GLOBADOM

This is the sister ship to the ferry I was riding. As you can see, more ice.

The day was dry enough, and I did enjoy the ride after a fashion, though it was the kind of day wehre you really had to be interested in riding as its own reward.
Posted using scary magic-like technologies

Bungie has released the wondrous Marathon Trilogy as a free download. Life is good. I’m going to go home, download this, and play through the whole thing at maximum difficulty! So, who’s up for a LAN party?

Update: I went home, got Marathon, set the difficulty to “Total Carnage,” and died, repeatedly, about 10 feet from the start point, except for the several times when I died standing on the start point. I have dropped the difficulty.

Also, there’s a thing called Aleph One, which is basically an open-source update to the Marathon 2 engine, and it adds some nifty features like network play.

I am finally going to create the map I always threatened to create. It will be called “To John Woo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.” Dual-wield will feature prominently.

See you starside!

There’s a few crazies trying to build another indoor velodrome in Canada, this time in London, Ontario, something I found out thanks to Gord’s blog. The killer part? They’re proposing a 142m track with 50-degree banking! The Burnaby ‘drome is already one of the tightest, steepest tracks in the world, but it’s a comparatively roomy 200m with 47-degree banking. Wow.

You know when the exact moment that Martin Scorsese lost me in The Aviator? As Hughes throttles up for his record speed run, the tachometer goes up to eleven (4500, I think), and then the needle falls off.

You see that sort of thing, and the credibili-meter drops near zero. I know that anyone with a flight or mechanical background would immediately snort derisively at this tired gag, and probably most film buffs, too.

So you see that, and then you start looking skeptically at the rest of the film, which gets weird, because the film portrays some deeply weird behaviour and fantastic plot turns. The problem is they were all true.

The experimental Army plane that Hughes crashed through several houses while trying for an emergency landing at the L.A. Country Club? That actually happened, and is accurately depicted in the film. The aviation speed record that ended with him running out of gas and crash-landing? Completely over-the-top, and also entirely true.

The movie drove me to do some quickie biographical research, because I get nitpicky about this sort of thing, and the scary part is that not only does Scorsese not over-reach on most of his plot points, he elided some details (opiate addiction, for example) which probably seemed too outlandish for a movie. Some details are badly degraded by years of pop-culture parody: the scenes of a crazy, long-haired, unshaven Hughes evoke memories of Mr. Burns in one or two Simpsons episodes. That’s what you get for being biographically accurate.

Maybe Hughes was too good a subject for a film. Maybe Scorsese agreed. Hughes had a whole (and arguably even stranger and crazier) second act of a life beyond the last reel of The Aviator: he was a huge part of Las Vegas’ post-Mafia era, bought another airline, and got involved in a CIA plot to recover a Russian nuclear submarine. Hughes was definitively larger than life. You wish modern billionaires were like this, and a few do aspire: Richard Branson, maybe, with Trump, Mark Cuban, and few others in the second tier. But their lives are only half-lived compared with what Hughes did.

So there you go: the film is 170 minutes of very strange behaviour by a very crazy man, and yet Scorsese actually took out the really crazy parts. I think I like this film more now that I’ve fact-checked it than I did when I was seeing it. At this point, I expect to read a Hughes bio and find out the tach needle really did fall off.

One more thing: the numerous flying sequences are so good that any aviation buff owes it to themselves to go see this film. And the crazy sequences ring true, too.

A lot of the time, I find myself looking at new Mac products and going “that’s nice, but a bit too much, and I hardly need it.” After the introduction of the Mac mini, I have started calculating when I will buy one, and which monitor I will use with it.

It’s just enough computer at a really low price, and it skimps on stuff (keyboard, mouse, monitor) that is commodified to a ridiculous degree and which doesn’t have much to do with the fabled Mac experience. When I first heard the pre-Expo rumors of a US$500 headless iMac, I believed they were fraught with the usual overrating of its capabilities and underrating of its price. Nope, there it is: G4-powered and US$499 (C$629; $599 with educational discount). I think they’ll sell a zillion of these boxes. I recommend upgrading the memory.

keith had some madcap ideas about making a base for a wearable computer, but I think the best clever musing so far is the one I read on Gizmodo or some such: a Mac mini will just about fit in the space used by a standard car radio.

The iPod shuffle isn’t of particular interest to me (I’m not a mobile music guy), but it’s also really cheap and looks very nice. I could see buying one, though my desire is more theoretical than real.

NPR : Armstrong Mulls Next Year’s Tour de France.

Excellent interview. Highlights: Lance will be doing the Spring Classics this year. Lance wants to do the Hour Record. Danger: WMA format.

Well, after a wonderful stint in Vancouver for the holidays, am back in Calgary, spreading the Wired Cola message! I finally got my mug from our security officer, and it is now sitting on my desk at home. Soon, it will be sitting on my desk in the lab, collecting dust here since I am not too sure about its lead content, as well as collecting strange questions from co-workers.

The purple on the logo has strangely been changed to magenta — which of course left our security officer/logo designer wondering what colours he would have to change the design to to get it to actually be purple, if there was some kind of correction offset he could use. It could work, and no doubt he can figure it out if anyone can.

Calgary is full of fluffy white snow. Lots and lots of it. I got back on Thursday, after a ten and a half hour trip back from Vancouver (the flight usually takes a little over an hour, but it snowed on Thursday in Vancouver, and Vancouver can SOOOOO not deal with snow). It was dark when I got back, and I sequestered myself in my flat for three days to play video games and watch Smallville. When I looked out the window on Sunday, it was very white. Oy. I haven’t been outside just yet (I can walk from my flat to my lab without going outside, thanks to the university’s underground tunnels).

I’m glad to hear y’all had a good time in Ottawa! Never been there, always wanted to go.

I’ll take these subjects in the reverse order. It feels really darned good to be back on the bike. I finally decided to risk the roads, and there was virtually no risk. Very clear today. The bike felt really good, almost soothing. I also almost but not quite bought a really sweet mountain bike frame this weekend, but then I remembered I didn’t need one, no matter how good a deal it was.

Also on the weekend, erm, how to put this so nobody gets uncomfortable? Ask me what happened to Skytrain on its opening day. I won’t post the story here, due to obvious familial entanglements. Note: this cryptic comment doesn’t change the fact that I think Skytrain is the bee’s knees. I’m convinced it’s a great deal for what it is, and that a large part of its remarkably good safety record is owed to its driverless status. Because drivers inevitably make mistakes.

Oh, I’d better not let that stand: actually, the bus service also has a superb record of safety, which is why you hardly ever hear of any problems. One of the difficulties of good systems is that we spend so much time finding and fixing problems that I think the art of finding examples of efficiency, safety, and profitability is often neglected, especially when the eye of the media is turned to the public sector. And I say that as person with reasonably strong small-government instincts. Must be the ludicrous preponderance of public-sector workers in my family, including me.

Well, here I am again; faced with an intimidating blank screen. I feel somewhat at a loss as to what to include in this entry, so I’ve decided to focus on both the ridiculous and sublime elements of my new favourite show, “House.”

“House” is a medical drama, with a quirky sense of humor, on the Fox network. It stars one of my favourite British actors, Hugh Laurie, in the title role. It is quite hilarious to see Mr. Laurie as Dr. Gregory House, as he speaks with an American accent and uses a cane in the show. It seems American audiences aren’t familiar with his work in “Blackadder” or “Jeeves and Wooster,” and some think he really is American and may use the cane outside of working hours. Hugh Laurie describes his character as “ornery,” a word which he loves using, as it is not part of every day speech in Britain. Laurie’s character is head of the Infectious Diseases Department at a New Jersey hospital. He has no bedside manner and tends to treat each case at a distance, allowing a team of unbelievably pretty doctors to deal with patients. His character can be compared to Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, he is a solver of puzzling cases. Interestingly though, he combats infectious diseases in the same way Holmes endeavoured to fight criminals. Like Holmes, he has an unhealthy dependency on a drug, which affects his performance and perhaps his ability to interact with people. He also butts heads with the chief of hospital administration in a way that is comparable to Holmes’ difficulties with Scotland Yard and its various representatives.

So, what is sublimely entertaining about this show? Hugh Laurie. He brings a standard of acting and a cleverness in delivering his lines that always leaves me in awe. However, the thing that made my jaw drop was seeing him in such a dramatic role when I’ve spent more than 10 years admiring him in comedies where he plays a buffoon and a fool. Suddenly, he seems to have taken on an aura of sexiness along with the new accent, cane and the embittered character of Dr. House. The writing in the show is very good, as well. Yet, I think through the medium of another actor it would not have been as successful.

Now, what is ridiculous about “House?” First, as I alluded to earlier, the supporting cast is way, way, way too good-looking. I’ve spent a lot of time with family members in hospitals over the years and it is no catwalk. I’ve seen the occasional doctor that has merited a second glance and one or two nurses that could grace a Sears catalogue, but really there are no special people-watching advantages when sitting in a hospital waiting room. However, I must say that House himself is just so ridiculously funny that I can’t stop laughing every time I remember one of his zingers. I close this entry with some of my favourites (note these are not word for word):

Patient: What are those pills for? Oh, for you, for your leg.

House: No, ’cause they’re yummy. Want one? They’ll make your back feel better.

House: Unfortunately, you have a deeper problem: your wife is having an affair.

Patient: What?

House: You’re orange, you moron. It’s one thing for you not the notice, but for her not to notice you’ve changed colour, she must not be paying attention.

Well, I just get back from vacation, try to get back on my bike, and seem to be stuck in neutral. On Tuesday, some residual ice in the chain froze, rendering the bike temporarily unrideable. It now sleeps in the house overnight. Wednesday, I actually got to ride. Thursday, with threatening snowfall afoot, I take the bus. As it was, the roads would have been rideable. Today, I take the bus again, and again the roads are clear. And now, after some excitingly threatening-looking snow, I will probably be taking the bus home over clear roads again. So it goes.

Meanwhile, another local college has had half of yesterday and all of today off. But we are strong!

But that’s how things are at the moment: after some hopeful-looking negotiations, we’re almost certain to go on strike sometime next week. After struggling for some hours with a piece of evil Korean technology (evil, thy name is Miraphone), I got it working (thanks to some exploratory regediting: never trust a device that connects to the serial port and the keyboard port), only to find that it was unusable due to a huge amount of static on the line, apparently from the device itself.

And so on. Nothing serious, just the sort of thing that exerts a mental drag on me. Snap out of it…