There are legions of individuals working throughout the world to improve the lives of their fellow human beings and striving to prevent conflict through mediation and education.  Many of those folks have whole months of their lives to this cause.  Many have devoted years.  To accomplish this, a great number live in the same conditions as those whom they are trying to help.  They put themselves at risk of infection by foreign parasites, viruses seldom seen in advanced countries, and physical harm by local thugs and military juntas threatened by their presence.

Amateurs.

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama, sitting President of the United States for nine months, single-term U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois,  three-term state Senator, lawyer, 3-year community organizer and political science major.  He was nominated for the Prize prior to the 1 February 2009 deadline, at a time where he had served as President for less than two weeks.

The five-member Nobel Committee examined the 205 nominations for this year’s award and chose President Obama over other nominees such as Afghani human rights activist Sima Samar, Chinese political prisoner Hu Jia and Zimbabwe’s pro-democracy Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The Committee’s citation reads:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.”

Other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates include Martin Luther King, Jr., UNICEF, Andrei Sakharov, Mother Theresa, Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel and the Dalai Lama.

What's on the roof? Not pigeons. Not Santa.

One of my favorite games right now is Left 4 Dead. You can’t possibly go wrong with zombies, guns, and cooperative multiplayer action.

Or so I thought, until this past weekend.

Up until now, I’ve been pretty fortunate in my online play. Sure, I’ve been teamed up with some real dopes from time to time, but mostly I’ve had the good luck to play with fairly intelligent adults.  But the past two nights have, with rare exception, been a different experience.

Along with the undead and the near-dead, I’ve now played with the brain-dead: individuals apparently devoid of the gray matter that zombies crave so much.  Individuals with unimaginitive, all-lowercase names like will and thomas, who find shooting their teammates or clogging the voice chat with anemic attempts at humorous banter to be far easier than actually fighting off the legions of Hell.  Many more remain nameless, since I seldom saw them — they were too busy racing through the level to offer their teammates any kind of support.

Actual picture from our last trip to Pennsylvania

I realize that my experience is not unique.  Ever since I started playing Quake online in 1996, I have run into horrible players.  I read about foul-mouthed 13-year-olds on Xbox Live all the time.  An environment that allows for anonymity and easy communication at the same time is bound to cultivate that kind of activity.  The studies into the phenomenon are legendary.

Maybe it was the fact that it involved zombies, or that I had waaaaay too much caffeine in my system, or that I was suffering from some sort of bug that prevented me from sleeping soundly the night before, but when reflecting upon this sad state of affairs last night I had a revelation.  Not an uplifting spiritual revelation or a world-improving scientific revelation, but rather a “oh crap, we’re screwed” firefly-flash of insight.  It is this:

Left 4 Dead is not simply a brilliantly-conceived and executed first-person shooter, it is a hyperaccurate simulation of a zombie apocalypse.

When the zombie apocalypse comes, who will survive?  The Ted Nugents, the Heidi Grimms, the Les Strouds?  Nope.  They’ll either be killed off by the mutated supervirus or by tragic accidents in the midst of riots and civil disorder as the citizenry panics.

Instead, the survivors will be the aforementioned wills and thomases, the Octomoms, the ShamWow guys, the Ward Churchills.  They’ll be the hapless Taco Bell crewmembers who can never get a drive-through order right (I’m looking at you, Powers and Palmer Park store).  They’ll be head shop employees, minor politicians and the shrillest members of your homeowner’s association.

Cooperation between armed survivors won’t be the norm…because you’ll want to shoot them in the head within minutes.  You’re not going to be marooned with the Professor, you’re going to be teamed with Gilligan.  And Lucy, and Urkel and Bobcat Goldthwait. Everybody on MTV, the E! Channel, and Bravo.

Yep, the truly dead will be the lucky ones.

The car was a Jaguar.

I swear to God I’m not making that up.

I hadn’t seen it in the theater, despite the omnipresent media campaign that ranged from M&Ms to thinly-veiled archaeology shows on the History Channel.  Reaction from people who had seen it was definitely “meh”, and if I’ve learned anything from George Lucas in the last 9 years, its that he can’t make a decent film to save his life.

So I was prepared for disappointment.

As much as I’d like to say something like “but boy was I wrong”, I can’t.  Harrison Ford looks old.  Karen Allen looks as old as Harrison Ford, and she’s 9 years younger.  The absence of Denholm Elliot‘s character is noticeable even before the movie makes a half-assed homage to him (Elliot died in 1992).

This was a movie made 17 years too late.

If I hadn’t seen the original three movies earlier this year, I’d probably be feeling somewhat pissed right now; movies fare a lot better when viewed through nostalgic lenses.  While I had never been completely enamored with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I had forgotten about how bad some parts of Temple of Doom were.  Like I said, I was prepared for disappointment.  I’m not pissed off, I’m just kind of saddened by the wasted potential.

Spoilers follow.  Consider yourself warned.

I think the choice of the Soviets as the bad guys was a decent one; I’m just amazed that Steven Spielberg was talked into directing a movie without robots or World War II as a backdrop.  Then again, it does have aliens.

Ugh, aliens.  I don’t know if this particular stink can be pinned on George Lucas, but he’s my primary suspect.  Spielberg’s range of subject matter looks comprehensive in comparison: George just seems to need a chrome spaceship and some CGI these days, both of which were in attendance.

Would it really have killed them to do a story about Atlantis or the Spear of Destiny or Excalibur or the Fountain of Youth or Aztlán?  Bigfoot?  Even the Loch Ness Monster?

Maybe even better material wouldn’t have improved this movie, because Indiana Jones is tired.  Whether this was an intentional decision by Ford/Lucas/Spielberg or not, he’s a low-energy guy in what should be a high-energy movie.  It’s like he’s got mono, but worse: he didn’t take his Geritol.  All he’s missing is a walker and a chance to snap his whip at some kids on his lawn.

I thought Cate Blanchett was pretty much forgettable as a scenery-chewing Commie.  Ray Winstone was ok as Indy’s longtime-friend-whom-we’ve-never-met-but-are-convinced-of-such-due-to-exposition-desperately-trying-to-cover-19-years-of-backstory, though a better choice might have been Jonathan Ke Quan, reprising his role of Short Round from Temple of Doom.  Now that would have added a little more drama to the story, were he to also side with the Soviets and suffer Mac’s fate.

As for Shia LaBeouf?  I thought he did a fair job, nothing more.  I don’t think he has the screen presence to lead the franchise in the future, but he didn’t deserve a lot of the fanboy hate directed towards him.  He’s just lucky he wasn’t cast as an Ewok.

I don’t think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a terrible movie — it was certainly no Ultraviolet — it just wasn’t very good.  It isn’t a movie people are going to remember 20 years from now in any context other than “oh yeah, they made a fourth Indiana Jones, didn’t they?”  It is Godfather III-ish in its setup and follow-through.

]]> http://blog.caljacobson.com/2008/11/27/indiana-jones-and-the-kingdom-of-the-strained-prunes/feed/ 1 http://blog.caljacobson.com/2008/10/06/the-front-range-php-users-group/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-front-range-php-users-group http://blog.caljacobson.com/2008/10/06/the-front-range-php-users-group/#comments Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:48:43 +0000 Cal http://blog.caljacobson.com/?p=75 When I was in my mid teens, I stumbled upon a Computing Explorer post in my hometown of Spokane.  This was an organized group of computer geeks with adult leadership that met once a week under the guise of doing something to further our minds and careers.  In truth, it was more social than anything else…years later, the core members of the group would still meet for pizza (and beer) on the traditional Wednesday nights.  While I didn’t learn much about the PDP-11 that the group had access to, I did make some good friends and had a really good time talking about Commodore 64s, Apples, Ataris, science fiction and dorky things in general.

Nowadays my interests are a bit more focused — with a family and a job, they pretty much have to be.  Still, I thought it would be cool to be able to attend something like the old Explorer meetings and shoot the breeze with other computer geeks.

There’s a .NET Users Group in town, but since I work in the PHP arena these days that didn’t quite cut the mustard.  Then my boss Dan and I got to talking about PHP User Groups — specifically, how there wasn’t one for the Colorado Springs area.  For that matter, it didn’t look like there was an active “PUG” anywhere in Colorado…at least one that had updated its website in the last five years.

This sounded like an opportunity to do something fun.

The easy part was finding people in the office who were interested in attending a group meeting.  Almost as easy was getting a basic website up and running: Dan provided hosting, I bought a domain name, and we threw some pages together.

A meeting location was a bit harder to find, but thankfully we’ve got some good libraries here in the Springs and we were able to secure a free 15-person room.  An in-office meeting announcement found its way to Zend, and through them out into the mailboxes of 20-some local developers who are interested in PHP.

We only had seven people show up for our first meeting, but two folks were from outside of our office so I took that as a good sign — especially since we weren’t working too hard on publicizing things yet.  After all, our first meeting was simply to take care of the boring administrative stuff…anybody coming for a good, meaty PHP presentation was going to be sorely disappointed.

Bylaws — the rules and regulations governing an organization — can be truly mind-numbing.  Were they really necessary?  For our next few meetings, probably not.  But in any small group (online or offline) that I’ve participated in, at some point there comes a problem or conflict…and without even a simple set of rules people end up making assumptions and somebody’s feelings inevitably get hurt.  Aside from getting the dull work out of the way first, we figured that by doing this now we’re going to save ourselves some problems down the line.

We ended up with three pages of bylaws…but all that took 90 minutes of discussion, even after working off of a template and taking some better sections from another user group’s charter.  If you think three pages is a lot, you should see some of the monsters out there: I think I came across a 30-page set of bylaws for a Mac User Group.  Hey, we just wanted to cover some basic rules and responsibilities for the people in charge, a means by which those people can be appointed and removed, and a way to ensure that the general member body doesn’t get screwed out of representation.  That’s hard to do in just three pages, even if you’re assuming that the rules will be interpreted in the same good-faith fashion in which they’re written.

We lost a couple of folks over the course of the first hour, so there were only five of us left when we were done with the bylaws.   You’ll probably not be too surprised when I tell you that by the end of the meeting there were five positions on the Board of Directors: a President, a Vice President, a Treasurer, a Secretary and a Member-at-Large.  It’s an odd thing, nominating yourself and everybody else in the room for an elected position; it smacks of a post-coup staff meeting in a banana republic.

This particular republic is the Front Range PHP Users Group, or FRPUG.  Our next meeting is the 22nd of this month, and now the real work begins: finding presenters and making things interesting for a typical PHP developer.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, if you’re a PHP developer (or just interested in Web technology in general) and live somewhere between Denver and Pueblo, I invite you to check out our website at http://www.frontrangephp.org and consider attending one of our upcoming monthly meetings.  I think we can make this fun.

And maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in the beer and pizza at some point.

ConnectedText on Ubuntu

If you’re a fan of ConnectedText like I am, you might be interested in knowing that you can get this Windows-only application to run on Linux thanks to WINE.   I found it to be surprisingly simple; as the attached screenshot will attest I have CT 3.0.0.5 running on my Ubuntu 8.04 system.  Here’s how you do it.

• Install WINE.  An overview of what this program is can be found here at Wikipedia, if you’re curious.  Obviously, how you install WINE will vary from system to system, though on Ubuntu (in my opinion one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions out there) you can simply go to “Add/Remove…” under the “Applications” menu item, search for “WINE”, check a box, and click a button.
• Download the ConnectedText installation program from this website and save it somewhere on your system.
• Using a command-line terminal (in Ubuntu this is found at Applications -> Accessories -> terminal), cd (change directory) to the location you saved ConnTextSetup.exe.
• Type wine ConnTextSetup.exe (and hit return/enter) to start the CT installation program under WINE.  Follow the installation instructions as normal.
• With a little luck, the installation will complete without a problem.  You should then be able to start CT via WINE — follow your system-specific directions.  On Ubuntu, this is simply a matter of going to Applications -> Wine->Programs -> ConnectedText -> ConnectedText.

There are some differences, of course.  Some CT plugins, such as Ploticus and Graphviz, do not work (RSS, Tex and Highlight appear to be fine for me, however).  Text on some pages may appear odd — I’ve noticed some minor layout issues involving links.

It’s not perfect but it’ll do in a pinch.

(Minor spoilers follow: consider yourself warned.)

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Pixar’s movies are the shorts they show beforehand.  I think the one this time around, Presto, is probably their best to date — lots of physical comedy in the Loony Tunes vein.

WALL·E itself is also a step up from their previous work, though I think more in a technical sense than a storytelling one.  Not only have the animators given a (mostly) voiceless, boxy robot character and emotion, but they appear to have overcome a major issue with CGI: dirt.

Yes, dirt.

I’ve heard that every Pixar film has at least one major technical challenge: in Monsters, Inc. it was hair, in Finding Nemo it was water, in Ratatouille it was supposedly food.  If this film had a technical challenge, my money is on dirt — there was a lot of it and it looked as great as dirt can.

My only criticism of the movie involves the use of live-action footage: some of the 1969 movie version of Hello, Dolly! and some of actor Fred Willard as a company CEO.  Both seemed very out of place in a production by a company that has animated numerous human and dancing characters in the past.  My initial reaction after leaving the theater was that it smacked of simple laziness on the part of Pixar, but now I’m of the mind that it was just a very poor decision by director Andrew Stanton (who previously directed Finding Nemo).

I’ve heard that there has been squawking in various circles about a heavy-handed message in the movie, and to be honest when I saw the first trailer eons ago that was my first impression.  But WALL·E is nowhere near the club-you-over-the-head territory that Happy Feet was, thank God.  The movie may flirt with the boundary between story and propoganda, but it doesn’t cross it.  I’m sure some folks will be put off by the notion that the future is populated by fat, materialistic humans…but I wasn’t.  I think there’s some truth there, but the manner in which it is presented is unlikely to cause Junior to renounce worldly goods and embark on a lifetime of communal living.

I strongly recommend going to see the movie if you’ve enjoyed Pixar’s previous films.  Now if we could only get them to can the forthcoming Cars 2 in favor of an Incredibles sequel.

At this moment in time, life is good.  So good, in fact, that sometimes it’s hard to remember how bad it was a year ago. Although I am mindful that things could change tomorrow and that there are a lot of families out there who aren’t as lucky as we are today, I’m going to gloat a bit.

The thief has received a thorough ass-kicking.

He isn’t gone, of course.  He never will be.  But he has made himself mighty scarce in the last few months.  Oh, he pulled a stunt in May — showing up in my son’s preschool class — but fled the scene shortly thereafter.

I don’t know if a picture is worth a thousand words, but showing you my son’s journey over the last year is probably more effective than anything I can write:

(update February 2011: I’ve removed the pictures of Gavin — not because his status has changed but rather because I’m a lot more concerned about his privacy at this point.  Suffice it to say that the pictures covered a progression of good to bad to worse to great)

When I wrote The Thief In My House, Gavin was that poor boy in the upper-right corner.  Yeah, that’s really the same kid.

What’s changed?

First off, we got him off the steroids.  By the first of the year he had dropped all the weight he had put on.  We’re not entirely sure they helped, but when you’re grasping for straws you’ll try anything that has worked for somebody else.

Secondly, we achieved control over his Epilepsy: since late September 2007 he has had only two major (tonic-clonic) seizures.  With the exception of the seizure in May (which was a result of us dropping a little too low in his medication adjustment), we haven’t seen a thing since.

I knocked on wood after typing that.  When a cause-and-effect relationship is tenuous at best, superstition tends to take over.  Call it bad mojo or Murphy’s Law, but his last seizure took place days after both my wife and I happily told friends that we hadn’t seen any activity in quite a while.

I’m actually wondering about the reprecussions of posting this blog entry.  Neurology sometimes seems just like glorified voodoo for all it does — and doesn’t do.

The third thing that changed was that we actually got help from our local school district — that’s District 49 here in Colorado Springs.  We were able to get Gavin into a preschool program, where he had individualized attention.  I have been told that Colorado is near the bottom of the list for social programs, so we consider ourselves lucky.

Fourth, we continued to attend the local Epilepsy support group for kids and families.  They have a website, and if you’re in Southern Colorado I encourage you to attend the next meeting.  I cannot stress enough the importance of having a support group, especially if (like us) the rest of your family lives thousands of miles away.

Fifth, we prioritized.  Our tolerance for drama and bullshit dropped through the floor.   Once our first priority — getting Gavin stabilized — was achieved, we focused on long-term issues, such as paying off medical debt.

Sixth, we were lucky.  Or blessed. Consider the following:

• Out of the blue, my wife is called by the company she left 7 years ago when she was pregnant with our oldest child.  Boom, she is suddenly employed.
• After a year as a contractor with crappy benefits, I land a job with a large, stable company with great benefits and an excellent work environment.
• Gavin ends up doing so well at in the District 49 preschool program, he gets bored.  At the same time my wife returns to work, we are able to get him into a Montessori preschool just blocks from our house.  Within a couple of weeks, we observe Gavin’s development take off again.
• We manage to hit upon the right combination of medicines, as our options were becoming fewer and fewer.

So like I said, life is good right now.  It’s possible that the other shoe could drop tomorrow: the effectiveness of medicine for kids with Doose Syndrome can change suddenly.  I suppose that’s not too surprising: you’re not dealing with a bad liver (hey, don’t drink alcohol) or set of lungs (don’t smoke) but rather an organ that changes based upon what you think.

An organ that is in the body of a 5-year-old who is absorbing everything he sees, smells, hears and tastes.

Voodoo, indeed: how the hell can you baseline something that changes at the speed of thought?

This is where we are today.  I’m hoping that tomorrow is much like today; there’s much to be said for boredom and normality.

<Happy Voice, “Pomp and Circumstance” plays in the background>
Graduation is right around the corner, and many seniors are looking forward to the excitement of having their name called and walking down the aisle to receive their diploma.

<Music ends, idiot switches to his Mr. Bad News Voice>
But an increasing number of students won’t get to graduate …

And that’s when my head exploded.  “Get to graduate?”

Get?

Maybe I’m just showing my age, but when I graduated high school (back in 1988, shortly after the Renaissance) students had to earn a diploma.  You know, by taking tests and reading and writing and stuff.  I didn’t even apply myself in school, yet still managed to graduate in the middle of my class.

When the hell did a high school diploma become a right?

Those of you who had to drop out to support your ailing mother and 85 younger siblings, pipe down.  You guys are a statistical blip, outnumbered by the legion of mouth-breathers who can’t apparently squeak through public education with a D-minus.  The same goes for everybody who had a serious medical condition in 12th grade and needed a quintuple organ transplant: you guys get a pass.  I’m baffled by the huge number of future service industry employees incapable of following along in class, let alone trying to make change.

Am I out of touch here?