is the seventh day of Chanukkah and Lorraine & I just returned from her sister's second son's bris. All went well and mother, child (not to mention father, grandparents and assorted aunts and uncles) are fine. Lorraine barrels along in to her ninth month and we excitedly anticipate our family's pending expansion by 50%. I am thankful for all of this, which was barely conceivable to me a little over a year ago. My two best friends, Manny and Chuck, also got married recently, making this a most auspicious year for the three of us. I continue to find happiness and intellectual stimulation in my chosen profession, which is all I can really ask for besides enough compensation to live on. My car works, my apartment has heat and my new laptop is in the mail.

Happy and healthy Holiday season and New Year to all. (Rather, Wendy, the only other known reader of this blog.)

P.S. Friedman gets it right for the first time in awhile (IMHO.)

OFFICE SPACE

For fans of Office Space. Here's the Bill Lumbergh sound board!

Hat tip: Paul Katcher

DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER

If you've been following events in Iraq, you are probably aware of the brouhaha surrounding the apparent marine shooting of a subdued, unarmed insurgent. In times of war, these things -inexcusable as they are- do happen. The idea that somehow 150,000 heavily armed, trained and primed soldiers mostly in their late teens and early twenties under severe stress somehow posses the diplomatic skills and judgment of an ambassador under hellish conditions is ridiculous. These kids make mistakes. Some of these mistakes are criminal in nature, if not intent. We shall see what U.S. Military justice decides the appropriate fate for the individual under investigation is. What we should not do is somehow draw the conclusion that we are no different than the enemy we face. We are quite different and clearly on the side of moral and civil values in this conflict. There should be no mistake about that. Additionally, we should not shoot the messenger. Kevin Sites, the MSNBC reporter who shot the footage of the incident has been an exemplary correspondent throughout this conflict. At all times he has shown respect, admiration and forged deep friendships with the soldiers he embeds with. To suggest that his actions are traitorous and agenda-driven is odious to me as it should be to anyone who has been following Kevin's adventures on his blog. His recounting of the story can be found here.

UPDATE: From a Marine who was there.

UPDATE II: This is from a US Army future combat systems scenario demonstration. It's worth noting that all of the systems being used in the animation are either in service now or in active development. The small peanut-shaped drone, in particular, has eerie shades of Star Wars in it. Life is not going to be getting any easier for enemies of the US Armed Forces anytime soon.

THE REAL ROCKET SCIENTISTS...

if you've ever asked me about my profession, programming, and whether I'm any good at it, I've probably said that yeah, I'm a decent programmer. What I do is mostly along the lines of scripting and integration, i.e. programming the glue that holds different high level prebuilt components together. Such sexy pursuits include: integrating Lotus Domino with third party LDAP servers and document management products, etc. I do some medium-wieight programming as well, but nothing, strictly speaking, that could be considered rocket science. The true rocket scientists of the trade, I always said, are the game programmers. These guys -they are all men as far as I can tell- design complex mathematical engines for the creation and management of incredibly realistic audio-visual experiences that perform seamlessly and enjoyably -to the delight of millions of ardent game players worldwide in four dimensions. They are the Einsteins (and Von Brauns) of the computer science trade. Backing up my assertion is the realization that John Carmack, a leading member of this august group, is indeed a rocket scientist in his spare time. Carmack co-founded and co-owns id software, which published some of the most popular action games of our time. I first began following Carmack's other company, Armadillo Aerospace, almost two years ago when my interest in the x-prize began. I've found this small company to be my favorite of the contenders, notwithstanding the realization early on that Scaled was going to be the team to beat. Carmack and his small cadre of hobbyists are seriously vying to build an affordable and reliable space transportation device. Check out their site, it's fascinating stuff.

ANOTHER YEAR GOES BY...

Happy birthday to me! I'm a palindromic 33 today. Yay! The lovely Lorraine threw me a beautiful birthday smash last night in the new (and Improved!) Chez Ochs on the Hudson Passaic. I got an Aeron chair for my office nook, so I'm one happy camper this morning. Thanks Sweetie!

Who would swipe a yellow "support our troops" magnet off of a car! It's unpatriotic, that's what it is.

South Park was singularly and uncharecteristically awful this week, bwaah!