Category: Foo

Asleep

There’s a new tv show on NBC called “Awake.” The premise is that a detective was in a car accident with his wife and son. Since the accident, he will wake up in one world and his wife will be alive, and he will wake up in the other world and his son will be alive. He uses clues from one world to solve cases in the other.

To be honest, I was only interested because Jason Isaacs is cool. The first episode set things up. But now I’m bored with it.

The thing is, this whole “living in two parallel/alternate realities” could be really cool. As someone who has spent most of his life reading horror, science fiction, and fantasy, I see a lot of potential here. As someone who read a lot of Philip K. Dick, I am disappointed to see this potential wasted.

Every cop show has a gimmick. Monk is neurotic. Castle is a writer. The Mentalist is observant. Poppy remembers everything. They are all boring cop shows with a gimmick and very little else. Turns out, that’s all “Awake” is. His gimmick is that he has two “dreams” to use to solve the cases. Yawn.

What if his wife has the same fractured reality? What if realities started overlapping? (For example, what if the killer from one reality called him in the other?) What happened to the whole “conspiracy” that was hinted at? There was a scene in which Britten wakes up without the colored wrist band he uses to keep track of which reality he is in. For 15 seconds he is freaking out. That was a great scene. What if he woke up and the wrist band was a completely different color? If he’s got two realities, why can’t he have another?

But no. We’re just going to get more stupid cop drama. Wake me up when PBS starts it’s new programming.

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Bertrand Russell

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

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Emotional Awareness and Intelligence

Last night I watched a three hour Nature special on PBS entitled Ocean Giants. One of the many things they talked about was whether or not dolphins and whales are intelligent.

They showed dolphins working out how to trap fish. They showed whales working together, in teams, to catch herring. It was pretty amazing. They’ve proved that dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors. Having a sense of self, of identity, is one of the big signs of intelligence. So hooray for dolphins.

Then they mentioned this idea of emotional awareness. One level is being aware of your own emotions. The next is being aware of the emotions of others. If you’re aware that other things around you have emotions, you just might be intelligent.

They were looking at dolphins and wondering whether or not they were aware that things around them had emotions.

And yet, here we are, ignorantly believing that nothing else out there has emotions like we do.

I wonder if whales and dolphins question our intelligence. I certainly do.

Cabin Fever Induced Pre-Spring Cleaning

It’s that time of year again. Time to realize holy crap I have a lot of stuff and eesh that’s not even plugged in and okay I obviously didn’t keep up with this series of graphic novels. You know what I’m talking about. Here’s a list of “crap” I want to get rid of.

  • The Watson.
  • The gargoyles. I used to have a lot more. Now I don’t even want these.
  • My graphic novels and comic books. I used to have a lot more. Now I don’t even want these.
  • My turntable and record collection.
  • The dozens of board games we never play.
  • A lot of coffee table books.
  • T-shirts. For the love of Ganesha, why do I have so many t-shirts? I am hereby instating a moratorium on the acquisition of t-shirts.

Things that are on the short list.

  • The VCR. We only keep it because of one exercise video. Which, now that I think of it, I could probably get from Amazon for $5.
  • The CD player. We still have a lot of CDs. We don’t play any of them outside of the car. Can you tell I’m getting really tired of physical media?

If any of these things sound appealing to you, let me know.

The Mondays

This was originally drafted as an email to my good friend Grant. But I think it’s appropriate for public consumption.

Increasingly, any development I do follows this pattern:

10 ask for specs
20 wait
30 get (new) specs
40 build (more)
50 test
60 goto 30

Yes, that is an infinite loop. No, nothing is ever done. Even if it’s live, even if it’s production, it’s never done.

It’s hard to feel good about anything you do when it’s temporary. I was trained/educated to build robust systems that last.

But I am not my job. Right? There is life after programming.

Good weekend. Saturday was a lot of fun, despite being tired all day. Sunday morning I finished the book I was reading and decided not to start reading another book until at least Monday. Kathleen has been suggesting we ride our bikes to Starbucks for coffee. Which is pretty cool. I’ve been riding my new bike. It’s got some kinks that I need to work out. Braking is weird. We went to a few open houses and saw something we like but can’t afford. Kathleen went to the studio and threw two pieces. I’m really happy about that. She stopped doing pottery while her father was sick. It’s been a few years now. I’m glad she’s back at it. I always liked her work. It’s not perfect and shiny but it has a sort of honest character that I appreciate. A lot of her pottery friends can make a dozen pieces that all look the same, and while that makes you “good” at what you do, every piece Kathleen makes is unique and experimental. While she was out, I did some bike maintenance on the Bastard Son of the Disillusioned Yeti King. Rear brake was off, thought my wheel might be misaligned in the dropouts. Turned out I had a broken spoke. Probably not a good thing to be riding that around. And because I’ve been doing maintenance on a roughly weekly basis, I know that broke last week. So I’m on the new bike this week. Obviously the more I ride it, the more things I think about. The brakes are different, so my pannier will push against it if I put it where I think it ought to go on the rear rack. And, like I said, the front brake is doing some thumping thing that isn’t right. I will need a kickstand. I need to copy down the serial number.

But I digress.

You have to move on. I have to figure out how to get my busted wheel to the bike shop before they close at 6pm. That’s a bit more rushing than I like to do. Possible. I am already not as prepared as I could be to do it today, but I will probably try anyway. A little hustle. I like the word hustle. I don’t like the word hurry. I need get to pick out a new book to read. I need to get up to Stuyvesant to see about ordering the other books I want. I’ve decided that while it would be cheaper to order them from Amazon, and while Amazon would give me all kinds of reward points, I miss going to an actual bookstore. Wednesday we’re getting Brooks BBQ, which is a rare treat. And we’re trying to work something out to get together with my parents, though nobody has any idea what to do or where to do it.

Let’s focus on what’s ahead of us.