triv.org

I finally finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It's a damn good book, perhaps the best book I've read in recent years. In a strange way it reminded me of the Foundation series; it was both broad in scope yet intimate in focus. The world turns quickly thru history in this book, all the while keeping you focused on the rather amazing path of three people.

This is exactly the sort of book I would like to write one day: witty, esoteric, quick, and stylized. [Spoilers Ahead] I love how in the middle of the book we spend a winter in the arctic, slowly going mad. It's completely out of touch with the rest of the novel, and gives great weight to Joe's later struggles. I also like the idea of rebuilding a plane with seal skins, but only in the abstract.

Audition is the most disturbing movie I have ever seen. I had seen it a long time ago but not all the way thru, so when I saw the DVD on the shelf at Best Buy, I picked it up. I watched it in the dark, with the sound loud. I don't think I'll ever look at acupuncture the same way again. Like every other Takashi Miike movie, the end of Audition makes the end of 2001 look clear and obvious.

A lot of people would watch Audition and not enjoy it at all. I think you need to be tuned into the darker side of life to enjoy the movie. It would be very easy to loose the intellectual intrigue in the movie to the shock of the last 20 minutes. Think Misery mixed with Japanese S&M mixed with Hannibal Lecter.

It's a pretty strange movie, and I didn't even bring up the vomit. The vomit scene is really the only part that I couldn't watch. That was just wrong.

For some time now I have wanted to make mushroom soup. Not soup in the typical sense, but that sort of perfectly smooth soup where the texture is like liquid velvet and the flavor is deep inside. Those of you who have dined at Five Lakes know what I mean. Those of you who have had Kyle's melon soup know what I mean. I figured that it would take several tries and weeks to get this soup figured out.

I was wrong.

Jon and I slapped this soup together in about 30 minutes with no plan or recipe of any sort. All we knew was that we wanted textural soup that would be rich and succulent. It was almost perfect. The soup itself was perfect. The presentation needs some work. Mushrooms are grey, and the soup was perfectly smooth. We had a grey gruel, a fabulous gourmet gruel, but a gruel none the less. A crunchy garnish right in the middle of the bowl would not only make it look great, but give a great contrast in textures.

I really like soup.

Do I look like the sort of person that works at a book store? I didn't think that I did until I was approached by several people at Borders looking for help - DVDs are upstairs, at the back of the store. Only after I helped out the first people did I realize that I wasn't obligated to help any of them. I was helping these strangers because I am just that great. I told the third one that I didn't work there and that I wasn't going to help him. Jamie tells that I should aim to have neutral karma.

I'm to go to Kalamazoo tomorrow to attend Jamie's birthday party. I've gotten to actually like the drive to Kalamazoo. It's just long enough to really be a drive, but not so long that you start thinking of ways to kill yourself. Just the point when you no longer want to be in the car, you arrive in Kalamazoo.

I have kept working on the new look for this site. The font problem I had has been licked. sIFR is pretty slick, though it does have a few issues. The docs suck. They basically tell you to twiddle the example till it works for you. In your search for things that do not belong in technical documentation, let the concept of twiddling be a red flag. I was having all sorts of issues with a line break in the middle of my headline, and while I did fix it, I have no idea how I fixed it. I just played with the flash movie until it worked properly. The wiki site they have for additional documentation isn't up, which greatly reduces its usefulness.

I still haven't wrapped my head around the new navigation. I know for certain that the sidebar is going to go away, but I have no idea what to replace it with. I want to have my blogroll and quickies somewhere - more thought is obviously needed.

My computer speakers are dying. The subwoofer only works about half the time now, and the cords are becoming very particular about angles and connections. Should I replace my old speakers with the same thing? Should I go upscale? It's more likely that I will just do nothing until they break completely.

It's official: Movable Type 3.2 rocks. I've been using it for about a day now, and while I still have a few things with my search page to figure out, I'm very impressed. The spam fighting features are much better integrated than any of the plugins I had used in the past, and the junk folder is just plain handy. Now I just need to finish my new design for the site, and I can redo all my templates.

After a good three months of thought and work, my home theater is done. A few thoughts on components:

Television

I love my plasma tv (a Panasonic TH-42PHD7UY). It does it exactly what I need. It displays any video source from 480 interlaced to 1080 progressive(!) with wonderful accuracy and depth. The black levels are excellent and the color performance is almost perfect after calibration. Most people will want to get the consumer version of this TV, as this one does not have speakers or a tuner. For my system, all I needed was a monitor and this does exactly that.

Speakers

B&W rocks. That is all.

Receiver

I really like my Denon AVR-2100. It sounds marvelous, has plenty of power, includes an auto-setup which gets the levels and timings just right, supports every encoding you can throw at it, does video up-converting and switching perfectly, and it didn't break the budget. I do have a few annoyances with it however. It doesn't have true 5 way binding posts, just odd 3 way posts. The posts are spaced very tightly, making it tough to use bare cable connections. The mode change click is really too loud. The volume is a bit to hard to control with the remote. I wish there were two more component video inputs.

Cable

I'm actually very impressed with the hi-def offerings from comcast. It just works. I get both satellite HD channels like Discovery and HBO, and all the over the air local networks. The oddest point was when the tech came to install the HD box. I had a optical audio cable ready for it, and he commented that no one had ever used that in his experience. Isn't digital surround sound one of the big features of HDTV?

Cables

AudioQuest makes some damn fine cables. When I switched out my crappy generic cables with AQ runs, I quickly noticed a big difference. Both the sound and the picture became clearer. Not only do their products perform, but their customer service is great. My plasma has BNC connectors instead of RCAs, so they made me a RCA to BNC cable. Which, by the way, is a fucking cool cable.

After using AudioQuest cables, I swore off Monster. I then promptly bought some Monster speaker cable that's rated to be installed in-wall. It's for the surrounds. It was cheap, it sounds pretty darn good, and it got the job done.

DVD Player

I wanted three things from a DVD player. Good general video quality, good deinterlacing (the process of converting the interlaced video on the disc to a progressive signal), and universal compatibility (the ability to play DVDs, CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, MP3 CDs, etc...). I got all three of those with the Yamaha DVD-S2500. It's a very nice DVD player.

Remote

I have actually used the sentence "programming my remote is fun" while not being sarcastic. The Harmony 880 is just that good. You pick it up, hit the button next to what you want to do and then you're done. I've been known to nitpick user interfaces to death, but this one held up to scrutiny. It's simple. It's intuitive. It's superlative.

So now that it's all together, I'm happy with the results. Watching movies or TV, playing video games, and listening to music are all a hoot on the new system. I've also learned that projects like this are never over, you either run out of money or you die. I can already think of a few things I would like to add.

I just received word that my DVD player will be in tomorrow, or Friday at the latest. Soon the home theater will be finished and young Skywalker will be one of us. Wait - no - the second part of that isn't true. That part is from Star Wars.

For the last month or so every post on this site has used a Bob Dylan song as its title. My sister was the first to notice. She won a copy of Newsweek from June of last year. For the rest of you that didn't notice: shame on you! It's Bob Dylan.

I was driving back from the grocery store the other day when I passed by Pioneer High School. A team was playing something in the field, but I didn't get a good look until I stopped at a light. It was cricket. Only in Ann Arbor do you seen cricket at the local high school. Then, later on I was relaxing in my study - yes I have a study - when I heard quite a ruckus outside. Shopping cart races on main street. Only in Ann Arbor. This is the sort of town where you see "No War From Oil" bumper stickers on even the Hummers.

Does anyone else find it strange that huge SUVs are named after a sexual activity?

On Sunday my sister and I joined my parents in looking at the house they want to buy. First thing I couldn't get over was how much smaller things where. They were going from a huge lawn to almost no lawn, from a pretty big house to an average sized home, from no one near by to neighbors right next door. I'm not completely sure if I like the house yet. There are certainly parts of the house that I like, but in other ways it seems a bit to much like a cottage. I suppose part of that could be the current occupant, a single young man. I'm ok with my bachelor's pad, but all the others seem to be a little off putting to me.

My own house has gotten a bit messy again. Part of this is due to having no place to put my DVDs right now. This should get fixed Thursday when my shelves come in. Then I just have to get the old coffee table tucked away. A new couch, rug and lamps would finish off the living room; which is the next thing I should do. The new TV stand came in a few weeks ago, and it is very nice. The problem now is that the rest of the room seems cheap next to it.

Time to drift off to the 116th dream.

As I am want to do every year or so, I'm am redesigning this site. Just one look this time. I want to be simpler, with no sidebar and a navigation scheme based more on how people actually use the site and less on the canned MT layout. Here's a very early doodle:

Feedback is welcome, though I reserve the right to completely ignore your ideas.

Oh, and in case I forgot to tell you - I'm finally going back to school this fall. Eastern for a bit to get my grades up, and then to U of M. In my CS classes I plan to tell no one of my industry experience and knowhow. Instead I will be a very pleasant surprise for one project group.

I recently bi-wired the front speakers in my home theater. Having thought about the physics behind this, I'm pretty sure it doesn't make much of a damn difference. However, some people swear by bi-wiring and I'm one of them. I've eschewed the rational for the first time in my home theater project. To me, the high end is much smoother and open when the speakers are bi-wired. This is almost certainly in my head. It didn't cost me anything to bi-wire the fronts though, and I like the idea if nothing else.

A long time ago I ordered a custom Audioquest component video cable. The back of my television has BNC connectors instead of RCAs, and I don't do adapters. Every time you use an adapter quality suffers. The plugs on this cable are pretty impressive, with a flake paint job that rivals a hundred-grand hot-rod. When I picked it up at the stereo shop we spent five or ten minutes just looking at it.

We're a bunch of dorks down at the stereo shop.

Tomorrow I go to look at the house that my folks are thinking about buying. The last vestiges of Fentondom are slipping away. It should be interesting.

God is dying, and we need to let him die.

The course of human evolution can be traced by following the rise from ignorance to enlightenment. We used to think that the world was flat, that the human body would explode at speeds over twenty miles an hour, and that arsenic was medicine. God, and by association religion, exist outside that timeline. They have to because they deal not with knowledge, but the purposeful disregard of knowledge.

I have felt this way for a long time. Certainly as long as I can remember. I have always tempered my feelings with words about the importance of faith or the uncertainty of the unknown, but I can no longer avoid that which I know both in my heart and mind to be true: that religion is a scam. It is perhaps the greatest tall tale ever told. If you were to read the bible outside of the context that Christianity places it in, you would never believe a word of it. The Lord of The Rings is more convincing.

In Europe, 15% of the population attend of a place of worship every week. In the Middle Ages that figure was around 100%. The conservatives would say that Europe is becoming a bastion of amoral secularism. The less reactionary would say that as Europe becomes more educated and erudite, it gains the ability to look past the vale of ignorance. As for morality, what is more meaningful: morality as the rote obedience to a frightening god, or as the independent decision of a man or woman to be the best person they can possibly be? Morality is richer and deeper when it comes from a personal need to better the world around us.

America's flavor of Christianity grows more and more fundamental with each passing year. One of the cornerstones of that Fundamentalism is, "The Bible, having been inspired by God, is entirely trustworthy and without error" (my emphasis). These people have obviously never read the bible. If they had, they would be off stoning the Sunday attendant at the local 7/11 for being at work. The rise in literal interpretation of the bible is perhaps the scariest thing to happen in my lifetime.

It is happening because god is dying. The growing extremism in religion is directly connected to the growing irrelevancy of god. What is lost on the Christian right is that every time they make a statement about Intelligent Design or the "sin of homosexuality", every time they park a granite copy of the ten commandments in front of a courthouse, or every time they talk about the roll of women; the mainstream rolls their eyes a little more. The more religion declares itself to be the final truth, the more obvious their lies become.

Somehow in this country a debate has begun over Intelligent Design. If people want to teach this bit of hogwash to their kids that's fine, but it must stay out of science class. Science class should remain a place of science. You cannot simply say that a theory is wrong because you don't like it. Intelligent design is neither repeatable nor observable. The very core of the concept (that life on Earth was designed by an intelligent agent or agents) is nothing more than a flight of fancy or thinly disguised religious dogma. Not that there's much of a difference.

To me Intelligent Design is like saying, "I find it hard to imagine a way in which a thousand-ton piece of metal could fly through the air. Therefore, airplanes will never work." Evolution is complex, with many variables that can cause massive changes in the final outcome. Not being able to understand it doesn't make it untrue however. Remember than the next time you fly to the Bahamas.

I realize that this has been a rather unorganized rant, completely lacking in circumspection. Perhaps over time I will refine my thoughts in this matter to the point where they longer resemble the ravings of a loose cannon. Some of you may be offended by the preceding. Please remember, I didn't force you to read it.

At some point, perhaps while I was busy living a life, my country lost its mind. I'm not sure when it happened. This erosion of national sanity may have taken place while I was in school, working, or perhaps during my six months as a Sherpa in Dasharathchand. Now that I think about it, it was probably during my 5 years as a professional assassin in the Tokyo underworld. Anyways, my point is that the United States has lost its mind.

First off, we keep letting Bob Novak speak in public.

We've known that this is a bad idea since 1972. (High on acid my ass.) I fully admit that I am a bleeding heart liberal, but at least I grasp the subtle difference between true and false. In a perfect world I would have a logical argument clearly showing the damage that Novak has done to the country. However, it isn't a perfect world. Most of Novak's actions are so far out in crazy-crazy land that they defy even the most casual connections to logic. He has blow the cover of a CIA operative, then refused to reveal his source. Mind you, he demanded that CBS reveal their source during the controversy over President Bush's National Guard service. Turns out you only need to reveal your source if you oppose Robert Novak's ideology. He accused Richard Clark of being a racist. He compared the compromise in the senate over judicial nominees to the holocaust.

He got Karl Rove fired - twice. Karl Rove has no reflection. Novak must break the mirror.

I would have distracted myself from this lunacy with a nice game of San Andreas, but I can't seem to find a copy of the game anywhere at my local store. This bit of insanity has been with us for a while though. The puritanical avoidance of sex in this country goes back to the 1600's. Remember - we are a country founded by people so uptight that the British couldn't stand to be around them. We're perfectly comfortable with violence, signing our kids up for passes into R rated movies, but sex is a whole other subject. We'll drool over the NFL cheerleader clothed with three strategically placed strips of spandex on monday night football, but god forbid that sex gets in a video game.

Every person that is up in arms over this has obviously never played the game. Grand Theft Auto is not only incredibly violent, but it shows a complete disregard for society. Having played the game, I'm not at all surprised that there is some sex in it. Well... there's sex in it if you go through a complex, thoroughly geeky procedure that you would have never stumbled onto without google. It's as though Reservoir Dogs has a sex scene that can only be seen if you rewire your entire house, speak in polish for four days and then bathe in tomato paste. You're just not likely to go to all that trouble. Even if you did, no one has ever confused Reservoir Dogs with Babe

Then I talked to Jon. Jon works in the home entrainment industry. Jon has warned parents about the violence in Grand Theft Auto. I'm told that more than one parent has been shocked and surprised after learning about the game, and one parent refused to believe Jon. That individual later complained to Jon about the violence in the game.

Just remember, from the confused parent to Bob Novak and everyone in-between: they all get to vote.