Craig's Blog

4400

I'm not sure if anybody out there in the cable TV ready world have had a chance to catch a new show on USA called The 4400. It's an ok scifi show, I've enjoyed the first 3 episodes so far. A reviewer on imdb.com hated it. Said it was poorly acted with terrible scripts. Well this is a made for cable tv show, which means low budget and scraping the bottom of the barallel for actors and script writers, so I try not to expect much from cable. However I thought the SciFi channel did a wonderful job with their Dune miniseries. Much better than David Lynch and his oversized movie budget could come up with. Anyway the 4400 is about 4400 people who were randomly “taken” by an unknown force starting in 1946 and continued up until today. Then overnight they all return to earth, with no memory of their “abduction” and not second older than when they were taken. However each of them are slowly discovering they have a unique special talent that was added to them. Like one guy could move super fast, another could cause local micro eathquakes, yet another could remove life or restore it by simple touch. Sort of X-men-ish but still it's enough to make a series out of -- each week we discover another of the 4400's powers and how it plays out. Of course the overriding question is “where were they this whole time and what happened to them?”. The Gilligan's Island conudrum, will they ever get off the island. However it does have that weird X-Files feel to it at times. No one has been able to step in and take over that weirdo tv show slot since XFiles exited TV a few years ago.

Ramblings

Well today I got $20 in movie tickets   for doing an outstanding job at work. That's nice to be complimented. They have these weekly “communication” meetings that I fail to see any communications being done and this is where you are “recognized“.

                        

Mostly looking at charts and bar graphs of performance and metrics. Boring. Let the anal-ysts deal with that and tell me where I need to work harder in. I'm a grunt I admit it. So I decided a few months ago to just stop going to the meetings. Kind of nice to be in the office for 30 minutes with everyone gone. I can get so much done in those 30 minutes. I feel like the guy in Office Space, “I really only get a good 30 minutes of work done a week”. The interesting part is I still get “recognized“. So I got movie tickets, what show should I take Annette to? Heck I can grab Gregg, not every movie has to be with the girlfriend. Then again she told me long ago it's one of the things she likes to do most. Brownie points and all of that.. Back to what movie. A few good ones are out now, most notably I, Robot. Sure it's a trashing of Asimov's classic just to show off some cgi and Will Smith action vehicle. But it still looks an entertaining movie. Am I breaking a covenant that we as hard core scifi have by seeing this? Well I've never been good at being apart of the group (see above). I might be able to convince Annette to go, Gregg will go in a heartbeat, he'd rather build robots than eat. Then there's the Bourne Supremacy. I saw parts of the Bourne Identity. It was ok, mystery-action flick. Annette really liked it a lot. The other one out there is the Will Ferrell movie Anchorman. I like Ferrell, he was great in Elf. It got good reviews so it's a maybe. Then again it's a good rental down the line. I heard he's going to play Ignatius J. Reilly from the book Confederacy of Dunces.

We'll see if Hollyweird does a fair job with it. It will be the first real chance for Will Ferrell to play a character with depth. All of his other characters have been one dimensional silly ones. Although he's done a great job with them.

So can somebody be too respectful of others? Can you lose yourself, your identity trying to play nice? I guess that depends on your definition of respect. To me the after you get rid of the god voodoo stuff from the 10 commandents, all it comes down to is respect those around you, the golden rule, pure and simple. Moses
                                                                             
was a great marketer for religion. He couldn't offer the jews just 5 or 11 commandments, he needed a good round number like 10. Sounds more holy and perfect. God doesn't work with prime numbers... Anyway I obviously have issues with respect, I don't respect too many people. My dad use to say you can't respect anyone unless you first learn to respect yourself. A good internal question, need to call a few private methods of this current instantiation of Craig. My friend Gregg says he's been instantiated 11 times in his life. My instatiation count is lower, I think I'm in my 5th instationation right now. I just hope I don't have a memory leak and get garbage collected...

 

 

Ayn Rand

As many of you know I've been aurding books lately. The latest book is a collection of writings by Ayn Rand called For the New Intellectual. I've always had a passing interest in her philosophy. I'm almost all the way through it and objectivism as far as I can tell is basically socialism bad, capitalism good. The altruistic nature of socialism, which is sacrificing ones dreams, passions, self-advancement for the good of the community or betterment of the whole is ultimately self-destructive. It is not human nature to be socialist, but instead to work out the Darwinian struggle to move ahead which in the end benefits society to a greater degree. There's of course more to it, mostly saying that any society/religous institution/leader that puts down someone who is a free thinker, an individual, a seeker of wealth is in reality wanting to control you, tell you how to live so that they don't have to deal with the realities of everyday existence. Interesting concepts but I can't agree 100% with most of her opinions. They are somewhat out dated for one. Written in the 1930's when Soviet Russia was advertised as the worker's utopia, facism was popular in western civilization and talk of the US becoming more socialist sparked a lot of debate in those days. Much of the socialist ideals have been proven wrong as the years went by as more and more countries turned to a capitalist republic way of life. Some of it still exists today in the anti-New World Order/anti-corporate organizations that attract spoiled rich middle class kids to protest whenever goverments try and get together to decide how to feed the world. I don't blame the kids for being involved in those demostrations, it's apart of life to reject your parent's ideals. I once heard that to be a conservative when you are 20 makes you a soulless person, and to be a liberal when you are 40 makes you an idiot.

By the way this is my first post using an offline blogging tool called BlogJet. I like it, only $20, quite a deal.

April Wine and July heat

Last Friday Annette and I went to see another 70's washed up rock band play. This time it was April Wine. They are more of Canadian/Midwest act, not well known on the coasts. Great music in any case, mostly hard rock. I guess their more famous song was a love song called Just Between You and Me. High school dance song in my youth. Dang but these guys are getting old though. The drummer is 65 years old but pulled off a pretty mean drum solo. Of course afterwards he took a much needed break to get his breath back..haha. What a difference 40 years can make eh? Whenever I go to an “oldies” rock concert I often wonder about how these guys are playing to the past. It's nice to reflect and enjoy good memories. Is this just a gig to them or are they deluded? I mean what happened to their creativity, the spark that made making music exciting? Perhaps the allure of the limelight, a little extra cash and an excuse to revel in the past is enough for them now. After the show the guys from April Wine said they would hang out and sign CDs and sit around and chat with everyone until the bar closed. I had a half mad thought about sticking around and posing that question to them, what drives you guys now? What has changed about how you see yourselves as a band? I decided to leave well enough alone. I was just glad that they chose St.Louis as one of the four US cities they added to their tour. I met one couple who flew in from L.A. to see them. Now that's dedication.

So we had our first real hot weekend. Summer has laid seige to St.Louis at last. We had an extended spring through June. Now we live in “bubbles” as my mother says. Sort of like living on Venus. Get in your environmental carrier to get you from one air conditioned dome to the next. Mom also says I'll never have to worry about going to hell, because I already did my time suffering St.Louis summers. They have a weather metric here called a “heat index”. It's basically taking the current temperature and factoring in the humidity to come up with the heat index or what the temperature really feels like. Sort of like no it's just not god awful 96 F it's even hotter, it's 110 F heat index! Burn you tortured souls!!! I have this theory why this country has not adopted the metric system of measurements. The spread of temperatures between the freezing and boiling points of water is 180 degrees Farenheit. In the metric world it's perfect 100 degrees Celsius. 1) 98 F sounds a lot worse than 38 C. Of course on the flip side 0 C sounds worse than 32 F. 2) You can watch the temperature creep from 95 to 98 F before the temperature will change from 37 to 38 C. Isn't it much funner screaming “now it's 96!.... now it's 97! now its 98! oh my god we're going to die from global warming!! Grab the kids we're heading for the artic!!“ Where's the fun in seeing a forecast of a low of 30 C and a high of 38 C. 8 degrees is it? How boring.

Audio books

As many of my friends know, I've discovered audio books and the portable flash mp3 player. I use the Rio S10 player with 64MB of memory and an extra 512MB SD flash card. That allows many hours of audio to be stored. Audio books are usually recorded at a low bitrate, like below 48KHz. For those who like to read it's a great way to fill in your downtime hours like driving to work or working out at the gym. I've “read” more books this year than I've ever been able to in 6 months.

I think it's time to for a sniglet to mean “listening to an audio book“. Let's call it “aurding“  or “aurd“ as the root verb henceforth.

My last audio book was not that great. Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio. Very long and boring. I stopped aurding it about 70% of the way through. Bear just meanders around and never moves with the story. Takes useless sidetracks that have no meaning. Disappointing to say the least. Even the plot wasn't that great, our DNA self organizing itself to create a new human species.

I just dropped a few new books on to my Rio:

* The Teaching Company - Science Fiction - Literature of the Technological Imagination. Another great offering from the Teaching Company. I have been somewhat disappointed in the past with their audio books since the lecturers refer to chalkboard diagrams and slideshows that obviously can't be seen by the listener only audience. Sucks being blind ;)

* Michael Palin 1 - Around the World in 80 days. The Monty Python player journeys the world, tracing the original route of the Jules Verne novel. I followed this when it was shown on PBS years ago and loved it. His humor and sense of adventure made for a great show. I wonder how it will come across in audio book format?

* Ayn Rand - For the New Intellectual. My interest in Ayn Rand has always been on the radar. A couple of my friends have found her philosophy and writing to be intellectually stimulating. Also my favorite rock band Rush have written songs based on her stories and philosophy. I did aurd her book Anthem awhile back and loved it.

* Bill Clinton - My Life. My conservative friends don't understand my “perversion“ with Bill Clinton ;-) I always liked him and thought he was an effective president although not a great leader. I find it interesting with how well he was able to play the system (e.i. politics) to make things happen instead being mired in stagnation and political party fighting. He was able to give and take, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours so to speak. In my mind he was able to pass some impressive legislation such as NAFTA.

* Joseph Campbell - The Myths and Masks of God. Chris suggests I read up on Joseph Campbell to help balance out my thoughts and opinions on religion in general. I'm a atheist and have always had issues with the negative side of religion. Hopefully this will give me a new perspective.