WATCHING:
Young Adult
Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson

This is the movie I was expecting – an essentially dark movie with a veneer or comedy – but it disappointed. It just wasn’t as good as I had expected.

I had higher hope for it as it once again brought together director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, who collaborated to such success with Juno.

This was no Juno.

It was a good movie in that the character development of Charlize Theron had a nice arc, and you could – eventually – see how she ended up where she was today: Essentially, she never left the glories of high school even though she’s in her 30s.

Patton is in a similar situation, but his lot in life was set when he was a geek in high school, and – without giving anything away – this led to events that really leave him with few options other than to continue to be the sad outsider.

The ending is ambiguous, and I like that – does Theron’s character grow up, or does she continue to circle the drain even faster? Can’t really say.

All movies

Well, I installed Google’s latest free feature – GDrive – yesterday, and here are some quick observations.

Note: With my own domains/servers, I’ve never needed file sharing tools like GDrive or Dropbox – I’ve just used FTP. So my point of reference is a techie with little exposure to these tools.

The Good:

• Since I have a Google account, the install was a breeze (see “The Bad,” below).
• 5 gigs of storage for free, as compared to 2 gigs for Dropbox.
• Fast synch; links to my Google docs appeared almost instantly in my local “Google Drive” folder. Uploads appeared in Gdrive almost instantly.

The Bad:

• Didn’t let me install the program where I wanted. I have my drive partitioned off, and I like to put apps on the NON-C:/Program Files partition. There was no option for this. I was allowed to select the location for the “Google Drive” folder, however. Odd.
• GDrive’s Terms of Service are a joke and scaring off users. I expect Google to shortly revisit and revise same. Get rid of the goddam lawyers and treat your customers – us – with respect!
• For some reason – maybe it was an opt-out I missed – but the next day my screen saver had changed to “Google Photos Screensaver.” I don’t like when apps change other apps. That is evil.

Just first impressions, more as I run across the good and the bad.

About a decade or so ago, Six Apart’s Movable Type blogging tool was all the rage. Ben and Mena Trott were internet rock stars.

What happened? It looks like the company (Six Apart) is now owned by a Japanese firm.

And WordPress is all the rage for blog/CMS installs (today).

I never really thought about it until I saw an ad for Movable Type on some tech site.

I did a local install of Movable Type on one of my Linux boxes years ago; slick program. Perl.

WordPress is PHP, which is the hot blogging/CMS language right now (good for me – I know some Perl, but I’m a PHP developer).

Still, Movable Type and Ben/Mena just dropped off the face of the earth.

Just sayin’/askin’…

WATCHING:
Singles
Starring: Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon

This Cameron Crowe-directed film has, of course, a lot of great music (not as good as Almost Famous) and an incredible cast.

It’s been 20 years since its release, and I just watched it for the first time this past weekend. Worth watching.

Not a great movie, but fun – about the lives of a bunch of 20-somethings living in Seattle. Talking, falling in and out of love/lust and so on. I kept thinking of “Friends” watching this. I swear it must be an influence for the TV series.

I’ve been to Seattle a couple of times, so the location shots were fun, and the general tone of the movie made it a nice – but not remarkable – watch.

I’ll recommend this flick, but not push too hard on same.

All movies

Well, I put a new fan into one of the Linux boxes today (an old Dell box that I turned into a Linux server). The old fan was starting to screech – not too badly, but I took this as a sign that it was ready to die.

After shopping at TigerDirect.com – and not having the fan arrive in over a week – I placed an order for two fans (let’s have a spare and save on shipping) from newegg.com and they arrived today.

First time I did this particular repair (been lucky…) and it was pretty straight-forward. My only complaint is that there wasn’t a direction flow marked on the fan, so had to power up the box before securing the new fan. Or maybe I just missed the indicator. No biggie.

Quiet again!

Now, I know I’ve ragged about the shameful quality of Newsweek magazine’s covers over the last year or so, but this week brought another disastrous example.

And it can’t be just the financial straits of the company – they did a great job last week with the “Mad Men” cover (and the retro ads throughout the issue; just brilliant). So they are up to the job.

And Time magazine, which is Newsweek’s closest competitor, is in the same boat as Newsweek (hemorrhaging readers/ad dollars), so comparing their covers should be a pretty much apples-to-apples job.

Well, here are the first issues of April 2012 for each magazine; you decide:

Any questions? Time’s cover is minimalist but well laid out; good contrast.

Newsweek’s is a grainy picture with some helvetica condensed italic type slapped on randomly. It looks like I designed the cover – about 20 years ago. Just awful.

Which would you rather read?

That is to say, this year two of our three raised garden beds needed replacing.

After 10 years, the wood – just normal construction pine – was falling apart.

Learned some lessons:

• Thought I built it out of 2x10s. Nope, 2x12s (still worked fine, but next time….)
• Over the years, the wood stretched a bit – we had to trim the dirt around the beds to get the frame to fit. When it comes time to replace the third bed, I’m going to buy three 2x12x10(ft) lengths, and frame it out for the existing space and then just use the saws-all to trim off the extra.

Live and learn!

Without any further ado, the garden beds:

Before:

After:

What the Dog Saw is a collection of Malcolm Gladwell essays, all of which were previously published in The New Yorker magazine.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I purchased this book (via Amazon…). I’ve read excepts of Gladwell’s writings for years – he’s big with the geek set – but I don’t know if, until this book, I’d ever read a full article/book by Gladwell.

Wow. I’ve been missing some outstanding writing/content.

Let’s break that last sentence down: Gladwell, like John McPhee and E.B. White, writes in a manner that makes you ignore the writing. Nothing fancy, no need to impress, just getting the story across is a very clean, sometimes-stark manner. Herman Melville has more “writing” in any three consecutive graphs of Moby Dick than Gladwell has in the entire book.

And in both cases, that’s a good thing. Different stories to tell.

And that’s – the story to tell – is the “outstanding content” part I was referring to: While McPhee often writes about big issues (taming the Mississippi in The Control of Nature, for example), Gladstone often spins tales about weird little issues and how they came about.

Why are there only a handful of ketchups but a gazillion mustards?

Does criminal profiling really work?

What’s the story behind the birth-control pill? Or hair color?

Gladwell’s got ya covered, and always in a very accessible manner.

One of Gladwell’s basic techniques is to take something that is a basic given (homelessness can be helped/solved with basic safety-net programs; too many students per classroom are a teacher’s largest challenge), and then gradually introduce information – via studies/interviews – that slowly peck away at these so-called truths.

At the end, you’ll have a new appreciation for the issue and – to be honest – a lack of clarity about the solution. Why? Because the data Gladwell presents flies in the face of what is bandied about as reality. He presents a compelling argument, yet…

Gladwell also hones in on – as he’ll admit, often by accident – stories that come out of left field. The ketchup vs. mustard issue. His hair color story came out of an attempt to write an article about shampoo, but the direction changed. And the result is a great article.

It’s one of those books that, to some degree, you’re sorry you’ve read: Because you’ll never again have the pleasure of reading it for the first time. To me, that’s high praise.

It was a great year for all magnolia trees in the neighborhood, ours included.

This is probably due to a combination of a very easy winter, and temperatures that – for the last half-dozen or so days – have been over 80 degrees. Yeah, in March. It’s 83 degrees right now.

This picture was taken a couple of days ago, when the blossoming was at its peak. After that, the blossoms drop and create a slimy mess below/around the tree.

Today, the weather was right for putting down the first lawn treatment (yeah, again, way early this year), but the blossoms were coming down off the tree like it was snowing.

Now, I needed to fertilize the lawn, not the carpet of petals.

So – a section at a time – I had to quickly rake the petals onto the sidewalk/driveway, fertilize that area, and move on.

And then rake up all the slimy petals.

What fun.

But it beats crabgrass, which this feeding is supposed to suppress.

For those of you who (for whatever demented reason) have followed this blog, or know me (ditto), I think you’ll agree that I’m not a Luddite.

Sometimes behind the curve (getting a smart phone), or ahead of the curve (the first to get a Gmail account).

Whatever.

Let’s talk digital photography vs. film.

With automation/digital you can take blah blah a million pics for no cost some pics will be good. Agreed. Awesome.

But this digital freedom comes at a cost.

Framing: By this, I mean taking the time/effort to actually take the picture that seems like a good picture. With “no roll” cameras, this sometimes goes out the window: You can take a zillion pics and (later) pic the best. But I used to go into the woods with my 4×5 view camera with 12 double-sided film holders (24 shots; less than a regular 36-shot roll of 35mm film). While I always carried extra film and a changing bag, I never needed it. Under those constraints, I took so much time to frame the pic, set the depth of field, wait for the sun to move beyond the tree … etc. Totally different. While I love that I can burn digitally through dozens of rolls of formerly physical film photographing this or that, the best pics I’ve taken – digitally – have been very heavily composed. Focus on this, not that. Make sure the fence is/isn’t in frame. And so on.

Take this sorta artsy picture of a trash can in the snow, with the shadows from the snow fence falling on the snow. Notice how the snow fence shadows line up with the ribs of the garbage can? Very much on purpose, and – to me – a better pic for making this effort.

Mode choice: BW vs color. Sure, can convert, but if you shoot – intentionally – in BW you’re thinking differently than if color. You look at light and shadows in a very different way. If doing color, more of a shades of colors, juxtaposition of yellow vs. blue and so on.

In the picture to the right, I made a very conscious decision to use a black and white – actually, infrared (IR) – camera. This picture would have been considerable different if it had been taken gray scale or in color. Might have been good, but not what I was looking for.

Depth of field: Makes all the difference in non-I’m-here-with-my-friends pics. Pic of a woman/cat/tree with just one important part in focus, the rest softer. Harder, but more powerful – less “capture the moment” snapshot pics and more of here’s what I think is important [for whatever reason]. (NOTE: both are good; just different).

In this nasturtium picture, I deliberately focused on the flower only, leaving the background/stem fuzzy: Now you look at the blossom only.

Just sayin’

I made a couple of fixes to my at-home tools that I use to update my hosted sites this evening.

Nothing remarkable; not worth telling the story.

Except this: Thanks to the way I had architected it all, the changes – though good for me – took virtually no time and didn’t adversely affect anything.

That’s a win in my book!

But I’m a dork…

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen. [opening paragraph]

— Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

I saw the movie based on this book about a month ago (review here), and it piqued my interest in reading the book. I finished the novel earlier this week – it’s a quick read, about 300 pages and not too dense.

Great literature? No, but a very well written (for the most part) book based on the eerie/macabre premise: The book is upfront in telling the reader that the protagonist is going to die almost immediately, and the book is told in a first-person narrative by the deceased teenager from her perch in “in-between land” (not quite Full Heaven, but certainly not earth).

In the book, the narrator – Susie – has some interactions with those she has left behind on earth: A schoolmate who encountered Susie’s soul as it was leaving her body to go to heaven; her father, who can’t quite admit she is gone; Ray, her first love, her first kiss. She watches them, tries in some cases to make connections with them, is happy with the achievements they keep rolling up after her death, tries to let them go.

The story moves along at a good clip, and a lot of it reminds me of Hispanic literature, where the supernatural is part of novels in so many cases: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Like Water for Chocolate and others. Just about any Jorge Luis Borges story.

The book is about relationships, motives, how we live our lives and letting go.

It’s also reminiscent of Winesburg, Ohio – with the small subdivision taking the place of the small Buckeye State town. There are secret – and not so secret – parts of peoples lives. Some live out loud – such as Susie’s madcap grandmother. Some live lives of quiet despair – Susie’s father, the detective who is unable to solve this and other cases, and the mother of Susie’s first love Ray, Mrs. Aruna.

And some – like Susie – are taken before they can even begin to understand life.

Entertaining, at times extremely poignant, the book far surpasses the movie, and I enjoyed the movie, even though it was, except on base structure, very different from the book. If you’re interested in the book/movie, I recommend experiencing them in the order I did – movie, then book.