Saturday, 28th of June, 2008
Pixar's demonstrates superior creativity again with this year's movie - Wall-E. I should know better by now and just trust that Pixar movies will always be good, but when I watched it tonight I started out skeptical again. How are they going to make an interesting movie about one or two robots rummaging through what is left of the world in 2700, absent of humans? Again, I should know better - it was not the talking that made toys, bugs, monsters, and fish come alive. It was the computer animation - and this time they conquered the challenge of giving robots life and emotion.
Of course, there is more to the story than just two robots - humans come into the plot later, and the way that works makes this one of my favourite Pixar movies.
Incidentally, the Pixar short before the movie was excellent - there was one part in particular that made me laugh out loud. You can probably figure out what shot it is too.
Friday, 27th of June, 2008
Wednesday, 25th of June, 2008
Thursday, 19th of June, 2008
Wednesday, 18th of June, 2008
Tuesday, 17th of June, 2008
Left the client site super early today because someone accidentally dropped all the rows from the data warehouse, and the development environment was down for some unrelated maintenance, so there was barely anything for me to do. It's a win-win situation because I got to get some other stuff done and the weather was beautiful today.
I went to my usual place, Bimmers R Us, to try to find some ATE brake fluid since it's time for a brake flush on the Subaru, but they didn't have it. Wound up stopping be a couple Auto Parts stores, and Advance Auto happened to have some Valvoline Synpower brake fluid that "exceeded DOT 3 and 4 specifications" with a 503F dry and 343F wet boiling point. Not quite ATE, but probably good stuff - interestingly enough Valvoline doesn't even list it on their own website. Took it the Autotire in St. Charles on Droste Road and they fantastically squeezed me in at the end of the day.
Monday, 16th of June, 2008
Friday, 13th of June, 2008
Tuesday, 10th of June, 2008
Monday, 9th of June, 2008
RIM, the Blackberry manufacturer, argues that business users prefer a keyboard over the touch screen that you find in the iPhone. This leads to an interesting article on zdnet that quickly went downhill. I have used the iPhone a little, and agree that the iPhone's touch-screen input seems to slow me down. However, if I recall correctly, the iPhone's touch-screen input is also a "qwerty keyboard." This is where the article becomes useless - isn't the topic at hand more about "Keys vs. Touchscreen" than it is about "Qwerty vs. Touchscreen", since the touch screen is also in Qwerty?? I have seen better high school journalism than this.
While we do bring up the somewhat comical point again that the Qwerty keyboard was invented "to slow typists down in the days when the print hammers could get tangled", the iPhone does not make a departure from it - it just makes it even worse by removing the tactile feedback of a real keyboard. If you really want to advance to something better, the Dvorak keyboard layout was invented 72 years ago.
For a pocket device, I have eliminated the keyboard altogether. Again, we have had the technology for a long time now - 1996 with the Palm Pilot, and even earlier if you count the less successful efforts by Apple to implement handwriting input. Going back to the old qwerty keyboard is almost the only reason why I have not moved over to a Blackberry device - it has been Palm devices for me now since May 2000.
If Apple goes back to their roots and implements good handwriting input on the iPhone, that may be what pushes me over to the Apple side over Blackberry. But what we have now is a picture of a Qwerty keyboard on a touch screen. How is this progress?!
Sunday, 8th of June, 2008
I did a bit more recording and playing with the MRS-8 on vacation last week. I'm sticking with the 5-string violin since it seems versatile enough for what I want so far:
Telemann Concerto in C Major for 4 Violins (130-kbps MP3) - 1st, 3rd, and 4th movements. Next part of the project is doing one more take of the Allegro 2nd movement.
Blessed Be Your Name - Redman (2.2MB MP3) (130-kbps MP3) - Tried a lot of new things in this recording. I started out playing a bass line in the C and G strings and discovered the octaver. I ended up keeping the first take of each track - I played my usual accompaniment and anything other than 2 octaves of melody ended up sounding too busy as I tried to enhance it.
Tuesday, 3rd of June, 2008
Monday, 2nd of June, 2008
The good news is my stomach discharge was interrupted with the boat's first catch of the day! I caught a beautiful Atlantic Sharpnose shark. That area turned out to be slow so we moved on to an area near an oil rig, and things got very busy quickly. We were catching sharks of a different variety left and right, keeping the crew very busy. I had gotten one myself, but only one person had one that was close to the 54" minimum size regulation.
The big keepers ended up being King Mackerels, as you can see from the display of catches from today. We only had about 15 people on this fishing trip, so we all got on one side and everyone had a pretty successful day.
The big one in the middle of the picture that won the fish pool was Haley's big catch. My shark, the only one that we kept from this trip, is two fish over to the right of the big one. Between the 7 of us, we had over 80 pounds of fish - Haley's big catch was 32 pounds by itself.
Fortunately, I was feeling a lot better once we were back inside the jetty again, and by the time we were looking at the fish hanging up I was ready to have some shark for lunch. I think by the end of the week, we'll all have eaten so much fish we'll be geniuses.