Happy Birthday Baby

Two years ago at about this time I was standing in a NICU looking down at my two month premature baby girl wondering how the hell I am going to be her father. Two years later I guess I’m still asking the same questions, but I know now that my life changed that day. I’m thankful that my wife recovered, and that my baby girl is amazingly healthy and happy.

Happy Birthday Inara!

Caprica

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a huge SciFi fan. 7 years ago Ronald D. Moore and David Eick made a spectacular production of a reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. This reimagining was an origin story that was shown as a mini series and played on SciFi. It was amazing and fans immediately begged for more. Mr. Moore and Mr. Eick granted the fans wish with 5 years of television that made my Friday nights something to really look forward to. Like all good stories though, it needed to end. It was getting long in the tooth and the characters were developed as far as they could go. So, they gave the series a proper ending that I personally was satisfied with.

Now here we are a year later and Ronald D. Moore and David Eick were probably sitting around Ronald’s house in Berkeley smoking something that isn’t legal without a prescription and the thought hit them, “Who created the Cylons, and why are the sentient?” This is the basis of the new TV show Caprica.

The pilot for Caprica is an 84 minute wonder that leaves the watcher begging for more. The NSFW version has been available since April 2009 on DVD and online includes visions of people being bludgeoned to death and mass orgies in a virtual world created by kids hacking around. The “appropriate for television” version of the pilot premiered on 22 January 2010 to a fairly small audience.

The world itself is 58 years before the fall of New Caprica in Battlestar Galactica. It all revolves around a terrorist organization that worships one God blowing up a train and the aftermath and grief this caused.

The world and the characters are quiet a bit darker than in BSG (Battlestar Galactica). This makes for some more interesting story lines than were possible in BSG.

There have only been a few episodes shown, but every week there are fewer and fewer viewers. Some experts are saying that puts Caprica “on the bubble.” This term means that it is likely to get canceled. I’m really saddened by that and I hope that everyone reading this blog goes out and watches at least one episode. It is a far better show than all of the SciFi currently shown on TV (like FlashForward, V, and yes even Lost).

Surrogates

Bruce Willis leads a cast of characters including James Cromwell and Ving Rhames in this Sci-Fi action/murder mystery. Written by Michael Ferris who also penned such wonderful movies like Catwoman, the Net, and the Net 2.0, you should probably take the hint that this may not be the best movie out there.

The movie has some interesting subtexts about humans living in a world where their surrogates (a robot avatar that lives life for them) take risks the human operators probably wouldn’t take. The lead character never really finds out where the mysterious weapon that kills surrogates and their controller came from, but the electronic bong hits that some surrogates were taking at one part of the movie was incredibly similar.

The whole thing was a bad attempt at looking at the future through Steven Spielberg’s human disapproving eyes. For more on that, one should refer to the movie Artificial Intelligence: AI. We are all self destructive and technology will destroy us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look I have an online persona as much as anyone else, but there just is no chance that the future will come out so black and white that civilized society will live in Surrogates with hosts that lay in bed all day popping pills, while the people against Surrogates are the outsiders living in trailer parks.

It’s not enough to say “be civil” anymore, and “don’t worry, be happy” doesn’t convey the right meaning. From now on, just be pragmatic you loser.

If you have an hour and a half to kill and you need some Sci-Fi watch this, but honestly I didn’t think that it was worth the cost of plastic the DVD was pressed into.

Moon

Last year was a good year for movies. I however, haven’t had a chance to see all the really good ones (or any of the really bad ones either). So, I’m playing catch up here. So, this week’s movie is called “Moon” written and directed by Duncan Jones.

Moon is the story of Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) who signed up for a three year mission to mine the moon for the LUNAR corporation. The moon has valuable minerals that will solve the Earth’s energy problems. In his final weeks on the moon he starts to talk to himself and see strange things. It’s a cerebral movie and if you can’t sit and absorb into it for an hour an a half you probably shouldn’t watch it. Otherwise you should see it. This movie is well written, well acted, and beautifully filmed. I don’t think the award shows have given it enough credit though.

Now, the rest of this entry is filled with spoilers. Don’t read on if you haven’t seen the movie.

So it’s the future and you have an evil corporation called LUNAR. LUNAR has been using clones recycling them every three years to continuously mine the moon. So far I can totally believe that a company would do this. Why spend the time and money to train and ship people back and forth between the Earth and the moon when they can just use a supply of clones on the moon? Also they pre-tape video’s from Sam’s wife and young child. This is supposed to give him frackin hope of a future. Ha! Turns out the wife is cheating on him and dumps him just weeks before the end of his three year term. A story arc probably concocted by the evil LUNAR corporation to make the Sam on the moon commit suicide.

LUNAR is blocking live transmissions to Earth and stopping all of Sam’s outgoing videos from reaching their target. Sam eventually figures this out and goes beyond the transmission jamming stations far enough to contact home. Turns out his wife died recently and his daughter is now a teenager. Bummer. But, if you listen carefully in the background when his daughter is telling her dad that there’s someone on the phone asking about mom, the dad’s voice is the same as Sam. I wonder if the real Sam ever reached the moon to begin with.

Interesting. Again, I highly recommend this movie. The twists and story were really good.

Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball

There are times when you want to be entertained. You want to sit down and watch a 90 minute movie and not think about cinematography or blocking or direction etc. You just want to watch a movie. Some of my friend don’t get that. They laughed at me when I said that I liked watching Smokin’ Aces 1. Then they went through a point by point explanation of why it was a terrible movie… technically. They failed to realize that when I watched it, I wanted to just sit back and watch a fun shoot ‘em up movie and not think about technical aspects of movies. Smokin’ Aces 2 is the same way.

Smokin' Aces 2 is a prequel to the original. Christopher Michael Holley from the original reprises his role in the prequel and even mentioned Buddy Israel in this movie (Buddy Israel is Jeremy Pivon’s character in the original). This movie lacks a bit of the finesse that would come from a film that didn’t go straight to video. In that I mean the speed up and slow down of time is a bit too jarring, and some of the character introductions are a bit out of context. Although introducing Autumn Reeser’s character the way they did was great and possibly the best part of the movie, but that’s just the gutter part of my mind talking.

Overall, this is a good movie if you liked the first one and you’ve seen all the other movies in this genre. If you are looking for this type of movie, but want more polish go for “Shoot ‘Em Up” or “Crank”.

Domino's Inspired New Pizza

Friday night is pizza night in my household, and now that there’s a new SyFy show on, Caprica, it's even more important that we spend a simple family night eating pizza, and enjoying each other’s company.

This past Friday we decided to try Domino’s new pizza. They’ve changed the cheese by adding a hint of provolone. They’ve seasoned the crust with garlic, and they’ve changed the sauce with more herbs and red pepper. This was all a bad move in my opinion.

Although I really like garlic, the crust just didn’t taste right. The new dough would be better suited for their garlic bread, but that’s probably the inspiration for the pizza crust.

The cheese was good, but really it’s mozzarella with a little bit of provolone how could they screw this up? Besides, by putting provolone in there they are probably saving money.

Finally there was the sauce. How can I phrase this without being overly critical? The sauce was appallingly bad. I thought it was too salty, too spicy (in a bad way), and overall it attacked my taste buds with a murderous rampage that can only be dealt with by special forces.

Their old pizza was a good standby for those nights when I didn’t want to pay $32 for excellent pizza. Overall, to improve their old pizza would’ve been as simple as making the crust a little thicker, put a little more cheese and sauce on it, and don’t be so stingy on the toppings.

Now don’t just take my word for it. At $5.99 per pizza (minimum 2 pizzas) you should try it yourself, but I didn’t enjoy it.

Analog Hole

Yep, there sure have been a lot of people over the past decade or two complaining about Digital Rights Management. For the most part I’ve been a complacent monkey in the whole thing just accepting it as a necessary evil of living in the digital age.

For those uninitiated, Digital Rights Management (called DRM) is code embedded in digital media (like digital audio and digital video files) that somehow ensure that the files are only played on the hardware that the owner of the media allows.

There’s a lot of blogs, and lawsuits, and such out there that have covered all of this. I don’t want to cover it again.

So why am I writing this blog then? Well, last night I ordered a movie from Amazon on my TiVo. Somehow, though, my TiVo in the bedroom decided it would download the movie, and not the one in the living room. After the movie downloaded, TiVo wouldn’t let me transfer the recording from one to the other. DRM strikes again.

Well, now for the ultimate analog hole. I physically picked up my bedroom TiVo and moved it to the living room to watch the movie. Screw you DRM.

DRM is simply something that makes life inconvenient at best for those of us that are honest. The thieves have ways around DRM.

In the end though I think this is a small piece in the bigger problem. TiVo has jumped the shark. The future of DVR is not in TiVo. hopefully we’ll see a re-emergence of Windows Media Center this year as the DVR to have.

The Best Photo I've Ever Taken

This is a photo of my daughter that I took last week. It is the best photograph I’ve ever taken. I have been reading more on photography and how to get the shot. I know this is still a little out of focus, but I really like it. It hasn’t been color corrected or re-touched in Photoshop. I hope you like it.

Where Is Microsoft?

Three and a half years ago I wrote a blog post on my other blog asking the question, “Where was Microsoft?” This post was talking about the video iPod and asking why Microsoft hasn’t come out with a decent competing product. Since then the Zune was introduced and it has won my affection so well I own three of them, plus I pay for my Zune Pass subscription three months at a time.

So what am I writing about here? I’m worried that they have hit the end of the road. Last October at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie announced that Office Online would be previewing this spring. The exact phrase used at the time was “early 2009.” We are quickly approaching the middle of 2009, and in Microsoft speak we are approaching the end of their fiscal year. Yet we haven’t really heard anything about those 2010 products. In fact, about the only official word I’ve heard is a web site I wrote for Exchange 2010. (Side note: I did not write that Silverlight hero on that page. I know better than to have 7 different media elements running at the same time.)

Exchange 2010 is really cool, and it truly introduces Ray Ozzie’s vision of Software plus Services (S+S). Since Ray announced this direction though we haven’t heard much else of anything. Ray Ozzie wasn’t even mentioned at this year’s Mix conference in Las Vegas. It’s almost as if he is locked in a room somewhere working on Groove and nothing else.

Think about this: Office 2007 was such a revolutionary change and a wonderfully usable product that the VP in charge of it got moved over to the Windows group to try and fix Windows Vista. Windows 7 is already being hailed as the greatest product of the year. As a beta tester for the past 10 years I can say that my voice hasn’t ever been so muffled in history for an operating system. But perhaps this is why Windows 7 is turning out to be a great product. The build that I got at PDC last October was stable enough to be used as a day-to-day machine. I couldn’t say that about Vista during Vista’s first Release Candidate.

Some people are hailing the fact that the system requirements for Windows 7 haven’t changed since Windows Vista, but really Windows Vista’s system requirements were that of a high end PC when Vista was released. I heard a story once about how Windows developers were given older PC’s to develop on so that the operating system they produced would be really fast on a typical machine when the OS came out. I think that was in regards to the advancements that Windows made from version 3.0 and 3.1. During the Vista beta I asked if this was still the case. The answer I got was that the developers were using really high end machines because it would be those machines that would be mid-level machines when the OS came out. This was due to the longer development cycle and that every 18 months… blah… blah… blah… Maybe if they’d listened a little more to the beta testers complaining that none of their hardware worked they wouldn’t have had such a terrible release. Now mind you, I love Windows Vista. Imagine what the haters say about it.

Jump to now. We have Office 2007 which works great. We have Windows 7 that will release I predict within the next couple of months (the Release Candidate was leaked last Friday). So what’s left for the client? We haven’t heard any word on what is coming in Office 2010 that will justify the $300/PC upgrade price, and since there isn’t even a CTP for it yet (much less an official beta) I doubt we’ll see it within this calendar year. Windows Home Server seems to be resting on its laurels releasing a Power Pack here and there. The Zune team is wrapped in more secrecy than Apple’s iPod team (except when some Zune HD pictures are leaked). Xbox 360 seems to be ticking away doing pretty well. Finally the Windows Media Center team seems to be the quietest, but that’s for another blog post.

I think Vista was rushed to market so that people that had bought the [then] new Software Assurance agreement would get an OS upgrade within their 3 year agreement. Since Office 2007 was released almost three years ago I see Microsoft rushing an upgrade to Office to market before its fully baked. This would be bad for Office. Hell, some genius may even say, “let’s call it Office 2007 R2!”

Obviously I’ve skipped a lot of products here, but those may have to be topics for future posts.

The International

Clive Owen and Naomi Watts team up to take down the man in this classic action drama about an evil corporation and the good Interpol/FBI trying to get the baddies.

But is this movie truly a classic? I’m afraid that it isn’t. Clive Owen is starring in another movie right now with Julia Roberts called Duplicity. When I went to see The International I thought I was going to see a better movie, and I’m wondering if Duplicity is what I meant to see.

So what is it really about? Well, an evil multi-national financial institution is financing some international arms deals. In fact they want to be the world leader in gun running. Interpol wants to stop it. It’s your typical cops and robbers movie. There is some main driving force behind Louis Salinger’s obsession with taking down this company. Louis Salinger is played by Clive Owen, but really it seems phoned in. Clive Owen is a much better actor than he portrays in this movie, and the character he plays seems to have a very strong motivation. However, we the audience never get to find out what that motivation is. All we know is that Naomi Watts’ character, Eleanor Whitman, reads his file and now understands his obsession. What about us? Why is Louis so eager to give up his career and everything he’s worked for to take this company down?

The long and short of it is there’s too much passion and not enough motivation in this movie.

Given the chance I would have seen a different movie, and I’m hoping that Duplicity is that movie.