This isn’t a review, but I’d been meaning to watch _The Professional_ for a while and caught it on OnDemand(tm) tonight. The quick and dirty version is that a hitman who is disconnected from life and spends his days in an emotionless routine comes to the rescue of the scared, scarred, and world-weary young girl next door when her abusive parents and younger brother are shot in a drug deal gone bad. Mathilda forces Leon to reconnect with the world, and he shows her that life is worth living and good people (that is, good bad people, or is it bad good people?) do exist in the world.

What I got from this film was nothing like I expected: rather than cute and schlocky, it was violent, dark, thoughtful, full of uncomfortable sexual tension — and brilliant. Natalie Portman’s film debut here shows clearly the actor she was to become, and sets her up as that “wise beyond her years” young girl that plays so well in later films. Jean Reno is great as the hitman of few words but a big heart. But don’t be fooled, this movie doesn’t get sappy, nor does it cross that scary line into pedophelia — it plays everything just right, skirting the edges, staying true to the story and the characters, to a story about love, not sex, not violence, not despair.

The only thing I didn’t like about the film is that I felt like some of the angles simply weren’t fleshed out enough — Leon is training Mathilda to be a “cleaner,” but we never get to see how far she goes, whether she has the skills, whether she’ll follow through with a job. She has an inappropriate infatuation with him, clearly leading somewhere, but we never see how that plays out. It was interesting to see on IMDb that the director’s cut of the film, at 24 minutes longer and released in Europe, addresses just these issues, and is even more of a character driven film. It figures that the US test screenings would want more bloody action and less complex characters. Now I’m gonna go have to buy the DVD. Damn you, Amazon Prime!

Yesterday I went on Amazon.com to buy a phone accessory that I wanted to get quickly. After adding it to my cart, I clicked on the two day shipping option to see what the price was — expensive! But then an offer popped up for a free 3-month trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s premium shipping service. For $79 per year, Prime offers free 2 day shipping on all Amazon orders, with the option for discounted overnight shipping. I don’t buy enough to justify this, but this free offer was pretty tempting, so I took it.

Immediately my purchasing behavior changed. First, I finally gave in after several years and turned on Amazon’s “One-Click” shopping option, which lets you purchase items in one step. Previously I’ve avoided it like the plague because I’d always wait to make sure I had enough in my shopping cart to qualify for free ground shipping before placing an order. But now, I get free two day shipping on everything, which is pretty darn close to instant gratification. So when I saw a book that looked interesting, I clicked “buy.” A few minutes later, I saw a DVD, and clicked “buy” again. And then again. It was so simple, so fun, and so nice to not have to worry about the stupid shipping charges. And hey, I had a couple gift certificates in there anyway, so what’s the harm?

Amazon has caught me in their web. I don’t know if the intent of the Prime free trial is to change your shopping habits or just to get you addicted to the free shipping — probably both — but with me, so far, they are succeeding. Eep.

One thing I should add, the offer has the (obvious) caveat that after three months if you do not cancel, you will be charged the $79 for a year subscription to the service. The difference between this offer and every other offer I’ve ever seen is that Amazon emails you *before* your trial runs out, to warn you if you want to cancel, and they allow you to *immediately* cancel, well before the subscription runs out. Meaning, I signed up and cancelled on the same day, and my free trial is still active for the next three months *without any worry about being rebilled*. That’s absolutely awesome, and makes me love Amazon even more. Which is smart on their part, because if someone like me, a loyal customer for several years, were to get pissed off by being charged for something they didn’t want, Amazon might lose a lot of good will. Instead, at least in my eyes, they just gained a ton, and who knows, if I use it enough, I might even sign up for their damn Prime program. But probably not.

For my Battlestar Galactica watching friends, I just want to remind you that Television Without Pity publishes weekly recaps, and the recent BSG recaps by Jacob have been bordering on amazing. If I was him in college I would have been able to skip as many American Studies classes as I did will also getting all the “A”s that I didn’t. One specific character relationship that he has a lot to say about is the dynamic between Apollo and Starbuck, and its fascinating to watch them converse and then read his analysis and realize that everything they do, everything they say, every single guesture between them is *always* misinterpreted by the other, that as much as they care about and perhaps love each other, they just can’t communicate. The recap for Scar, which is a fabulous read on its own, contains this gem of analysis:

Kara pushes Lee off and starts dressing. “Hey,” he whines, “what about us?” She laughs. “There is no us, all right? I just wanted a good lay. There is nothing here. Do you get that? Nothing.” She dares him to say otherwise, but he gives in so easily that she just screams, “My gods!,” exasperated. He comes in again, this time like a friend, over her shoulder, on a bunk: “Hey.” She stands up and seems ready to shoot him. “Well, that’s just great. Frack or fight, huh?” He steps right up in her business: “Okay, maybe I am just a quick lay. But, Kara, I’m also your friend.” True. She takes advantage: “I am hung up on a dead guy, okay? And it is pissing me off. And I don’t know what I’m doing.” Nice to know that, even now, she can tell him parts of the truth. Lee turns and thinks about this, the crush part and the best friend part engaging in a brief war: “Anders, right? On Caprica, the resistance fighter.” Kara pushes this off, because “Samuel” is dead, and Lee starts to give her a speech starting with “For once in your life…” but Kara translates this as pity. Lee: “You haven’t got my pity! Listen, you are fine. You’re fine with the dead guys. It’s the living guys you can’t deal with.” Which is ironic on all cylinders but still true. She slaps him, and they look at each other, and she grabs his face, kissing him roughly. Lee’s hands don’t know what to do. She pushes off, and he’s a little angry and intense by now, even though the last kiss was basically an apology for being a freak, and Kara grabs the bottle and swings out of the room.

One of the most fascinating relationships in a series full of fascinating relationships, as long as we just ignore that completely terrible episode two weeks ago where Lee did all that stuff that didn’t make sense. I’m really rooting for BSG to redeem itself, becase when its good its just so good, and in the meantime while I wallow in its surprisingly out of place suckiness, at least I have Jacob over at TWOP to keep me hopeful.

Sunday night’s _Grey’s Anatomy_ was an excellent episode but I think the last few seconds caused some confusion among careful watchers, and that confusion has more to do with problemtic editing (or direction) than acting. The ratings-boosting episode showed a World War II weapons enthusiast coming to the hospital with unexploded home-made ammunition in his chest. An inexperienced paramedic stuck her hand into the chest to stop the bleeding and, in the final moments of the episode, upset and panicked, removed her hand and ran from the room, while everyone else dropped to the ground, afraid of an explosion. Meredith, standing by the paramedic’s side, instinctively put her hand into the chest cavity as Hannah removed hers, stabilizing (theoretically) the round and continuing to plug the wound, saving the man’s life, at least temporarily.

Click for full size version with annotation.

The problem, and the reason why I think many people are debating Meredith’s action, comes down to about eight frames (a quarter of a second) in that final scene. As Hannah removes her hand, at the bottom left of the frame we see Meredith’s gloved hand slipping in simultaneously to take its place. This leads one to believe that she took the action instincitvely and just might have saved everyone’s lives. This is borne through by the last few cuts, showing Meredith, calmly but almost unbelievingly staring down at the body and whispering over and over, “what did I do?” However, the scene immediately following the hand placement shows Meredith’s arm being thrown out of the way as Hannah removes her hand and retreats, and then arcing back down towards the body, thus leading to the belief that Meredith stuck her hand into the chest cavity after the shell had been jostled, thus stupidly putting herself further into harms way or, perhaps, having a death wish. Now, either way, the action took place in less than half a second, so I’m not sure that in general this would drastically change someone’s thought process, but the ambiguity of how it was shot and edited does lead to some deserved confusion about what precisely was taking place, how Meredith reacted, and the degree of foolishness of her action.

If you’ve found any of my other links about teenage sexuality the least bit interesting, you *cannot* ignore the article in this week’s _New York Magazine_ titled The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. The initial hook to the story is learning about salacious goings-on at one of NYC’s most prestigious public high schools, but it doesn’t stop there, oh no. To whit:

bq. These girls have obliterated the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t� stranglehold that has traditionally plagued high-school females. They set the sexual agenda for their group. And they expect reciprocation. “I’ve made it my own personal policy that if I’m going to give oral sex, I’m going to receive oral sex,� says Jane.

I think what I find most interesting about the article is that once you get past the entire subset of teenage culture that some of us were completely unaware of and are probably at least a bit uncomfortable with, you find out that, in the end, not much has really changed. Sure, teenagers ideas of friendship and intimacy and flirtation have changed dramatically, but is it any more dramatically than the change from the time when boys and girls weren’t allowed together unsupervised? The time when they didn’t even speak to each other except at heavily supervised formal events? Or even the time when a young man had to ask a woman’s (and per parents!) permission to write her letters?

During my high school years (not too long ago) the rules were different, and while I did find myself allowed to be alone with girls, I remember even then feeling uncomfortable on the occasions when I found myself in a girl’s bedroom. I, no doubt, was pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, as were most of the girls I hung out with. So I don’t find this current shift to be at all out of place.

And I find it comforting, when looking at the change, to see that beyond the superficial and the flirting and the day-to-day encounters of teenager-hood, the real longing for companionship still remains:

bq. Most of the kids say they hate relationships, that they don’t want to be tied down, that they want to be open to different possibilities and different genders from minute to minute, but there is a natural tendency—as natural perhaps as the tendency to experiment—to try to find connection. Like it or not, emotions get involved. If you look closer, you can see the hint of longing, the momentary pouting, the tiny jealousies. Jared can’t take his eyes off Nikki, but Nikki seems interested mainly in Alair. Jason, too, is angling for Alair’s attention, but Alair is once again focused on Jane. And Jane, well, Jane might actually be in love.

I find this sentiment comforting, and I think in the end the article shows us that kids will be kids, teens will experiment and be trendy and push against the blurry boundaries of social norms, but when it comes right down to it the adults of tomorrow still want what the adults of today, and the adults of yesterday want — comfort, companionship, stability, connection, love. In short, don’t freak out, we’re gonna be okay.

What I still can’t get a handle on, though, is that this is *Stuyvesant*. I guess I just figured, from my warped persepctive and my middle- and high-school experiences, that the “intelligent,” “driven,” “hard working” kids were the ones least likely to be at the leading edge of these sorts of social changes. But then, perhaps I was hanging out with the “wrong” crowd. 😉 And in a school of 3,000 — no matter the school — there is always going to be *someone*, to use a marketing slogan, “think[ing] different(tm)”.

Note a few entries back when I said I was fed up with TextDrive and going to stick AgBlog on a Berkman machine temporarily? Yeah, then that machine got hacked. Humph. Sorry about that. Welcome back.

I’ve gotten sick of “TextDrive”:http://www.textdrive.com for several reasons, and it was annoying enough tonight that I said to hell with it and just moved AgBlog over to a Berkman server, and also upgrade WordPress while I was at it. It took all of an hour. I should have done it sooner.

I’m not sure how permanent this will be, but in the meantime the site is nice and fast and I can finally finish my theme. I’m also installing the plugin that will let people receive an email when new things are posted. Let me know if you see broken things.

My cable bill is very confusing. Comcast charges all sorts of fees and then gives a bunch of discounts and credits and it ends up at a number which I pay without trying too hard to comprehend it. Right now my roommates and I are paying about $125 a month for digital cable with HD channels and high speed internet. This, to me, feels very, very high.

The first thing I’d like to do to that number is knock out the internet — that we need. However, doing so is difficult. While it costs $43 a month, with a “multi product discount” we get $15 off of that amount. $28 does seem reasonable to me for high speed internet, although I think for that price we should be getting something even *higher* speed. So let us say it should cost $30 a month for reliable high speed internet. Now the cable bill is down to $95. The HD recorder itself plus the remote control accounts for $5 of that, so let us pull that out as well, and we’re down to $90.

Ninety dollars is the figure we will use. Before we continue, let me explain my alternate proposal for a la carte programming. It is really quite simple: we have “podcasting” which is an easy way of checking web site feeds to see if new audio files are available and, if they are, downloading them automatically. There are even some “video podcasts” which is the same thing, only with video files. It is straightforward, it is easy to use, and it is built into iTunes. ITunes also now allows you to purchase some television shows at a low quality suitable for iPod viewing at $1.99 per episode.

I want to podcast television shows. I would like to sign up for, say, _Lost_, and every week iTunes would download the show for me and debit me $1.99. Then I could watch the show at my convenience, without commercials. However, I want my shows to be equivalent quality to what I can see on my fancy new television, which means beautiful high definition. Each night my computer will check for new shows on my list and download them in HD, each time charging me $1.99. Each morning I’ll have fresh content to watch on my iPod, my computer, or my television when it is convenient to me. This, I believe, is the future of television. Broadcast as a concept will gradually cease to exist.

Continue reading “A la carte economics and the pod people future”

Someone explain this to me, because now I’m confused. Does being a participant in “fandom” always or generally imply that a person writes pornographic ‘shipper fan-fiction? I mean, not that there is anything wrong with writing stories about television characters or your own fantasies about their non-relationships, but I always thought fandom referred to a community built up around a television show. Wikipedia seems to agree. Thus I find it odd that people are worried about losing their jobs for participating in “fandom,” unless what they actually mean is participating in X-rated story writing, which is perhaps more likely to ruffle feathers among those with delicate sensibilities than simply dressing up as a Klingon or going to a Buffy meet-up (I’ve done one of the two, I’ll let you guess which…).

Today we got our new HD cable box/DVR thing from Comcast, and I’ve been fiddling with it. Using some Apple developer tools, I am able to record full-resolution high-definition video off of my cable box onto my Mac laptop over a FireWire connection…at 80MB/minute. How cool is that?

(Hint: very. Very cool.)

Soon enough the content providers and cable companies will start locking things down and prohibiting this kind of behavior, which of course won’t stop the pirates but will stop interested hobbyists like myself. As it should be, right?

Knowing that spammers often use web crawlers (or let search engines do the work for them) to find email addresses sitting on web sites to add to their spam lists, most people now understand that it is a good idea to obfuscate email addresses they post on web sites. Many major sites do the obfuscation automatically, converting the addresses to images, which are much harder to scan, or making them less address-like, i.e. myname (-at-) mydomain (-dot-) com, trusting that users can figure it out, but hoping that computers cannot.

Which is all well and good, until you start using the mailto link, which is a link that is meant to open someone’s email program and automatically address the message. A lot of people who “get” that obfuscation is good don’t also get that if you put the *actual* email address in the mailto link, the spammers will be able to get to it even easier than if it was in the text of the web page. After all, something that says <a href="mailto:myname@mydomain.com"> is quite the red flag. And yet, when I make my mailto links the same as the displayed email address (i.e. with the obfuscation), I get complaints from people who don’t understand why when they click the link and it opens their email program the address isn’t correct, and their messages get bounced. You would think intelligent people, with a bit of thought, could figure this out.

Meanwhile, we have the highly silly phenomenon of sites using email addresses that are obfuscated to the naked eye but perfectly well-formed in the code, in the mailto links, saving the spammer the trouble while leaving the same amount of confusion in place for the reader.

I’ve never gotten a chance to light a show, and it occured to me tonight that I still want to do so. I took a lighting design class my last semester of college, and I’ve run light boards on various productions, but the last time I did anything with hanging and focusing lights was in high school. I’ve never had a chance yet to actually hang a light plot that I’ve designed and see if it works.

I don’t expect I’ll be in a position to direct a show any time soon. With my minimal recent acting experience I probably won’t find myself acting in one, either. But lighting — that I could do. And it doesn’t need to be incredibly elaborate. One of the best examples I’ve seen was a show at Brandeis that was lit by at most ten instruments, and turned out great. I also was board op on a show lit by 60 or 70, and it turned out awful.

So perhaps I’ll put that on my list of things to accomplish.

I’ve finished season 1 of _Veronica Mars_ and I think it is some of the best television I have ever witnessed. Episode 21, “A Trip to the Dentist,” is one of the best if not *the best* things I have *ever* seen on television, period. Episode 22, “Leave It To Beaver,” is one of the most intense. I’m not very good at writing reviews, especially in trying to balance what makes a piece of art tick without blowing important plot points. And there is so very much important plot that you do *not* want blown. So I promise that I’m going to post a review of _Veronica Mars_: Season 1 very soon, and I promise that I am not going to reveal *anything*. I’m also going to caution you that if you are at all interested in watching _VM_, please let me give you all of season 1 (or better yet, buy it on DVD) but *don’t* read anything else about it, online or elsewhere. It is way too easy to be spoiled, in fact I know from reading them that many of the published reviews contain major spoilers, and you don’t want to be spoiled. Trust me.

It’s just. So. Good.

On one of the early episodes of _Veronica Mars_ (1×05: “You Think You Know Somebody”) there is a scene in Veronica’s car with the radio turned on. The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” comes on and Troy says, “I dig this song.” Veronica responds, “me too.” Completely irrelevent to the conversation at hand and very random. Some strange product placement opportunity? Trying to be authentic to teenage conversations? Or just a writer slipping in a note about one of his favorite songs? Beats me. Sorta weird.

I just visited Salon.com for the first time in a while and I’m not sure there is anything more they can do to make that so-called publication any worse. The ad creep has reached insane heights, they’ve abolished all of their sections (and probably fired the section editors), and scaled back their wide-ranging coverage to include only a few blog posts and a few articles each week. I’m glad I let my subscription lapse a while back — there is nothing left worth paying for. A sad state of affairs for what was once a pretty good, well-read, and influential online magazine, if one that teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for *years*.

Why is it that when I get after-hours pages they always — *always* — come at 2 or 3 or 4am? Just once can I get a page at midnight, or at 9am? Please?

Got an email today probably based on my old Salon article about internet censorship (letters) (oh fifteen minutes of fame, I thought I had lost you! gee, you sure are dusty…) On the one hand, its just really sad that this stupid fight continues to go on and adults still can’t Get A Clue(tm) about the internet and about kids. On the other hand, its nice that students continue to fight these things, to question stupid rules, to learn how to think for themselves and stand up for their rights. And it makes me feel warm and fuzzy to think that I can play a role — however insignificant — in making that happen.

Well, I am. I so am. Everything about this show is just done perfectly. And, even better, its not the least bit predictable. It is totally the new Buffy (don’t just take my word for it). If you haven’t checked it out, you should, and if you need season one, I can hook you up.

But I’ve only gotten through three four episodes, and I’m trying to ration them, so *don’t tell me anything about it.* Anything. At all. Let us just bask together in the awesomness, and look out on our current TV landscape, and see that it is good.

Another time of transition. This is the longest I’ve spent on a design. What you are seeing here has gone through several iterations over many months, and it dawned on me today that if I don’t do something soon, I might never finish. So nothing like switching over to the new design right as the holidays are starting…I’ll either have lots of free time to finish up the design and fix the broken things, or no time at all. Report feedback, praise, and broken-ness to zeno @ agblog, as per usual.

AgBlog is now hosted at TextDrive. I love them in theory with their support for open source projects, liberal hosting philosophy, and amazing hardware, but in practice everything is really darn slow and needlessly complicated and annoying, so I might decide to move to something better if it continues to suck.

A Slashdot posting pondering the stupid assertion that geeks have “gone mainstream” drummed up a major backlash. As scary as it is, yes, I’m going to link to Slashdot again: This comment about what it means to be a true geek is pretty good. The definition of “geek” is not someone who is “good at computers,” meaning they can fix Windows and the like, or someone who plays with lots of gadgets and can wire your home theater setup. Those are attributes that geeks may have, but the definition of a geek is someone who participates in hobbies that others consider eccentric or not socially mainstream. The idea of a “mainstream geek” is an oxymoron. Geeks are a lot of things, in a lot of fields, but mainstream they ain’t, and can never be.

In a similar mode, this explanation of why enrollment in CS majors has drastically dropped is spot-on: I had a lot of contact with CS majors who were really clueless about technology and clearly were not in the program for a love of computers and programming. I think it is the same today with many people in the bio-med and economics fields. They may have convinced themselves that it is their calling, but its pretty clear that the reason so many more people are going into some of these fields and abandoning fields like CS and other sciences like physics is because that is where the jobs and the money are. I mean, seriously, there can’t be that many people who really want to be bioinfomaticians.

CS as a field isn’t dying, its just that programming jobs and the like are no longer where the money is, as those jobs are all outsourced and off-shored. The drop in majors is a natural market reaction, and the people who are legitimately interested in the field (and less concerned about short-term financial success) are the ones who are staying. I mean look at me — I didn’t do an American Studies major for with the expectation that I could jump into a high-paying career. Not to look down on people who go for popular majors, and not to say that practical people are in any way wrong for taking the course they do, but I think there is something more pure about pursuing a major you enjoy or a subject you are passionate about rather than something that is just going to give you money without the same return in happiness.

Why did I do AMST? Many reasons, but a lot of it was that I got to take courses in journalism, in the study of law, in American culture, markets, history, literature… I could have been CS or some other major, but I did AMST because it let me take classes that were neat and that I enjoyed, and, equally important, it gave me time to pursue other interests that I probably won’t ever get to do again in my lifetime — being on a Mock Trial team, working in politics through student government, and co-editing a newspaper. I consider those experiences far more valuable than a few extra courses that would have propelled me immediately into a high-paying job doing investment banking, or something equally dull.