Recent news items

Batman... Begins Again?

The new Joker for the sequel to last year's well-made "Batman Begins" movie has been cast:

Heath Ledger.

Did you do a double-take? I know I did. I haven't really watched much of anything with him in it, but the fan reaction appears to be either really excited or really scared. Well, Christian Bale worked out better than expected, and the guy did just star in one of the most critically-well-received movies of last year, so maybe there's some hope. I'm also hoping that the supporting cast - Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, et al make their way back too.

Full-body DDR

Some folks at National Taiwan University have come up with a next-generation Dance Dance Revolution, simply titled Dance Dance Dance (DDD), where instead of tapping on panels in rhythm to the music, you actually have to mimic the body positions that flash across the screen in rhythm. Check out this video - would you play this?



Email is like so yesterday, man
Back when I was in high school, email was still a novelty item. Started off doing everything from the command line, and then pine became a godsend. IRC became popular, and my first use of the WWW (NCSA Mosaic!) was to log on to some NBA sites and Star Wars sites. My HS was the first one to offer an Internet class, which gained enough notoriety that VP Al Gore (the father of the internets!) came to visit us - we were trapped inside our rooms while snipers patrolled the roof, as he sat and talked with students about email before the television cameras.

I bring this up because according to MSNBC, email is now pretty much obsolete in the minds of today's youth (no wonder it's so hard getting the HS kids to respond to email!), having been overtaken by less formal, shorter forms of communication such as IM and text messaging. Well, they'll have to learn proper email formatting, punctuation, etc. before long since the academic and business worlds probably won't be changing any time soon...

Ode to the F-14 Tomcat
Finally, I read a few news items saying that the venerable Grumman F-14 Tomcat, perhaps best known as Maverick's plane in the 1986 movie "Top Gun", is being retired this year after over 30 years of Navy service. It's being replaced by an advanced version of the F-18, the Super Hornet. In its day, the advanced targeting radar and fire-and-forget Phoenix missiles made the F-14 the superior naval interceptor in the world, but age and cost combined to mothball it.

I've been a fan of fighter planes for many years, particularly the F-teen series that has served America well for an abnormally long time - most of them were designed in the 60s/70s and are still in use (F-14, -15, -16, -18). The F-14 was probably my favorite though, with the variable swing wings that could sweep backwards for high speed or forwards for greater maneuverability. It was the inspiration for the G.I. Joe figher plane, as well as the Robotech Veritech. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the plane looked more like a bird of prey than a simple missile.


You will be missed.

Incidentally, if you're a fighter buff... the Air Force is slowly introducing an expensive, but superior new fighter with stealth technology and advanced missiles - read up on the F-22 here. In a few mock battles, the Raptor achieved a 10-to-1 kill ratio. Pretty impressive.

Nostalgia

My generation, which had its formative years growing up in America in the 80s and 90s mostly, is reaching the collective age where we have the most disposable income (since we're working jobs and may or may not have house payments and kids' college funds to save up for).

Because of this, it seems like the entertainment industry is doing a lot of flashbacks in order to inspire nostalgia in the folks spending the most money - us. Comic books coming to the movie screen, video games being updated with new graphics but keeping the same gameplay (like the Mario Bros compilation, for example), and the Transformers movie coming out next summer... everything seems to be aimed at helping us get in touch with our inner child again.

On a related note, I came across this video from the classic NES game Contra. Contra was probably my favorite game growing up (up up down down left right left right b a start!), and my greatest gaming accomplishment was to get from the first level to the last level on 1 life. The key is to get the spreader weapon with rapid fire on the first level, which just demolishes everything. Well, this guy utilizes this strategy and some impeccable timing to beat the entire game in less than 12 minutes - it's pretty impressive to watch:

Hermeneutics applied to a STOP sign

While I don't condone the general stance of the site hosting this list, this is a pretty clever illustration of different types of hermeneutics, copied and pasted from here:

1. A post modernist deconstructs the sign by knocking it over with his car, and thus ends the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

2. The Marxist refuses to stop because she sees the stop sign as an instrument of class conflict, since the bourgeois use the north-south route and obstruct the proletariat moving east-west.

3. A serious and educated Catholic rolls through the intersection because he believes he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn't take it too seriously, he doesn't feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

4. Average Catholics and mainline denominationalists don't bother to read the sign but will stop if the car in front does.

5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell her to go.

6. A seminary educated evangelical preacher will research the meaning of "STOP" and discover that the word indicates something which prevents motion (i.e. plug for drain) or a location to leave passengers. The lesson is that STOP signs indicate clogged traffic, so it's a good place to drop riders.

7. An orthodox Jew takes routes devoid of stops to eliminate the risk of disobeying the Law.

8. A scholar from the Jesus Seminar concludes that the passage "STOP" was never uttered by Jesus, since he would not stifle peoples' progress. So, STOP is a textual insertion from stage III of the gospel tradition, when the church was first confronted by traffic in its parking lot.

9. A New Testament scholar notices that there is no stop sign on Mark street but there is one on Matthew and Luke streets, and concludes that the ones on Luke and Matthew streets are both copied from a sign on a street no one has ever seen called "Q" street. Extensive research has been done on the differences between stop signs on Matthew and Luke streets, but nothing to explain the meaning of the text.

10. An Old Testament scholar points out that there are a number of stylistic differences between the first and second half of the STOP. The "ST" contains no enclosed areas and five line endings, whereas "OP" contains two enclosed areas and only one line termination. He concludes that the author for the second part is different from the author on the first part and probably lived hundreds of years later. Other scholars determine that the second half is itself actually written by two separate authors because of similar stylistic differences between the "O" and the "P."

11. Another OT scholar notes that the stop sign would fit better into the context three streets back, having been moved to its present location by a later redactor. He thus exegetes the intersection as though the sign were not there.

12. Yet another OT scholar amends the text, changing the "T" to "H". The resulting SHOP is much easier to understand in context than "STOP" because of the multiplicity of stores in the area. The textual corruption is easily explained as a form geschichte alteration. Thus, the sign announces the existence of a shopping area. If this is true, it could indicate that both meanings are valid, thus making the message "STOP & SHOP."

13. A "prophetic" preacher notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (sigma-tau-omicron-pi in Greek), multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and divided by 4 (the four corners) equals 666, the dreaded "mark of the beast." All STOPS are therefore satanic.

Top 50 movies to see before you die...

... according to the Sunday Mail (I've bolded the ones I've seen and italicized the ones that I've considered watching in the past):

1 Apocalypse Now
2 The Apartment
3 City of God
4 Chinatown
5 Sexy Beast
6 2001: A Space Odyssey
7 North by Northwest
8 A Bout de Souffle
9 Donnie Darko
10 Manhattan
11 Alien
12 Lost in Translation
13 The Shawshank Redemption - perhaps my favorite non-Star Wars/Lord of the Rings movie)
14 Lagaan: Once Upon A Time in India
15 Pulp Fiction - I walked out of it the first time around, but I'd consider seeing it again, I suppose
16 Touch of Evil
17 Walkabout
18 Black Narcissus
19 Boyz N the Hood
20 The Player
21 Come and See
22 Heavenly Creatures
23 A Night at the Opera
24 Erin Brockovich
25 Trainspotting
26 The Breakfast Club
27 Hero
28 Fanny and Alexander
29 Pink Flamingos
30 All About Eve
31 Scarface
32 Terminator 2
33 Three Colours: Blue
34 The Royal Tenen-baums
35 The Ladykillers
36 Fight Club
37 The Searchers
38 Mulholland Drive
39 The Ipcress File
40 The King of Comedy
41 Manhunter
42 Dawn of the Dead
43 Princess Mononoke
44 Raising Arizona
45 Cabaret
46 This Sporting Life
47 Brazil
48 Aguirre: The Wrath of God
49 Secrets and Lies
50 Badlands

Looks like I have some work to do before I die!

Best graffiti ever

A former Cal grad told me about the best graffiti he's ever seen, found in a bathroom at LeConte Hall on the Berkeley campus (for the uninitiated, LeConte is the physics building):

Heisenberg may have been here.

Bad news / Good news

Bad news: at work, since I'm now overseeing the sub-team that handles, among other things, second-level tech support (basically, we support the regular tech support people when they encounter something they can't handle), I now have my personal cell number entered into the directory in case anyone wants to get in touch with me regarding high priority issues outside of regular working hours.

Good news: the company will now start paying for my cell phone service.

Old times
After a conversation with Danny about our good ol' younger days, I've taken to reading some of the early entries of the 5824 blog. Even though I didn't live there, the exploits of Danny, Cal, and JLau were immense fun to read... talk about your legendary bachelor pads. Now that JLau is hitched and Danny's in SoCal, I guess it's kind of like the Diaspora.

Some favorite early entries:
Are you a metrosexual? quiz - 9.23.2003
Spider on fire 10.4.2003, Beginning of East Bay/South Bay weapon-making rivalry 10.15.2003
Bacon-wrapped, bacon-stuffed turkey 12.5.2003, 12.6.2003, Christmas poem 12.24.2003
State of the house

What other house would have its own T-shirt?

Ode (?) to a trustworthy tool

About 3 weeks ago, I was getting ready for worship practice in our church's sanctuary. I got set up, pulled my trusty Yamaha FGX412SC out of my case, jacked in, and strummed - no sound. Checked the cable - no sound. Checked the battery - no sound. Tested a different instrument with the same cable and battery - it worked. My unfortunate conclusion: the pickup in my acoustic-electric guitar, which had served me faithfully in leading worship basically every other week for six years, had finally burnt out.

I first bought the guitar my junior year of college after a trip to Guitar Center with a few other guys in my college fellowship for a package deal of about $500 (guitar, case, tuner, capo, strings, picks) and promptly got the action lowered, and in the years since, it's followed me to New York City, the beach, camping trips, and most often, on stage at my church. While it sounded better than average for a mid-range guitar and was nicely low-maintenance, I never developed the loving affection for it like some other friends did for theirs. To me, it was a useful tool that sounded good and performed its function well, but I had no qualms about letting other people borrow it and wouldn't even wince too much if someone banged it into a wall.

So now what? Couple of options:

1) I can check to see how much it would cost to fix the pickup in my guitar. Depending on the repair cost, it may or may not be worth it.

2) I can revisit my previous musing on upgrading to a "last guitar I'll ever need" like the Taylor 414 pictured to the right.

3) In the band setting, I've found that while I have the most experience leading on vocals and guitar, I have the most fun when I'm playing a supporting instrument or singing backup. So perhaps I'll start learning mandolin... or drums... or get better at bass... percussion... the possibilities are endless! (although bound by my finances, darnit)

New shades

After reading this article on how sunglasses work, I'm now thinking of ditching my usual "$10 generic brand at the flea market" sunglasses and investing in a nicer pair. Although the generic ones probably have UV protection, why take the chance on actually making things worse? Quote from the article: "The cheap sunglasses block some of the light, causing your iris to open to allow more light in. This lets in more of the UV light as well, increasing the damage UV light can cause to the retina."

So, I'm planning to either make use of one of my optometrist connections to get Oakleys or Nikes for considerably less than retail, or just go to REI and pick up a pair of polarized sunglasses for around $35 (heard about this from a coworker).

Update 2006/07/24

Yesterday I went ahead and bought these from REI. They're nice, but not so nice that I have to pamper them...

Heat

Here's a map of the US current temperatures from this afternoon:


Looks like the Great Lakes area is a nice place to be this time of year!

Fortunately, the weather in California should start cooling down next week back to the mid-70s we pay so much money to enjoy 90% of the year.

Besides, while driving in my air-conditioned car this afternoon in 104 degree weather, I saw some guys outside on the street holding those arrow signs trying to entice drivers to check out apartments and condos, and promptly decided to try to avoid complaining as much as I have been.

Jars of Clay favorites

I recently took part in a poll on a music website listing my favorite songs from my favorite band, Jars of Clay. Here's the current list from their entire discography so far (their newest album, "Good Monsters", is scheduled to release later this year). Maybe one of these days I'll get around to making a mix...

From "Jars of Clay":
Liquid
Like a Child
Boy on a String
Flood
Worlds Apart

From "Much Afraid":
Overjoyed
Fade to Grey
Tea and Sympathy
Truce
Hymn

From "If I Left The Zoo":
Unforgetful You
Collide
Sad Clown
I'm Alright
Can't Erase It

From "The Eleventh Hour"
Something Beautiful
Revolution

From "Furthermore":
Frail (prefer this version to Much Afraid's)

From "Who We Are Instead":
Trouble Is
Lesser Things
Jealous Kind

From "Redemption Songs":
I'll Fly Away
On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand

From other sources:
This Road

Assorted food pictures

Some of the good eats from the past two months...
Rack of lamb (some French restaurant in LA)


Seafood soup medley (same French restaurant):


Fish over leeks with some kind of fruit sauce (same French restaurant)


New York strip steak (same French restaurant)


Biggest sashimi platter I've ever gotten (Japanese restaurant in LA). I wasn't even able to finish all of the tuna chunks! Guess how much it costs? Hint: it's the lunch special.


Chili dog, teriyaki chicken, and veggie medley (Guy's Appreciation)


Strawberry and Nutella crepe (Crepes-a-go-go, Berkeley):


Lamb chops and potato puffs (Gregoire, Berkeley):

Assorted scenic pictures

A picture post, ranging back to our family vacation in May (note: for some reason I still avoid posting pictures with people's faces in them, yet people who know my ID can go and browse my Yahoo photos at their leisure. Go figure. Maybe someday I'll be more comfortable with it):

Yosemite
With the huge amounts of rain dumping tons of snow on the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, going to Yosemite and other national parks in May just as all of it was melting resulted in some breathtaking visuals of waterfalls and rivers swollen beyond capacity.

Yosemite Valley:


Bridalveil Falls:


Yosemite Falls:


There was even so much water that Yosemite, famed for its waterfalls, had more than a few impromptu waterfalls show up on the valley walls:



Sequoias
These trees, the largest living organisms in the world, are both awe-inspiring in their size, age, and majesty - and yet interesting in the sense that they aren't as all-powerful as they look. In order for the seeds to take root, they rely on lightning-caused fires to clear out the underbrush on the forest floor so that they don't have to compete with other plants for nutrients. They need squirrels to help them disperse seeds from the cones. And finally, despite their ability to live several thousand years, they can actually be quite fragile in that their root system is very shallow.

Amazing that a little brush like this one (which came up to my mid-shin):


Could eventually grow into the General Sherman tree, the largest living organism in the world (2300-2700 years old, 275 ft high, 103 ft in diameter at the base):



Getty Center
Entrance:


Garden:



Independence Day fireworks
From the Shoreline Amphitheatre after the Movie Magic concert (see Esther's and Karen's recaps, as well as Karen's video of the grand finale):


Bursting over Great America: