the resident alian
Main Journal Gallery Wedding Concerts Bands Friends HHGG Tech Web Disclaimer Search Contact

Journal Apr 2007

26 Apr 2007

There's not much I can say about the Virginia Tech shooting last week. Just prayers for all those affected.

Speaking of which, let's talk about prayer in public schools. I just recently heard a sermon where one of the priest's lines was about it not being allowed. Despite what zealots and other confused people may believe, it is allowed for students and student groups but not for staff to lead the whole school or a class, unless perhaps the students in that class have already consented. I don't know why adamant people on either side of the issue don't seem to get this. You are free to pray in school on your own time. You are also free to refrain from praying with others at public schools.

Lots of other miscellaneous stuff today:

The name of the game of Tetris can be applied to any activity that involves the strategic positioning or stacking of objects to maximize the use of space. Some of the ones I use are fridge Tetris, freezer Tetris, and couch Tetris. Apparently, someone else also came up with freezer Tetris.

Almost every U2 album either has a title track or a song the includes the name of the album in its lyrics. I thought How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was one of the exceptions, but apparently, there's a song, "Fast Cars" that references the title of that album. It's only on the Japanese and UK versions of the album, though. Bummer.

I saw a new commercial for Celebrex, where its new selling point is...not having been taken off the market [presumably for being under investigation for side effects]. I think it's a sign of the times that these new drugs aren't as thoroughly tested as we'd like them to be, yet they're marketed incessantly.

-res

Other news and opinion from the day:

Other news and opinion from the past:

13 Apr 2007

I think iTunes and similar music stores are a great idea. For the consumer that only wants individual songs, it's a good way to get high-quality music files for a low price. That said, buying music ditigally is not for me. At least not yet.

Right now, iTunes only sells music in their own protected AAC format. It's set to change, though. Apple had a recent deal with EMI to make their catalog available without copy protection. That alone is reason to celebrate, for fair use advocates. But the rumor that iTunes will start selling songs in the lossless ALAC format is reason for me to consider buying music files. It's worth it to me to spend 50% more (as is the rumor) to get a CD-quality, lossless file that can be put into a CD audio mix with the same quality as if I had ripped it from a CD with that song on it.

My only reservation with buying individual songs, independent of the album, is that many rock artists craft albums as units to be considered as a whole, artistically. As far as I know (i.e. from Wikipedia), this started in the '70s with album-oriented rock/radio. Before that, artists like Elvis and The Beach Boys focused on single songs. (The Beatles, of course, did release albums that are considered atomic works, though the releases differ between the US and the UK.)

I think that generally the album is a concept that should be taken as a whole, not just as the sum of its individual tracks. I made a list of my favorite albums that I take as whole works, and I have a formula for ordering the tracks that is explained in the list. For certain kinds of artists, generally pop or vocal artists, I would buy individual tracks, but for new artists, I like to check out albums first (usually from Ben) before committing to buy an album. If I only like one or two songs, I'll skip out. If I really like those few songs, I'd consider buying the single or music file. But sometimes if I listen to a borrowed CD enough, I can get the whole picture, have it grow on me, and then I'll buy it. On sale, of course. Or on BMG.

-res

Other news and opinion from the day:

09 Apr 2007

Great quote from Randi Rhodes today, in response to the Pat Robertsons of the world (and Regent University) trying to fuse fundamentalist religion with the state:

"If Bush was God, the stories in the Bible would be a whole lot different. You know, Joshua would still be stuck in the battle of Jericho to this day, waiting for enough soldiers and equipment! If Bush was really God, you know, everything would be different! First of all, the whole Burning Bush thing would be deleted. And the Ten Commandments would be...determined to be quaint by Alberto Gonzales! He would have started drilling in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago, instead of today, which is where are fighting, in the Garden of Eden, you know? . . . Yeah, if Bush were God, he would have said to Noah, 'We never anticipated the breach of the levees.' There would never have been an Ark!"

Yesterday, Maureen's cousin Chris introduced me to the common class project, Flat Stanley, where students take a paper cutout figure and take pictures of the figure in their everyday life. Timmy has a similar thing in his class with a teddy bear named Madison. It's also like the gnome statue in Amélie. I had the idea to replace Flat Stanley with PaRappa the Rapper, or the more recognizable Paper Mario, for our upcoming trip to France. Oh, did I mention we're going on vacation?

-res

06 Apr 2007

With the Triduum here (yesterday, today, and tomorrow), Lent is almost over, along with my abstinence from meat on Fridays and Ash Wednesday (which I like to call the "standard deduction", as opposed to the additional sacrifices Catholics make during Lent). If I forget to abstain from meat, I try to do it the next day. Personally, I think the fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday is much harder. Two very light meals for breakfast and lunch and a sensible dinner (sounds like a diet plan) on those days. I was ready to faint before dinner. Of course, I have little to complain about hunger being above the poverty level in a first-world nation. It could be a lot worse.

On a somber note, our condolences to the McKinney family for the loss of Chris' dad.

-res

Other news and opinion from the day:

05 Apr 2007

I learned something interesting about Unix pipes today. (Non-nerds, please feel free to skip this one.) I know there are two kinds of output pipes, stdout and stderr. If you want to separate the two outputs into files, the way to do it is:

$ somecmd &> /tmp/test-stderr > /tmp/test-stdout

I just needed to know that today. If you ever automate things in Unix or even Cygwin using cron, it helps to output thing to logs, say in the /tmp folder. If the cron task involves, say using lynx to download something automatically, then to save the file and log the errors, this way works:

lynx -source http://www.someurl.com/somedir/somefile &> /tmp/cron-lynx.log > savedfile

cron rules! It's extremely powerful if you know how to use it. I highly recommend it to schedule daily tasks. It helps to understand the command-line (console), of course.

-res

02 Apr 2007

Yesterday was April Fool's Day, and on the first few minutes of the drive back from dropping Timmy off at his grandparents' for Spring break, Maureen lamented not pulling a joke on me. "Evelyn, how can we trick Papa?" Then she (apparently) interrupted herself saying she forgot her cell phone. I said "What??" You may laugh, but here's why this is not funny. Forgetting her cell phone is something she is likely to do. Either way, she got me.

Last Thursday, we got to see a preview of Disney's Meet the Robinsons. It's about Lewis, a 12-year-old aspiring inventor, who gets discouraged at failure. Someone from the future gives him a glimpse of a future Lewis apparently helped to create. It's a very inspiring story of the creativity in science that mankind can use for the common good.

Without giving away too much, the timeline is similar to the pair of Bill & Ted movies: the main character(s) help to create a positive future; a protagonist appears from the future to ensure that the main character(s) succeeds; and an antagonist appears from the future to try to stop the main character(s) from succeeding (which necessitates the intervention of the protagonist from the future in the first place). However, Meet the Robinsons handles the events in a much more kid-friendly and inspiring way.

For me personally, movies (or series) that show a complete story in this fashion are really moving. I don't know why, but when I watch films that have a sense of (positive) destiny, and then that destiny is fulfilled, it's extremely rewarding for me. I can't give too many other examples so as not to spoil those movies. But even something like the Star Wars double-trilogy gives me that sense. Hear me out. The original trilogy (Episodes IV to VI) chronicle the rise of a rebellion to a power-hungry empire (or at least its emperor), then the prequel trilogy (Episodes I to III) shows the rise of the empire. What I particularly enjoyed about the prequel trilogy is that it provides development for just about all of the characters and the worlds in the original trilogy as well as slowly putting the puzzle pieces in place to set up the original trilogy. Plus, there's lots of talk of destiny all around. As dark the idea is of showing the rise of a malevolent empire, it does leave a sense of hope at the end of Episode III by tying in what the "New Hope" is in Episode IV with a subtle but stunning visual just before the credits.

Maybe that's it. Maybe it's all about hope for me. I think the most inspiring stories are about characters who keep hope alive and never (or at least seldom) give up. At the most cynical, a sense of destiny is just a device humans use to hold on to hope and eventually make the destiny a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say that's how destiny works. A personal destiny is an idea of unknown origin that we use to achieve our goals. As long as we use (mostly) noble means to achieve those goals, the journey is both rewarding and inspiring.

-res

Past Journal Entries: 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

2010 Journal Entries: Nov

Common and favorite references and their acronyms:

Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!