Category: Random observations

Visited the parents this weekend. Climbed Mt Coolum today. Steep climb but it’s pretty short. All in all, a very relaxing weekend, and one that I needed. Straight back to paper writing on Monday. I probably should have been working on it over the weekend, too, but there’s more to life than service discovery. A lot more.

The final DVD we watched last week was The Legend of Bagger Vance. I really enjoyed that film. On the surface it’s about golf, but underneath it’s about life and the demons each of us lives with. In fact, the movie used golf as a metaphor for life. The script writer (actually, I think it was based on a novel) could have used almost any sport to convey the same message, it’s just that there are elements of golf which are particularly suited as metaphors for aspects of one’s life. I won’t detail what these metaphors are because this review (or whatever you might choose to call it) will become boring. Besides, upon watching the movie, the important metaphors are quite obvious, and so I recommend you just watch the film. It is worth it, regardless of its score on IMDB.com.

The film follows the story of a gifted young golfer, Rannulph Junuh, who is sent off to fight in World War I. The war breaks him psychologically. After the war is over, he hides from the world. Eventually he returns to his home town of Savanah in Georgia. He is convinced to play in a golf tournament organised by his one time girlfriend, Adele Invergordon, who needs to raise money so that she can keep the golf course her father created. Junuh meets a caddy by the name of Bagger Vance who helps to get his game and his life back on track. One of the questions the film doesn’t answer for you is "exactly who or what is Bagger Vance?" There are hints in the film and the title itself that suggest Bagger Vance is not human, but possibly Junuh’s guardian angle. The stories of Junuh’s golfing comeback, his romance with Adele and the demons of his past are combined to create an interesting and touching plot. The movie is filmed beautifully, and is perhaps its most outstanding feature. There are also strong performances from Matt Damon (one of my favourite actors), Will Smith (who plays the part of Bagger Vance extraordinarily well) and Charlize Theron, who does a fair job of playing Adele the southern belle. However, I felt Theron laid on the ditsiness, if there is such a word, a bit too much at some points. A beautiful film. Don’t be put off by the IMDB.com score (6.4/10 at the moment). I noticed that almost everyone that gave this film a bad score thought that the movie was only about golf, which should give you some indication of the amount of faith you should place in that score.

I was going to write a review for Super Troopers but have decided against doing so. It’s really not worth it. A few funny moments but nothing more.

On the other hand, Black Hawk Down is an excellent film depicting the ill-fated attempt to capture a warlord from the Somali capital, Mogadishu in 1993. This is quite simply one of the best, if not the best, war movies I’ve seen. This movie gripped me more than even Saving Private Ryan, which itself was a groundbreaking movie in terms of the realism it was able to capture on film. The performances from all the leading cast members was excellent. The story was told in a way that didn’t glorify war, while simultaneously doing no dishonour to the soldiers whose lives were lost in that battle. The comradery between soldiers is captured in this film like no previous war movie has been able to capture before. Indeed, comradship is the central theme of this film. One other important point about Black Hawk Down is the way the Somalis are portrayed. The film is very careful not to portray them as completely evil people. In fact, a central tenet of the film is that the reasons for war are never black and white. There are all sorts of complexities at the political level. But what counts on the battle-field is the guy standing beside you. Everything else, all the politics and whatnot, goes out the window. The rule holds for the Somalis just as it does for the Americans. But the best aspect of the film for me was the way in which it was shot. The cinematography is stunning, having a huge affect on the way the movie comes across. It’s a hundred miles an hour from go to whoa. Black Hawk Down features some of the best hand-held camera work I’ve seen in a movie to date. This, coupled with the gritty scenery of a Moroccan coastal town which posed as the Somali capital, created a the perfect atmosphere for the film. It’s a very bloody film, but I suppose if it wants to depict reality, it has to be. Further adding to the reality is the fact that many of the characters were factually based. The leading characters in the film were actual soldiers who took part in the mission in 1993. In short, a fantastic film that brings home the reality and futility of war.

I’ve just read Roger Ebert’s review of Igby Goes Down. He’s left me wondering whether he was watching the same movie as the rest of us. His first mistake is to keep referring to Jeff Goldblum’s character, D. H. Baines, as Igby’s Stepfather when in fact he is Igby’s Godfather. The second mistake is to state that Igby met Sookie through Rachel. Of course, Igby actually met Sookie through his Godfather, and even then only indirectly: Sookie was working for the company that catered a party being thrown by Baines at his house in the Hamptons. Sookie was unknown to any of the other characters in the film. Furthermore, Ebert suggests the reason Sookie falls for Igby is because Igby makes her laugh. This is followed by a silly statement about Sookie and lessons young men such as myself are supposed to learn from her:

All women who like you because you make them laugh sooner or later stop laughing, and then why do they like you?

First of all, Mr Ebert, one of the defining characteristics of Sookie is that she never laughs, instead preferring to state, in the driest of tones, "That’s funny." Sookie rarely smiles in the movie, let alone laughs! This is probably one of the reasons Igby is drawn to her. She’s different enough from those in his own family (i.e. not rich and uppity), but melancholic enough that he can feel comfortable around her.

These may not be huge errors on Ebert’s part, but they are errors I’m positive he was not making in years past. He is still perhaps the most respected and most read film reviewer around, and thus should be doing his utmost to keep his reviewing standards at the highest level. Despite some recent complaints I’ve had with his reviews (I’ve written somewhere in this diary about his occassional lack of self-consistency), he remains my favourite movie reviewer.

I said I gave this move 7 out of 10, but the thing is, when I think about it on a five star scale, I definitely wouldn’t give it less than four stars. Four stars is 8 out of 10. 7 is only three and a half stars. On Ebert’s scale it would only be two and half stars out of four! I think I was a bit harsh in my first reaction to the movie because I made a special effort to observe all the little details, which I normally wouldn’t do on a first viewing of a movie. I know that I will be asked to share my thoughts about the movie on Monday, so I probably viewed the film with a more critical eye than usual.

Gosh, it’s late.

Just read Ben’s blog again. I think he’s getting a little carried away with my aptitude in various departments. I can code, yes. But I’m not Nathan. I know very little about Complex Systems compared to someone like Kai. In short, I don’t deserve the kudos heaped on me by Ben. Seriously.

Nigel and I went to see Igby Goes Down today. Be warned that this review might contain spoilers. It is an interesting, if rather depressing, insight into the life of a rebellious New York teenager. Igby, played by Kieran Culkin, is the second son to a dying mother and a father who suffers from schizophrenia and has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The family is well to do, despite the breakdown of the father. Whilst Igby’s elder brother, Oliver, is right at home in this upper class atmosphere, graduating top of his class at Prep School and gaining admission to Columbia University, Igby wants no part of it. He has flunked out of every private school on the East Coast, to the ire of his mother. Flashbacks are expertly utilised to create the impression that Igby feels a much deeper attachment to his schizophrenic father than to his dying mother. At least this is the case until the end of the film. In fact, Igby truly hates his mother. But we never really understand just why exactly Igby feels such hate towards her. In my opinion, this was one of the shortcomings of the movie. Igby’s character was not exposed enough for the audience to really get a feeling for why Igby detests his mother so.

Igby starts working for his Godfather, renovating apartments. It is here he meets his Godfather’s mistress, Rachel and promptly falls in love with her. We find out that the girl is an artist and heroine junky who trades sexual favours for accomodation. Thus, we have a strange love triangle between Igby, his Godfather and Rachel. It doesn’t last long, however, because Igby finds another girl, Sookie, a vegetarian hippy type. Igby’s heart is broken when Oliver steals Sookie from him. And thus the plot progresses, played out by a cast of depressed and depressing characters.

Kieran Culkin is the perfect actor for the part of Jason "Igby" Slocumb Jr. He delivers his lines with the dry wit required for his part, and gives a good portrayal of the obviously intelligent but misguided young man that is Igby Slocumb.

On a scale of 1 to 10, this film gets a 7 from me. It was nearly an 8, but I thought a few of the characters were a bit underdone. It was hard to get into the minds of some of the characters, simply because they were not exposed enough. It should have been easy to relate to a rebel like Igby, but it was not.

A delivery man dropped off my copy of The Penguin Book of Etiquette this morning. Having glanced through it, I can tell it’s going to be a thoroughly interesting read.

I wonder if KMH brought in the last episode of Gilmore Girls for me today. Strangely, I find myself hoping that she did. But why, oh why?! ;)

NSW came out on top in Origin 1, 25-12. QLD suffered many casualties during the match. In the end they were left with only 15 players who could walk, which meant there were people playing out of position all over the place. The new Suncorp Stadium has not proved a lucky ground so far for QLD teams!

Finished marking the two or three assignments that needed to be marked separately today. A couple of them didn’t even compile!

KMH wants me to go and see Igby Goes Down, which is a movie I want to see anyway. She says it is a great film, and has become disconcerted with IMDB because of the rating that the film has at the moment. It’s still early days yet, though. Apparently she’s also peeved with Channel 9 because they’re taking Gilmore Girls off air. I admitted to having watched the last two episodes of that show because stupid Big Brother keeps running over time and so Becker gets pushed back and Everybody Loves Raymond gets taken off. Nigel and I have given up on Channel 10 on Tuesday nights. So we watch Gilmore Girls, which isn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be, and then CSI which is our favourite show. But I made the mistake of mentioning that I missed most of last night’s episode of Gilmore Girls, and so KMH is bringing in the video tape on Friday. She has the whole season on video tape. But was it a mistake, or was it some kind of Freudian thing? Maybe I actually do want to watch the show, and figure out why on Earth what’s her name started crying at the end. There are definitely aspects of Gilmore Girls that are likeable. Most of the dialogue is fluff, but there are the occassional gems, like the conversation a few episodes ago between Lorelai and her father concerning Lorelai’s mother and the order in which she is served tea at DAR meetings (whatever they are). I remember being given a very similar talk from my own father once upon a time, though I’m quite sure it didn’t involve DAR meetings and cups of tea. Anyway, Gilmore Girls is one of those shows I probably could have got hooked on had I watched it from the start, as long as the plots are not too soppy and the dialogue not too fluffy :).

RW is being slowly introduced to the wonders of Ph.D life. When you’re not struggling to solve a problem with your own work, you’re struggling with the monotony of marking or dealing with students. For some reason we were also trying to think up weird names for people today, which I think broke the monotony for him.

Must get some sleep now. I need to do some serious work on my next paper tomorrow (or maybe today, by the time I finish this blog entry). I still have to hack together a little simulation of my idea for reducing the number of hops required to route a key in a distributed hash table. It shouldn’t be too difficult, I hope.

I’m getting a bit tired of all the SPAM I’m receiving lately. Often it’s the same e-mail over and over again, purportedly from different e-mail addresses. I’m getting everything from porn to viagra ads to notices about debt reduction seminars. What’s really worrying is the amount of SPAM that’s coming to me through the DSTC’s student mailing list! The SPAM’s got so bad at the DSTC that the sys admins have installed SPAMASSASSIN to decide whether incoming mail is SPAM or not. It rates each mail according to the probability that it is SPAM. If the rating is above a certain threshold, the e-mail gets marked as SPAM and then each user can configure their own e-mail client to filter out the e-mails that have been marked. I probably need to set up something like that for my own home system.

Having a simple username like rick and a popular ISP like Bigpond isn’t helping much either. Often I receive e-mail which has been sent to every name you can think of starting with the letter R at bigpond.net.au. The spammers just take a punt that at least some of those usernames will actually belong to someone. The rest just get bounced I suppose. Presumeably they do the same thing for the letters A, B, C and so on as well. They also have automated trawlers which scour the web for e-mail addresses. Spamming has become quite sophistocated over the past few years. If any spammers are reading this, I assure you I do not want a penis enlargement or to be enlightened about nifty debt reduction techniques or anything else, thank you very much! I wish you would all just go away!

At least I’m receiving far less e-mail that was intended to go this other Rick person. My message that this Rick guy was giving out the wrong e-mail address to people seems finally to have gotten through to someone, probably Rick himself. So that’s a few less irrelevant e-mails I receive everyday, but on some days it’s more than made up for by the sheer volume of SPAM that find its way into my Inbox from all over the place.

I’ve done up about 25 test cases in all for use with the comp4301 test script. But it took a little while to get them just right. So I’ve actually already run all the assignments through the scripts today to make sure everything’s working properly. It only takes fifteen minutes or so to run each time, so it’s not a big problem. Anyway, having tweaked the scripts and test cases to get them exactly how I want them, I started running the scripts for real just before I left uni this evening. I’ll check in the morning and see how it all went. I also dummy marked a few assignments to see how long it would take to mark each one from the script output. It’s going to be pretty quick I think. Probably much quicker than coms3200. The most tedious bit will be marking the Client component, because it’s all graphical and needs to be done by hand. But there’s only a few tests I need to do for each one. With any luck, I’ll be finished by Thursday afternoon. If not Friday.

Feeling much better today. If yesterday was a cold, muddy puddle, then today is a warm spa bath with the bubbles on. :)

Nigel sent me a link to this great advertisment for the new Honda Accord. It must have been one frustrating film shoot. There is no computer generated imagery used in the ad at all. It’s all real. This reminded me of the advertisment for the Nissan Z which is playing in cinemas at the moment. Again, this ad is all real. What makes it even cooler is that the film was shot in one take. There were no cinematography tricks used, like filming at fewer frames per second to make the car look faster. Cool car. Cool ad. I want a Nissan Z for Christmas! At a base price of 60 Gs (A$), I think I’ll be waiting for quite a few Christmases before I get to sit behind the wheel of one of those things. For now Nigel and I are doing just fine in our old Hyundai Excel!

Good night, one and all.

Before I forget, I thought I’d stick in a link to Ben’s blog. Ben is pursuing a Ph.D in the general area of HCI. Having read his first few entries (the blog is still very new), it seems the blog will be about HCI and sports cars. To make a gross understatement, Ben likes cars. He knows everything about cars. Well, from my car illiterate perspective, it seems like he knows everything about cars. When I want to buy my first car, Ben is the first person I will talk to. He also knows a lot about HCI. Like, for instance, he’ll probably tell me I should have linked the words stick in a link instead of Ben’s blog or something like that anyway. Or maybe I did it correctly, I don’t know. I’m still trying to understand that stuff, but it probably won’t happen. :)