Matt’s Blog

I didn’t think I’d ever see this movie, since the preview looked like an over-bearing action film with little plot or reason for existence. Luckily, some friends of mine had seen it before and liked it. Honestly, “V for Vendetta” was much more than I thought it would be. The dialogue was excellent, and there were some well thought out references to pay homage to the films arguable predecessor, 1984 by Goerge Orwell. I really liked it, and I really want to see it again. It just captured human spirit so well, and portrayed the fact that it’s not enough just to live, that you have to live conciously, even if that costs you other well valued aspects of life.

The last half of season two just came out a few days ago and I’ve been catching some episodes.  Unfortunately, I’ve been quite dissapointed.  While there are some pretty exciting things going on, it’s all related to the humans.  They’re practically falling into civil war, it’s so dramatic.  Though I guess it is highy plot related, with all the humans are imperfect, blah blah, do we deserve to survive, yada yada yada rhetoric.  Maybe I’ll like it better the second time around, or maybe the third.

I was certainly sad to see xxxxxx die, and not even by a Cylon.  I always wonder about deaths in tv series, whether they’re motivated by the actor/actress quitting the show or not.  Maybe xxxxxx will come back as a ghost or, even better, as a cylon.

Some friends and I have gotten into bowling a little fanatically lately. We’ve been having a lot of fun, mostly me losing and trying to convince my friends to start curving the ball with me, even though I’ve been pretty streaky with it. During the course of play however, we started to wonder how the automatic scoring works (even though wondering how the pinsetting works is a lot more interesting). HowStuffWorks says that many pinsetters have a ccd camera positioned with looks at the pins and relays the information. Alternatively, some pinsetters use “fingers” on the pinsetter itself to simply feel which pins are still standing after the roll.

I’ve also bowled in Brazil before, and there they have an interesting setup. The pins are actually hung on strings. And after the roll they are all stood up with the strings.

I worship vi.  It’s the greatest software ever written, though I’m sad to admit that it didn’t make it in the last “25 Greatest Applications Ever Written” list that I happened to stumble upon.  Alas, vi has fallen out of favor recently.  Most probie programmers coming out of college don’t even know a dd from a pp.

A friend and I have bandied around the idea of adopting the command/insert mode of vi for use at the keyboard level.  Then you could have the advantages of vi in any application!

There are some complaints against technology. It can leave us a lot of free time, and that time sometimes gets used for negative purposes. I’ve always held that as one among many of the causes of strife in the Middle East. I’ve come to believe differently. If a person is busy working just to survive, just surviving is a great victory, and there is left no more room for other desires. But given more free time, we seem to have other battles to fight, more personal battles that are often harder to win. Even though it may seem like the free time has caused more difficulty, or stolen happiness, it hasn’t. It’s merely given us different opportunities for growth.

I’ve just launched a new website, Daily Cribbage Hand

It’s just a small thing, every day it puts up a new hand, and you can submit what you think you would do with the hand. The results of the other users are shown as well, kind of like a poll. Check it out!

You’ve got to admire an artist like Neil Young. He’s had an extraordinary career, one that many musicians would love to have. And today he’s sixty years old, and still singing. Still recording albums, and controversial ones at that. I guess he just loves it to much to stop. I hope that whatever I happen to be doing when I’m sixty is to enthralling, that I choose not to stop.

Football fans in Britain take fandom to extremes by forming “firms”, which is really just a nice word for a gang, and take the game to the streets. It’s an interesting movie, and one that exposes viewers to worlds previously not known. I really liked the film, mostly for the acting, less so for the content. If the story bears any resemblance to society, then it’s a sad one indeed, where humans expend their energy in useless brawls, making everyone think they are doing great things by “standing their ground.” Luckily the main character came away with the true moral, which is that there is a time to stand your ground, and a time to fight another day. A movie to make you think though, and there aren’t many more of those these days.

I just watched an old sci fi movie with Gary Sinise. It’s about a futuristic war between humans and centauri in which the enemy sends replicants to infiltrate Earth. These replicants are made indistinguishable from humans using advanced nano-technology. It’s a theme repeated in the new Battlestar Galactica, and one that I find very interesting. In the movie, (spoiler coming up, highlight to read) the replicants don’t succeed completely in their mission, but one of them does manage to detonate the bomb each one carries inside the rib cage.

I find it an interesting idea because it truly is the one tactic I don’t believe we’d be capable of combating. Humans are too dependent on one another, our relationships with each other are too important to allow us an unbiased decision were such an attack possible. I think even if we had the ability to screen replicants from genuine humans, we would probably still lose because of our emotions. It will be interesting to see how Battlestar Galactica plays it out.

A diner in Sugarhouse which, though being in the heart of Salt Lake City’s “chique” district, felt suprisingly smalltown. It had a warm atmosphere and that diner smell, complete with old men tipping in quarters. The waitresses were cheerfuld old ladies, and the food was delicious. Definitely a place to try for a home cooked breakfast and a friendly face.