http://www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/lego.htm

Mechanical assemblies (such as a working differential and working rotation sensor), works of art (Rodin’s Thinker, M. C. Escher’s Relativity), and more…all with Legos.

What dreams may come

Last night, I had a dream that I was visiting the United Kingdom for some kind of event (I’m not really quite sure what), and while I was there, I met latexiron and kjersti. Why them? I have no idea. I don’t know either one of them.

I sometimes dream about people on LiveJournal I’ve never met, in contexts like maurading dragons or purple gumballs. I wonder if it’s because a forum such as LiveJournal can create the illusion that you know someone, or that you share something with someone, when the reality is nothing of the sort.

Clearly, those parts of our brains which are responsible for our social drives, the parts that create a sense of familiarity and connection with other people has not evolved rapidly enough to keep up with changes in communication.

Movies

Underworld

Eye candy. No doubt about it.

This movie owes its stylistic sense to The Matrix and Dark City. Every frame is gorgeous, and no doubt about it, vampires have the best wardrobes. It’s hard to complain about a hot chick in a rubber bodysuit and a corset.

Still, it’s nothing but fluff. The plot is muddled, the dialog rarely rises above so-so, the characters are all about style but are hardly believable. It’s the Goth answer to action-adventure flicks–good, mindless fun, and it certainly is pretty.

The Secretary

Can someone please explain to me just why the hell everyone thought this movie was so awesome?

Watching this movie is like watching the most boring parts of “9 1/2 Weeks,” only with more neurotic characters. It has all the charm of a Victoria’s Secret TV ad with none of the sexiness. I’ve seen more believable plots in Spider-Man comic books. There’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back…

The Last unicorn

This is an old animated movie that’s one of Shelly’s all-time favorites. She watched it with us last week.

The animation is terrible. No getting around it, the animation is just plain bad.

But once you get past that, it’s a very, very, very good movie. It’s the perfect antidote to Disney and harry potter; it shows that a movie written for children does not have to be childish.

We’ve come to expect certain things from children’s stories: simple morals, a cartoonish sense of good and evil, clearly-defined heros and villains.

The adversarial characters in The Last unicorn are deeply wounded, but they are not evil. The philosophical ideas in the movie are surprisingly sophisticated. The animation may be poor, but the movie has things that most modern children’s movies lack: complexity, nuance, and substance. Hey, Disney, you paying attention? Movies made for children do not have to be drivel!

American Pie

I am, I think, one of the few people left in the world who’s never seen American Pie, at least until last week. Now, I am no longer a cultural pariah; I have seen American Pie.

Yay.

How this movie got to be such a cultural touchstone is quite beyond me. It’s a “frustrated teenagers trying to get laid” flick. We’ve all seen a hundred of these, and they’re all the same. There’s always the Big Prom, at which at least one character is utterly humiliated by an Embarrassing Revelation, and hilarity ensues. There’s always the Horny Teenager who is caught at an Awkward Moment, and hilarity ensues. *Yawn*

It may have revitalized the “teen flick” formula, but make no mistake: it’s still formula.

feardotcom

lamedotcom. I’ve seen scarier things in my breakfast cereal.

The Weekend

So Friday evening, we all head out for a movie, the vampire-chic “Underworld,” and some clubbing. Since we planned to go to the club directly after the movie, we all headed to the theater in clubwear. (Yes, I wore a collar.)

And since nothing goes with a movie quite as well as dinner, we stopped at Bennigan’s first. All thirteen of us.

Many of the patrons there looked at us rather like one might look at someone who had just stepped out of an elevator wearing nothing but a gigantic Boa constrictor.

You just can’t get enough of that for my entertainment dollar. Indeed the only thing better is…

Cute lesbian chicks!

First time at the club, Underground in downtown Tampa. Kinda goth, kinda industrial, dollar drinks all night long. I’m told I had rather a lot of them.

Ran into an old friend from my Sarasota BBS days there…haven’t seen him in something like twelve years, but he still recognized me. Weird.

And cute lesbian chicks. Doing very dirty things. At the bar. 🙂

Saturday

Hangover.

Yep, that’s it. That was Saturday.

Sunday

PolyTampa. Old friends, some new friends, M’s tale of discovering her bisexuality while at Girl Scout camp (excuse me while I go there for a moment…), and then over to the home of lightgatherer, moonshadowdance, and their partner for a few games of Zendo. Which, if you haven’t ever played it, you should.

Yes, you. Yes, I do mean you. You’ll like it…trust me.

Also tried unsucccessfully to ressurect Shelly’s laptop, which seems to have gone off to the great Hewlett-Packard happy place in the sky–which sucks like a great big sucky thing.

Other stuff

Shelly and I will be in San Fransisco from January 3 through January 10 for MacWorld. We’ll almost certainly spend some time with altenra, which is always one of the hilights of the trip, and at least one evening at Power Exchange is in the plan as well. Anything else interesting to do in SF?

I’ve lost the battery charger for my digital camera, which also sucks like a big sucky thing. No more pics for a while…*sigh*

Now I’m off to bed.

Going out tonight with a group of friends, including kellyv, defunction, lightgatherer, moonshadowdance, and others. We’re going to the opening of “Underworld” (a vampires and werewolves movie–how cool is that?) then going out clubbing immediately afterward.

So we’ll all be in club wear for the movie, which should be fun.

So I told her that not only do I not want to save the world, the world doesn’t particularly want to be saved.

She thought about it for a while, then asked me if I thought that was a cynical attitude. Not at all, I replied; it’s a realistic one.

In the end, I think we agreed to disagree on the matter.

“Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a wrod dsoen’t mttaer, the olny thnig thta’s iopmrantt is that the frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crcreot ptoision. The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet wiohtut dclftfuiiy.”

First, the good news…

Shelly returned yesterday from her weeklong trip to New York City, where she evidently had quite a blast even in spite of the fact that she did not encounter latexiron during his trip. I picked her up from the airport Monday morning.

Next, the Bad news…

I picked Shelly up at the airport. I did not pick Shelly’s luggage up at the airport. Someone named Ruth picked up Shelly’s luggage instead.

I think Shelly should’ve taken Ruth’s luggage, just to hold hostage or something, but oh well.

I nailed the curb at the airport parking garage in kellyv‘s car, which I had taken so that I’d be able to…er, fit all of Shelly’s luggage. Destroyed two tires. Goddamn.

The Cinnabon at the mall by my house is gone. After getting the car fixed and making a trip back tot he airport to fetch Shelly’s luggage, I really wanted needed a cinnamon roll. I had to drive all the way across town to get one. (And yes, it was really, really good.)

Cinnamon rolls, like bacon, help make life worth living.

The amusing news

Courtesy of my friend Chris, in honor of my newly-minted arch-nemesis (without which no evil genius can be complete), and in recognition of the fact that the whole Friendster thing is overdone (as is, indeed, the whole online-dating thing), I give you:

ArchNemesisster!

It’s been a long, frantic, busy week. As with most things, thee’s a simple explanation, and a complex explanation.

The simple explanation:

A client’s server computer went down, and I had to replace the motherboard in it.

The complex explanation:

This is a sordid tale of corporate espionage, incompetence, greed, and Asian notions of “honor” and “face.”

Before I get into the whole cloak-and-dagger story, a bit of background: Computers and other electronic devices use components called “capacitors,” which are small metal cylinders, vaguely can-shaped, that are soldered to circuit boards. Capacitors contain a viscous, oily material called a “dielectric,” which improves their efficiency.

Last year, a scientist working for an electronics firm in Japan stole his company’s formula for a high-quality dielectric, and fled to Taiwan, where he sold the formula to a Chinese firm that manufacturers capacitors. The Chinese firm began making capacitors with the stolen formula in mainland China and Taiwan, where they were sold to Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers Abit and Micro-Star. Many thousands of the capacitors were also sold to IBM.

These are cheap components, costing less than a penny apiece in quantity. Manufacturers could shave a few cents off the cost of a motherboard by using the Chinese capacitors in place of name-brand capacitors from Taiwan and Japan, which cost a few percent more.

Problem is, the thieving scientist bungled the formula. The dielectric formula as sold to the Chinese firm was incomplete.

As a result, the capacitors using the faulty formula are unstable, and tend to fail dramatically. In some cases, they will physically explode after a few thousand hours’ use. When they do, the result looks like this:

As you can see, the tops have split open on the capacitors. The brown crud all over the place is the faulty dielectric, which leaks out and turns to a hard, crusty mess.

This causes the computer to fail.

So I spent a good part of the week replacing the motherboard, and rebuilding the Windows install on the affected server.

The Moral

My client’s server has been down for several days as the result of the unethical and incompetent corporate espionage of a Japanese scientist and the greed and petty cost-cutting of a couple of electronics firms (in this case, Micro-Star and IBM) who used untrusted components from an unknown manufacturer to save a few pennies on the cost of a computer.

The moral lessons here are not necessarily obvious. Yes, greed is bad; but beyond that, there’s another factor at work here as well.

The world we live in is a complex, interdependent entity, where actions by single individuals half a planet away can reach out and touch people far removed from them. I’m sure the thieving scientist and the greedy accountants at IBM and Micro-Star didn’t intend to make my week miserable, but their actions conspired to do so anyway.

The scientist involved was never arrested. Why? Because he’s in Taiwan; someone in Taiwan would have to lodge a criminal complaint against him. However, the manufacturers in Taiwan are reluctant to do so, because admitting they were hoodwinked by a vendor would be a grave loss of face. (For the same reason, the Taiwanese author of the Cherynobl virus was released after he was captured because no Taiwanese firms would risk losing face by admitting they’d been affected by the virus.)

Thge law of unintended consequences is as immutable as the law of gravity. So, too, is the fact that if you do not stand up against peope who do wrong, those people can continue to do wrong; pride can make anyone into a victim.

Don’t feel bad…it could always be worse.

This from The Register: A criminal was arrested in Wisconsin recently after he–get this–stole a GPS device used to monitor people under house arrest.

The gadget contains a GPS tracking unit and a satellite transmitter. When it was stolen, it sent a signal to the police telling them exactly where it was located, and the police followed the signal to the man’s apartment.

Some people, you just can’t reach…

DragonCon

DragonCon is a large, busy science fiction convention held every year in Atlanta. No, sadly, we didn’t go. bandage and M were able to attend this year, together with a large group of friends, but we, alas, were not.

So instead we spent the weekend with moonshadowdance, lightgatherer, their partner Chris, ucertola, and a group of other friends.

We had a blast.

What every evil genius needs…

…is a good archnemesis. And I believe I’ve found just the person.

He has all the qualities one generally looks for in an archnemesis: he’s intelligent, we see eye to eye on most things, we get along very well, our philosophies and worldview are generally compatible. There’s just one catch: He’s not a superhero, he’s an evil genius as well.

But I figure I can overlook that. After all, the “evil genius/superhero” thing has been done to death anyway.

So without further ado, I give you: Tacit’s arch-nemesis