House of the rising Moonglum

A Goblet On FIRE!

Finally, after a couple weeks of excessive work for me and almost a month for my wife, we were able to take an evening to ourselves and go see a movie. I didn’t get the mac’n'cheese that I have been craving for the past three days, but such is life. Century Dog will have to do. (Although I have to say, after what has become something of a regular trip to Hot Doug’s I’m not sure that I actually even like regular hot dogs any more.) So we went to see the latest installment of Harry Potter. It has been a while since I read this book, though I remember it pretty well. It was one of my favorites, from a character perspective. As for the movies, I think that the third one, Cuarón’s version of Azkaban was incredible. This was better.

I didn’t really think it was possible, given the length of this book, to make a really, truly great, movie out of it. Apparently they were thinking about doing a two part movie, but Cuarón talked him out of it. And he did a masterful job of really using the visual media to overcome the lack of 600+ pages. Certain aspects of magic that will become important later were shown rather than described, and a certain level of intelligence was assumed on the part of the audience. (OK, so they actually just assume that you have already read the book, but if that is what it takes for movies to not treat us like morons, then so be it. More movies out of books please.) The character development was wonderful. They managed to go through the whole cycle of teen jealousy and friendship, do it well, give a number of the characters a chance to shine, and bring it quickly back to the plot, thanks to some awesome writing and directing. They did the entire opening sequence of the book (100+ pages?) in a couple of minutes before the opening titles. And it was exciting, and scary, and spooky as it should have been.

It was admittedly a little bit fast paced, but that’s what you get when you take a brick like that book and turn it into a movie. Another complaint, that the more I think about it the more I actually like it, was that they sacrificed screen time for some of the main characters to put more of the secondary characters in. Clearly they needed to stick the three school champions in, but they actually went all out. The patel twins, cho, a host of others, who only got a few seconds of screen time but “filled in” a lot of the world lacking from the last movie. It was neat to see them, and as with the rest of the movie, every second was used well (I’m thinking in particular of the patel twins being misused at the dance, and later sobbing on the steps. Who hasn’t seen that in Jr. High?) but I really wanted more of snape. Oh well, we’ll get plenty of him in the next movies.

All in all an awesome movie. It was better than Cats. I would see it again and again.

So… one more thought… SPOILERS BELOW~!!!!!! No really. I mean it this time. If you haven’t read the books (and I think there is one of you on this list) don’t read below.

Cedric. They did an absolutely incredible job with him. He hadn’t been introduced in any of the earlier movies so they had the difficult job of introducing a character to kill him. Not only that, but they had to make him likable enough so that his loss was enough to match with Harry’s survivor’s guilt. Because that is what he has. But they had just enough interaction between the two of them that you could sense a competitive camaraderie. More than that the little extra scene with Cho and a mention in the papers, plus introducing his father really flesh him out. Then in the final scene where he is the one who futilely jumps up to defend them makes him more of a tragic hero. And then that final scene where he asks harry to take his body back to his father, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the theatre. Just a great job. Go see it already.

I was just reading about Sen. Murtha’s change of heart on Iraq. Nothing too surprising there, visits some vets, looks at the costs of the war, looks at the insurgency targeting US troops, and how the troops might be adding to instability, and wonders if it isn’t time to bring them home. And of course Cheney says he is unpatriotic. Whatever, you can read about it anywhere. The thing that caught my eye was the fact that Murtha had to intervene to get one of the troops he was talking to a purple heart:

“I was praising him, saying how proud we were of him and how much we appreciate his service to the country. `Anything I can do for you?’ His mother said, `Get him a Purple Heart.’ I said, `What do you mean, get him a Purple Heart?’” Murtha recounted.

Because he had been injured by friendly fire, the military had said he did not qualify for the honor.

“I met with the commandant. I said, `If you don’t give him a Purple Heart, I’ll give him one of mine,’” said Murtha. “And they gave him a Purple Heart.”

WHAT?! They don’t give purple hearts to soldiers injured by friendly fire?! That is nuts. Someone over there, risking their lives every day gets injured and we don’t even recognize their sacrifice? Ugh.

“‘Spy’ is such a short, ugly word. I prefer ‘espionage’, those extra three syllables really say something.”

“As with arguments and romance, somebody has to make the first move.” And yes, he is talking about a peer to peer connection model.

…to drive me to suicide with not particularly sad songs. It it odd, but all these songs are highly emotionally charged, just in different ways:

We’ll Meet Again, The Inkspots followed by Goodbye Cruel World, Pink Floyd, to the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony.

The first one always makes me think of the end of the world (thanks to Dr. Stangelove and Fallout) and the last, well, clockwork orange and all that. Missionary Man appears to be next so I am safe. But I do love iTunes on random.

“They’ll be happy to know, that as you saw me go, I was singing this song.”

This probably makes me a bad person, but the only thing I can think of when I read the stories about the riots in the french suburbs is “Suburbia” by the Pet Shop Boys. “I only wanted something else to do but hang around.”

So, did you know that when you play many new Sony Music Group CD’s on your PC it puts a rootkit on your hard drive. This seemed very odd to me, as well as to the people who wrote the few articles I found on the topic. It really is a case of hurting only the people who legally purchase the CDs. Search for “CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD” on amazon and check out the comments on the results. People are not happy about what these CDs are doing to their computers. (n.b. amazon doesn’t seem to let you do that search any more, so I used google instead, but you get the same thing.) It is unclear to me that breaking the security and operation of people’s computers when they play CDs is a good way to keep customers.

But it seems that the music industry in general doesn’t really care about customers any more. They just want everyone to pay their music tax and shut up. I understand the desire to not have people steal your music, but I have a desire for people to not steal my computer. Fortunately, since I run a mac at least I don’t need to worry about the rootkit, I just can’t rip the CD at all. Looks like I won’t be buying Sony Music CDs any more. The interesting thing here for me is what a stupid idea this is from a business perspective. They only people being hurt are the purchasers, this doesn’t even touch the downloaders.

And one final note, it doesn’t even look like this is about downloading at all. Sony is using rootkits on their customers to make them put pressure on Apple to open the iPod to other music stores. Oh yeah. What an awesome way of doing business. Wreck your customers computers when you can’t get as good a business deal as you want with your partners. If they really care that much they should stop selling through the Apple Music Store.

Ich habe heute ein E-mail auf Deutsch bekommen. Leider ist mein Deutsch noch nicht so gut, also es war ein bißchen schwer zum lesen. Erstmals gückte es nicht wie ein Spam E-mail, denn es hat nur wenig wörter mit nur größe Buchstaben. Aber, der e-mailer versuct meine Zuversicht zu haben. Warum fragst Du? Denn, dieses e-mail ist VERTRAULICH und-GEHEIMNIS. HAST DU ME NICHT GEHÖRT???? GEHEIMNIS!!!!!

Ja, es war unser guten Freund, Lewis Awele, von Lagos. *sigh* (Wie sagt man *sigh* auf Deutsch?)

Jakob Nielsen (with whom I often agree) has recently come out proclaiming the end of WYSIWYG and the beginning of a new era: WYGIWYG, or “what you get is what you get”. All of a sudden it looks like my recent complaints about Visual Studio.NET will come to Word and the rest of the office suite. Now it will tell you what your documents should look like, don’t worry about the details.

As someone who wrote his dissertation in LaTeX, I find this a truly horrifying thought. A carefully laid out page is a thing of beauty. Now all documents are going to have the same “sameness” that all presentations already have. I wonder how long until people start modifying their language to match the design of the document that Word 12 (or whatever) tells you it should look like?

OTOH, this could be an effective way of separating the content from the display, which was always the goal of html. Then people could spend their time improving the content and add the formatting as an after thought. That would be nice. Give VS.NET and PowerPoint, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Sounds like the good old days. I hope that it really is just a few people working together, so that catching them will break it up. I haven’t heard of crime rates like that in Hyde Park since my first year in college. Sounds like they have guns, stay safe everyone, don’t do anything stupid.