(from 2002)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 2002, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

My already beloved brother Clark has moved himself up the scale this Christmas by giving me the completely compelling video game Grand Theft Auto 3, which i think about when i go to sleep at night and when I wake up. Diane sometimes helps me plan escape routes and stuff (like how to spring a Yakuza lord held by the police), so, hey, it's a game for your whole family to enjoy, except for the frequent running into pedestrians part and complete lack of ethics you need to have to win. It's one of the best games I've played in years.

I've been spending most of the weekend wiping hard drives and installing OS's, things i usually avoid doing like the plague. But my old machine (Neptune) has been wiped clean and sent back to it's infant state of Windows XP-ness, as we're giving that machine to my brother, who will doubtlessly use the extra processing power to kill evil, slobbering aliens even faster.

But there's no actual net loss in machines here at Mahlen.org Tower (whew!), as a behemoth of a machine, the large and loud ottoman-sizedHermes is now being set up to sit in our garage and run all the continuous processes (like web servers, email servers, and the like) that currently reside on the little slice of Heaven (aka Zeus) that arrived in October. So Hermes will be the drone machine, and Zeus will be free to think only lofty thoughts.

Holy sweet merciful crap, this is a great film. Or more accurately, it's a great continuation of the previous film. Our engineering team took the afternoon off from work to see it (along with spouses), and even though it was madness at the Metreon and so we ended up in the third row, it was still magnificent. Definitely see this film once in a theatre with great booming bass and wide screen; you will be rewarded. I have next week off from work, so I'm already planning to see it again!Storm the gates and see it!

Today the building I work in at 650 Townsend in San Francisco was having a little free breakfast thing in the courtyard of the building, with bagels and so forth, a pretty decent spread actually. There was a drawing to be held at 10am this morning for some prizes, so i popped in my business card. Then I went back to the office to scarf the free grub.

Then at 10 we engineers congregated on the 4th floor walkway overlooking the courtyard, figuring that compared to the massive number of Sega people (two floors of our building are Sega), there was little reason for us to go all the way down to get nothing. We could see each business card being passed to the announcer, and they didn't look like ours. But then my name was called, the four of us cheered for me, and i went down the elevators to get a gift card from the building for Target. For $250! I was actually a little dazed after getting it, walking the wrong direction and such. I'm not sure why the building was so generous (it's not like anyone asks me about commercial rental property opportunities), but it'll come in handy!

Stuck trying to figure out what to get special someone? Well, if that someone is, say, me, then my Amazon Wish List is a great place to find what I really want :)

Diane and I went to see the newest touring Cirque du Soleil show Varekai on Wednesday, and it was really great, as all Cirque shows are. While not as thematically clean as some of the earlier shows, still a wonderous event. And funny as hell too; I'll never hear the beautiful and sad song Ne me quitte pas without laughing after that show.

For reasons never completely clear to me, I've always loved classic Christmas music, particularly by Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Vince Guaraldi, and the like. So not only am I glad that SOMAFM is back up and playing the great down-tempo electronic music, but they also have an eclectic Christmas music mix going on, with some classics and lots of great parodys of the classics as well. It's worth a listen.

A funny and no-holds-barred rant about what working in a restaurant kitchen is really like. Raunchy and compelling, you'll find a new appreciation for the hard-working people who deliver amazing food fast and consistantly. I'll never dine the same way again.

I've added some navigation links to make this front page easier to use, so if you're using Opera 7 or Mozilla browsers (both of which i can recommend), you'll see them on the top. Let me know if they help.

A very funny and intelligent movie about very dumb people (models), it was way better than i expected. And I'm glad i watched the commercials and extra bits on the DVD, if nothing else than for the line, "Words can only hurt you if you look at them; don't play their game." You Look Fabulous Watching This Movie, Darling.

This film snuck up on me, just dazzling me with the eye-popping and original animation (it takes talented animators to make people sitting around and talking interesting), but then when the plot takes a much more significant turn, it becomes a beautiful and aching examination of what it actually means to be alive at all. I loved this movie to pieces.Yes, Go See This.

A slight comedy that starts off great while merely observing the pointless humiliations of office life, but gets predictable when it actually generates a plot. Don't Quit Your Day Job.

Brilliant and self-righteous inventor takes family to South America to create Paradise. Since it's a Peter Weir movie, you know that it won't quite turn out that way. Like watching a beautiful slow motion car wreck, sickening and yet you can't turn away. Watch the wheels turn.

I enjoyed this more than i expected to. A decent action movie, which I'm told is so faithful to the book that I need'nt bother reading it. Nice eye candy, doesn't make you think that hard. But wouldn't it be annoying to be famous and have all those expectations for no real reason? It'll cast a spell on you. OK, wait, it's not that good.

Another great Tsui Hark/Jet Li movie, I thought even better than Once Upon a Time in China I. Hiya!

Quite simply, the Eno's lightly edited diary from 1994, with a large number of quite interesting essays by him in the back, and sprinkled through with emails he wrote to Stewart Brand. Interesting to read the day to day thinking and process of a successful artist, particularly one who favors chance and generative processes as he does. Even reading the parts that don't make any sense to me (about people that we're not quite familiar with) have an interesting voyeuristic quality when read.

Quite inspiring, but without oodles of time, I'll likely never get to turn those inspirations into anything concrete.

A wonderfully funny book about the author's ill-considered plan to hike the entirety of the Appalachian Trail with a friend who's even more out of shape than him. A story about the hike (and like all good travel writing, it's most interesting when things go wrong) with diversions into the history of the trail and on the state of modern experiences with nature.

While this book certainly didn't make me want to go hike the Trail, it did make me want to go hiking more often. Loaned to me by Rob Dickinson.

An interesting non-fiction book on the history (focusing on the last ten years) of the mathematics of networks, particularly ones like the Internet. Much of it centers around Barabási's own research. While nothing too terribly surprising is revealed, he does a good job of explaining how the nature of some networks leads to their growth in a way that maintains certain mathematical properties as they grow; a sort of self-selecting evolutionary path that leads to unhindered growth. Pretty interesting book, if you're a geek like me.

Well, the new computer is now serving up these very pages, which makes it the third Dell machine that has served up mahlen.org. I still have lots to do to pull all the interesting bits off my old machine, but the new machine now actually sits on the desk, and by gosh, it looks pretty nice there, flat screen, teeny speakers (the 695's) and all.

Sadly, increased computing power will have no positive effect on the quality of this site. I know, I'm a little disappointed about that too.

After a teeth-gnashingly long wait, wherein the speakers and the free gift (a Rio Volt MP3 player) arrived long before the actual computer and monitor, i can finally stop jumping up every time the office doorbell rings because the final boxes are now sitting behind me. Now all the pieces needed for my fiendishly clever master plan are in place!

Just got the word (by obsessively checking the Order Status) that Dell has shipped me my new machine. A 2.53 GHz dollop of love, and a flat monitor to boot. I'll be pacing quite a bit in front of my building until it shows, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Postal Service.

Back in the early 1970's, when i was less than 10 years old, my mom's cousin Ron gave me a boxed set of the three books of the Lord of the Rings. I didn't know anything about the series then (it was, of course, far less well known then), and for some reason i never really got around to reading them. After a while, the set became a piece of the furniture, and i never saw them as books to read anymore. But after seeing the first film last year, i finally decided it was time to crack them open for real.

I think maybe seeing the film first sort of wrecked the book for me, as usually reading a book first makes seeing the movie so odd. It really just didn't play out that well for me (although it did clear up some of the things that confused me about the movie). I guess compared the the movie the pace just seemed glacial. I wish I'd read them when I'd gotten them way back when, it would have made a bigger impression on me back then.

So, now, do i read the second one before seeing the new movie, or after?

Wrote my first work-related program in Ruby today, and I was pretty impressed with how easy Ruby made writing it. So far, I'm pretty impressed; Ruby rarely does what i don't want, and usually does what i do want. Plus the interpreted language thing (no compiling) makes it quite easy to test pieces as you go, incrementally building up the program i want. I wouldn't want to write in it all the time (Java is still quite enjoyable, and so well supported), but I wonder how far i can take Ruby professionally. It's awfully nice.

While I was shopping for t-shirts, i stumbled across this fascinating site, doing something that could only happen with the Web. The premise here is that people (mostly professional graphics designers) upload designs of their making, and then the community as a whole votes on them, and the top-rated ones get made in into limited edition t-shirts or posters. There's some beautiful work up there; i've ordered two shirts for myself already.

Another interesting experiment in harnessing a community for creative results is this collaborative typeface experiment. Just go up there and tell them whether a particular pixel in a letter should be black or white. The animations are cool, too, watching the collective mind decide where the letter should be.

Just got my first order (on the Ruby language) from these fine folks, and indeed it was at half the normal price. While they don't have every nerd book you might want, some books are 'only' %20 off, and their site is kinda half-price too, still, saving money on the best things in life is always a good thing.

Also interesting on the computer text front is O'Reilly's Safari service, where a monthly fee lets you read geek texts online. Their selection is astounding (not just O'Reilly books, either). Plus, having lots of expensive and going out of date books around is counter to common sense. Haven't signed up yet, but it's a possibility.

But i bought the Ruby book because having the API in a book seemed a lot easier to use, even though I'd read much of the book online already. So dead trees aren't, um, dead yet.

While I'm certainly still smitten by the Mini, a small, inexpensive car that runs on compressed air would hit all the buttons (although the styling screams "Practical" a bit more than I like). Maybe my next car will be this.

Bummer. Not enough people showed up for the second day to really get the Moonbase Commander tournament finished today, so it officially melted down into nothing. No T-shirt, no signed copy. Ah, well, it was fun. Next time.

A silly title (or at least a silly translation), this kung fu movie about pretty decent action scenes, but i found my self falling asleep towards the end. Just not that engaging. Don't play that funky music.

Yes, it's pretty good, what with the contrasts between what actors in a cheesy Science Fiction series experience and what the reality would be. If you'd like this movie, you've probably already seen it, but if you can still do the Vulcan "Live long and prosper" hand sign and know a questionable amount of Trek trivia, then you know what to do. Activate the view screen!

Not, in fact, the American film about Bruce Willis attacking an asteroid with wave after wave of grimaces. This is a Hong Kong supernatural thriller about the apparent approach of the Biblical rapture. It's not an action movie, it wasn't really creepy, it didn't make a lot of sense. Avoid

Well, my Moonbase Commander teammate canuck94 and I did respectfully well today, winning 2 out of 3 contests today, putting us in the #2 position. The finals should be tomorrow.

In about 30 minutes I'll be doing one of the geekiest things in my life; participating in a online video game tournament for Moonbase Commander. I think I'm OK at the game, but we shall see...

No, this site isn't about someone named Kyle who's finally lost it and sought revenge against all the people who've meant him harm. No, these are pictures taken by my four-year-old nephew Kyle in New Mexico, son of my brother Clark. They seem pretty good to me. He's especially good at making a somewhat banal backyard look interesting, chiefly with some unusual and yet alluring framing (not to mention the perspeective from his height). Do we have a budding Cindy Sherman on our hands?

And besides, Kyle can't have built up a list of people who've double-crossed him for the last time; he's only four!

A very guy film, this is basically Kevin Smith's (whose films I really like) extended series of inside film references, goofball jokes, and so on. I think I kinda liked it, but not many people would. You kinda have to be in the mood. Don't see it with anyone you're trying to impress (Diane fell asleep; phew!) You already know if you'd like it.

So I picked up my very first pair of eyeglasses today, and I'm wearing them right now. I got them because I discovered that there is a slight astigmatism in my right eye, and it's making reading more difficult. Since I basically read (computer code) for a living, the notion that i may be working through a hard-to-read fog didn't seem like a good idea anymore.

It certainly is helping for reading on the computer, although it has an odd "warping of space" feeling as well. I'll let you know if makes me any better at Moonbase Commander, which i am playing feverishly.

I'd heard this was a great quirky comedy, but it's really a sorta OK quirky comedy. It's not painfully stupid like most Hollywoood comedies, there are some knowing 'aha' laughs, but it's not that great, and now that I can get almost any movie in my house in the mail from Netflix, I'm looking for better than OK. It's OK.

A great action movie about two in-your-face narcotics cops who follows a hunch and some suspicious people around New York City, slowly uncovering something, but they don't know what. Based on a true story, and filmed entirely on location (as I learned from the directors narration), it shows what is rarely seen in police movies; the numbing boredom, the cold sitting around, and the difficult art of tailing people. Great car chase scene. Hey, did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie? See this movie now, or I'll come back here and slap you around again!

A well-told gritty story of ethically-challenged people in low-glamour Reno and Las Vegas from the guy who did Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson. A nice small drama. Worth Renting

We were disappointed in this film. Some cute special effects just get in the way of the martial arts action. We like our kung fu movies to at least look possible (all right, I know Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wasn't believable or anything), not blazing with obvious effects. Don't Bother

Yup, a new video game is about to take over my brain. Moonbase Commander. Maybe it's being marketed as a kids game, but like the guys at Penny Arcade say, it's simple like chess. Just get the demo, play it, consult the FAQ, and then tell me I'm wrong. But it won't do you any good, cause my copy on it's way from Amazon.

While I never (honestly) use IRC (for my parents: a method for people to type at each other in mostly unregulated groups), this growing collection of selected quotes from IRC conversations is still very entertaining. Lewd, crude, and often juvenile, there are still some gems, like:

 am i the only person who has these probs with ofp
 the short answer whould be 'yes'
 the long answer would be 'yyyyyyyyeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssss'

An English boy growing up in 1930's Shanghai is separated from all he knows when the Japanese take over in 1941. Since it's by Spielberg, it's beautifully photographed, and yet it's much more pleasantly restrained than most Spielberg films. Diane especially thought this was a wonderful film. Based on the novel and life story of one of my favorite speculative fiction authors, J. G. Ballard. Rent it, babe, and that's an order!

A film made in 1946 about the difficulties facing returning WWII veterans. I enjoyed it, and can see why it won Best Picture, but for modern tastes it is a bit slow and predictable, although the writing was pretty surprising and spontaneous-sounding at times. Might be Worth Seeing

Sadly, this is basically eye-candy glued together into a film. I can't quite pin it down, but just this is just not as spirited and original as the first, plus the romance seems completely implausible. They're all trying really hard to make it work, but it just doesn't go. Don't Bother

When i read this book sometime ago, it seemed like a fairly good run-of-the-mill potboiler. So the movie, which is surprisingly different from the book, is a pretty good summer action movie. Matt Damon is emerging as an actor with a real mastery and love of his craft, and it was fun to see Clive Owen basically reprising the role he had on bmwfilms.com. Ahh, Sure, Go See It

Netflix keeps sending us movies, so we keep watching them. Geez, what a great movie. This 1974 film about a private eye who stumbles across the awesome political force of water in Los Angeles is just superb. Polanski's detailed mometary focus on small details, incredible acting from Jack Nicholson before he became a parody of himself, it all comes together beatifully here. Rent Immediately!

A slim volume on the genesis and thinking behind an ongoing project to make a clock that will tell time for 10,000 years. It examines this question as an attempt to motivate people how to think in the very long term, not only beyond this year or this decade, but beyond your own lifetime and far into the future. Sort of interesting, but since the project is really just beginning, there really aren't a lot of conclusions, so eventually it's like sitting around stoned saying to your friends, "Wow, what if people lived for, like, forever. Dude, that would be so different." While the lack of specifics seems appropriate (10,000 years is a long time, so the project really has just started), the book eventually feels like a teaser for the website, www.longnow.org. Yet the site itself feels only half-formed or possibly abandoned, to the point where it's hard to measure the pulse of the project. I may get motivated to try and participate in what the Long Now is doing (fortuitously, their office is here in San Francisco). We'll see.

I loved this book so much that I couldn't stop reading sections of it out loud to Diane. Cohen is very funny and yet profoundly ethical in his responses to readers of his Sunday New York Times Magazine column. I try very hard to lead a mostly ethical life, and I think Cohen has a keen insight into the subtle nuances of doing so.

This book is about the home pages of 50 websites, what works, and what doesn't. I thought the majority of the comments about the home pages was very insightful, and even got me to modify my page design a bit. But after 35 sites were reviewed, I simply couldn't bear to read any more page reviews; the repetition of their basic rules over and over again was more than i could take.

I'm taking this week off from work, partly because I've taken very little time off in the past year, due to our tight schedule at work, and so now i have over three weeks of vacation time saved up. And things are a bit quiet at work, now that 2.0 is up and running, so this seemed like a good time to spend a week working on computer projects that I've been putting off. New languages to explore, my Free Software projects to do or tighten up, applications to try, that sort of thing. I'll also attempt to leave the house once in a while. But now I'm sitting at home with the White Zombie cranked up, reading an article on Strong Typing in computer languages, and just generally following whatever whims come to mind.

Two weeks ago we celebrated our fourth year of being married. On July 4th Diane and I went to a restaurant in Sausilito called The Spinnaker, where we happened to run into our wedding photographer Jeanette and her husband John, who got married two years ago on July 4th. We had a capital view of the Marin fireworks from the restaurant, and the food was tasty too.

For the weekend we spent two nights at Mankas, a lovely rustic hunting lodge in Inverness near Point Reyes. Our room had a private deck with a great view of Tomales Bay and an outdoor shower. The dinner we had there Saturday night by Chef Daniel DeLong was spectacular, quite likely the best food we've ever had. We went hiking in the fog with a small group and a couple rangers to see the Tule Elk reserve to the north. But then I got sick with a flu, whic cut short our outdoors stuff while I lay in bed a lot. Diane looked after me very sweetly whilst i lay around groaning.

Anyway, we both hope to go back to that area soon for more hiking; there's a lot to see.

A pretty interesting martial arts movie starring Jet Li, with some pretty rocking action scenes. Takes place when the Americans were first making their presence known in China in the late 19th century, and from a book that Diane is reading right now, is actually a fairly accurate portrayal. Great ladder fight scene.

I've never been that much of an Anime fan, which, given what other geek tendancies I exhibit in spades, is a bit surprising. But I'd heard so much praise for this series that I wanted to check it out, and it definitely hammers the point home that Anime has come a long way from Speed Racer. A killer jazz and soundtrack, some silly jokes, and decent hyperviolent plot-lines about interstellar bounty hunters, plus the occasional "WHOA" visual; it's all good. Number two is on it's way; thanks Netflix! Check out the fancy explosions.

A quite well done gritty, handheld-camera triptych of interconnected stories about strained and confused forms of love, and also dogs (the title means "Love's a bitch"). Solid performances and an always surprising plot. Rent this puppy!

Whew! Got DVD's flying in and out of our mailbox so fast it's hard to keep up. The first one we watched was a Hong Kong martial arts movie about the drama and intrigue surrounding the upcoming duel between two masters of he sword. Not really all that strong on the martial arts (most of it is special effects more than raw talent), and it played up a weird and goofy humor more often than I wanted. But it was still fun. Go Ahead and Rent

A slim volume on the Japanese rustic aesthetic that is in many ways the antithesis of modernism; Wabi-Sabi is an appreciation for the rustic, the incomplete, the unfinished, the organic. I think this is a book to leaf through on multiple occasions rather than a book to absorb all at once.

There are certainly echoes of this notion throughout my life. I love decaying surfaces exposed to the elements, the constant motion and fluidity of Wiki's, and non-deterministic systems like genetic algorithms and neural networks.

A beautifully rendered page-turner of a book about a NYC slacker who come across a drug that makes him more focused, more together, and much more intelligent. And what happens when he starts using this drug a lot. And what happens when it all starts to fall apart. Once I started, I couldn't put this down. I definitely want to see what else Glynn comes up with; he's one to watch.

We are soon to join the DVD video age, as Amazon is winging a Toshiba SD3755 (recommended by Consumer Reports to my office (note to self: could have gotten it cheaper and faster at The Good Guys), and our first movie rentals from the impressive Netflix are also in the mail. This is cool because instead of wasting time scanning the broadcast (we don't have cable) channels for something that isn't awful, we'll watch movies that we've (or at lest I've) actually wanted to see. Additionally, lots of hard to find anime and other non-mainstream movies are easy to get on Netflix. Oh, and we're lazy and i have a irrational fear of late fees.

You may now begin expecting more movie reviews here for a while.

I thought this this film-noir science-fiction movie was pretty good, certainly better than A.I. Very visually well done. Good plot twists, though no whack-my-head surprises.

A thorough and funny site where you can shop online for everything from a "SUBTERRANEAN ISLAND BASE WITH OPTIONAL VOLCANO UPGRADE" to the "PLANETBUSTER SUBTERRANEAN MISSILE" to any number of super powers and even stylish clothes for your henchpeople. Quite entertaining.

This self-published book of crudely-drawn images tied into stories with almost no dialogue is a cross between an art book and the eleven short stories (some just a page long) that it claims to be. Done by Sam Brown, the gifted and sardonic artist behind explodingdog.com, this book needs to be read slowly; there are so few words in the 220 pages you could "read" the whole thing in ten minutes. But I stopped and savored at the very simple art work, and while this is certainly not a book for most people, I'm glad to have it just for the story "saturday" alone.

A science-fiction distopian fantasy, this short novel about a place where crime is more of an art form than an event and where murder is very casually committed reads like a cross between Jeff Noon and James Ellroy. Very imaginative, some rather clever word play and some very memorable phrases (e.g, "He'd thought of modulating his voice but since meeting Rosa Control he'd engaged in so much oral sex his accent had changed"), but the plot bogs down towards the middle. So remember to stop reading it for plot and just enjoy the words.

It almost felt like a duty to see this film, more than something i was looking forward to. I thought that the action scenes were pretty effective (although still lacking in any real tension, unlike, say, the door warehouse scene in Monsters, Inc.), but man, whenever actors were talking, the whole thing fell apart. I mean, space opera isn't supposed to be Mamet or anything, but the dialogue and acting was almost embarrassing.

There's not much point in seeing this film on TV, since the visuals and production values are the reason to see it, so I'll have to say Walk to the Theatre.

This site features a bunch of online toys (written in Flash) that let you improvise reggae/dub music just by rolling your mouse over little moving objects on the screen. They're fun to play with, and some of the later ones do let you get a bit of a groove on. Entertaining in an enjoyable almost-mindless way.

The web site for a wonderful scupltor, whose exhibit in 1985 at the University Art Museum in Berkeley really blew me away.

Cars I'd love to own: Anything from Corbin Motors (check out the roadster, and don't miss the furniture section) or a Mini, both of which feed on my small-car fetish. Anyone got $20K they don't need?

Due to heroic efforts on Diane's part in the last couple of days, the interiors of the bookcases and the shelves themselves are now painted with the requisite two coats of paint. Hoooray! Now it's on to painting the outsides of the cases, getting the books out of storage, deciding which ones to keep, and then putting them in the cases. I'm near tears thinking this may actually be finished soon.

Diane thought this was a comedy when she rented it, but it's not a very funny comedy. It's a quirky Dutch movie about a man convinced that his daughter can become a music star if only she got a break, and goes a bit too far in order trying to get it. I guess it's sort of heartwarming; well, not really, but it's supposed to be, I think. Some goofy moments, but honestly I would pass on this one. Don't Bother

A chinese kung fu/swordplay movie in the desert. The dialogue scenes are shot almost as fast as the fight scenes; we had to rewind a couple times to figure out what was going on. OK, but not quite as good as Iron Monkey or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Still better than most American action movies, though.

A classic quest novel about a not terribly interesting London middle manager who helps a really odd injured street girl, and finds himslef plunged into an underground London by those who have fallen through the cracks, who, like he, are invisible to those above. Really well done, in Gaiman's haunting and clever way.

A beautiful little novel about a Carmelite nun who's been experiencing visions of God that have inspired her deepest feelings of faith. But what if it isn't God, but something far more prosaic? This is the first Salzman I've ever read, but i plan on checking out his other work, especially after hearing him interviewed on NPR.

So how popular has your first name been over the the last century? If it's ever been in the top 1000 names, you can Ffnd out here. Unsurprisingly, Mahlen doesn't even place, being an intentional misspelling by my parents of Mahlon, which was at its peak in the 1920's. That's why mahlen.org was available!

Last week Harmonic's CEO Mark Kvamme helped us celebrate our first million in revenue by taking the entire company out to an afternoon baseball game at Pacific Bell Park, which I'd not seen yet. In fact, I haven't been to a baseball game in 29 years or so, since my Uncle Walt took me to two Giants games when I was nine years old.

Pac Bell Park is really well designed, with smooth crowd movement and well-distributed food buying opportunities. I made sure to have some Gordon Biersch garlic fries. Harmonic had a bunch of seats in the "View" section, pretty high up from the action (and with a nice view, it's true). The game (Giants vs. Atlanta Braves) was already underway when i found our gang of fools.

I was pleasantly surprised to note that, unlike a cultural event where everyone is raptly paying attention, the game itself was more of a background to people's conversations, sort of like a jazz band at a club. It's perfectly acceptable to read the paper (as our founder, Adam Block, was doing) or comment on the game or hold conversations or whatever. Just don't walk down the aisle when there's a batter in the box (there's even people holding signs to that effect down on the lower sections, where i visited for a while (Mark had some season seats down there)).

All in all, a quite pleasent way to waste an afternoon.

Several weeks ago i had 2 big fillings done by my dentist, Dr. Cynthia Hom. After a while, they were really starting to hurt, especially when heated (like by hot food), so much so that the pain was really distracting, like I couldn't talk or even listen to people when it was peaking. Dr. Hom said that's a bad sign, likely indicative of needing a ROOT CANAL, a phrase so evocative of dental unpleasantness that i shudder to type it. So i went to see a specialist, who is expensive but can do ROOT CANALS pretty fast, since it's all he does. The first time i went to see him in April, he wasn't if i needed a ROOT CANAL or not, so we decidied to wait. Since then the symptoms have died down quite a bit, and when i saw him last Friday, he said i probably don't need a ROOT CANAL after all. Phew.

My thoughts on this film:

• This film skirts up very close to some really interesting and radical ideas, but backs away from them at the last minute.


• There is some stunning effects work in this film.


• Spielberg is a very gifted director.


• It's really a shame that he squanders that gift on what is, in the end, timid fare like this

Another film we saw at a midnight show at the San Francisco Film Festival, this one a 2001 Japanese swordplay action movie set in a beautifully rendered unnamed heavily industrialized country, about a young female assassin-for-hire who struggles the assassin clan she grew up in. Let's just say they aren't pleased with the notion of her leaving. While there is lots of action, it's also a film about her emotional struggle to become something other than a killer. Some jaw-dropping art-shots, especially of the giant factories that tower over the landscape, and some pretty crazy action scenes.

This is largely pieces that Ellroy did for GQ magazine. I'm certainly a big James Ellroy fan, but I can only recommend this collection of fiction and non-fiction to the Ellroy completist. For Ellroy's short fiction, i much prefer Hollywood Nocturnes, which i think is also known as Dick Contino's Blues and Other Stories.

A web site with nine very nice Internet Radio stations in the genre of electronic music, ranging from "Soma House Party" ("House, Garage, Speed Garage. 4x4, 24x7") to "cliqhop idm" ("Blips'n'beeps backed mostly w/beats." - this is pretty accurate, surprisingly). My favorite is "Secret Agent" ("The soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life."). Worth listening to while you can, since (as is explained on sites pointed to by SomaFM), Internet radio as we know it is in grave jeopardy, pending some legislation that could make it prohibitively expensive to run such stations. This would be a tragedy for music, in my opinion, since fringe musical tastes are getting so much better exposure via Internet than the laws of physics will ever permit FM radio to provide.

What a blast from the past this is. A large and growing collection of the stuff that came between the songs ("airchecks") including DJ patter, commercials, contests, news, weather. Especially nostalgic for me were the KFRC bits ("Dr. Don Rose!") and the lone KSAN piece. Really takes you back to life back then in a way that little else can.

The strange Google search results are back. All sorts of people looking for very different things are landing here again; the lull I mentioned earlier must have been caused by the long downtime mahlen.org experienced while the book shelves were being constructed (they are now fully painted with the primer coat, with much more paint on the way). So, stumble mistakenly inward, oh seekers! And enjoy!

Kick-ass Hong Kong action flick! Experienced silent assassin versus flashy movie-inspired upstart! So good it makes me it short puchy sentences like these! Yar, go henceforth and see it!

A great rambling chaotic party of a movie. While i certainly didn't follow what was being said about whom the whole time, the major story lines of the film are fairly clear and compelling, with mostly unexpected twists aplenty. Good performances all around. But not quite focused enough to ever let you forget you're watching a movie, so it'll slightly more appealing if you enjoy saying to yourself, "Isn't that clever?" Go Ahead and Rent.

We saw this at the Balboa last week (a week of many movies). A drama about a most unusual family. We both really liked it, it's funny, it moves right along, and you're really glad you're not one of them. Rent ASAP.

The "How other people found this site" page has registered an interesting phenomenon; I'm getting fewer hits from Google lately. In fact, many searches that used to mention me appear to not do so anymore. I suspect that Google has improved their search algorithm; although it was kind of fun getting people to read the site when they were looking for book reports (Book Summary, Kindred by Octavia E. Butler) and other oddities (Brand of whipped cream on store shelves in 1947), i suspect that Google will now be all the more useful.

But for the first time, I bought a text ad for mahlen.org on a great discussion site, kuro5hin. Mainly i did it to give the owner a little money for doing the site, but it was startling to see that out of 4000 impressions, 31 people actually clicked through and looked at the site! My ad went like this:

Open my mind; peer within
Book Time, Film Flam, Site Unseen: reviews aplenty!

Maybe some of them will come back someday. I'll just sit here and wait until they do, in case they need something.

On Saturday we loafed around most of the day, but eventually roused ourselves and bought a boatload of paint supplies, and then spent the night painting an enamel base coat on the Bookshelves That Will Not Die. Then on Sunday we went to the Dada and Surrealist Show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum. Dada was something i fell in love with in high school (the name i self-published poetry under was Denim Dada); it was really the first art movement that spoke to me. So it was a shock, almost surreal :) to see pieces I've read about for decades, like Duchamp's Fountain or L. H. O. O. Q., sitting right in front of me.

Wiki's are very simple web-based collaborative spaces, where (generally) any page can be edited by anyone. Because of the simplicity and instantaneous feedback they provide, they can have a myriad of uses from personal Wiki for tracking your ideas, TODO's, a random thoughts, to company Intranet Wiki's (like I've set up at work), and many things in between. For me the best part of this book were the chapters on all sorts of extra abilities you can add to a Wiki (they even provide source code for adding these changes to a Wiki engine they provide on the enclosed CD). There were many ideas there that never would have occurred to me. I also enjoyed the case studies of introducing Wiki into workplaces (both business and educational).

This book (so far as I know, the only book on the topic) was valuable, even though the CD had no value to me and the code sections were of no interest to me (since i use JSPWiki). Plus, buying it felt like giving back to the people (Ward Cunningham wrote the first Wiki) who've nurtured this wonderful idea.

I actually read this some time ago when i was deep in the thrall of learning the Haskell programming language. I thought the book was really good, and it did a nice job of teaching some way weird (to me) stuff. Sadly, my enthusiasm for diving into Haskell flagged because my self-imposed introductory project to it (a genetic algorithm program for simple math equations) required some ideas in Haskell that are sort of ugly (you pass this big state object around from call to call of the iterator of the process).

I still think Haskell is cool, but the Wiki thing has grabbed my brain and shaken it like a wet kitten. Today I installed Perforce onto my machine so that i could work on the source more easily from my main machine or the laptop. There's still a ways to go before my first Free Software project,Hula, lets go of me.

A fairly straightforward telling of the 1993 battle that is the subject of the film of the same name. The most interesting parts were not so much the description of the battle itself, but the commentary on the conflict (including that of the Somalians), pointing out the limits of U.S. nation-building from without, armed only with guns, and the surprising reaction that he got from the military for this soup-to-nuts telling of their story. Not a great book, but interesting at times.

A couple incremental improvements on the home computer front (incremental cause we can't afford to buy new ones, more than likely). I bought 256 Meg of RAM for $101 at buy.com and put it into our laptop. Now, when switching from IntelliJ Idea to Opera and backa again, instead of whirring the drive for 10-20 seconds, it's click-click-click. And, I've put Windows XP onto the machine that serves mahlen.org, so maybe it won't be so flaky and frustrating when i use it. Not everything is working under XP, but still, Mahlen's happy.

Another computer animated film! This one is enjoyable, although it's much more of a strictly kids film than say, Shrek or Monsters, Inc. I did like the look of the film a great deal, with a muted palette of rock and snow colors. And Ray Romano did a great job voicing the wooly mammoth. The faces of the animal characters aren't as flexible as they usually are in animated films, so much of the emotions are expressed through the eyes. Some very nice touches, but not as sophisticated a story as other recent animated films.

A very well done graphic novel about a realizing-he-just-might-be-gay young man in the 1960's South. A coming out story overlayed onto the civil rights movement might seem odd, but Cruse is good, with a taut but bearable pace and lots of twists and turns in the plot, conveying well the flux and uncertainty of the times.

A lighthearted comic novel about an accidently successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the girlfriend and child he'd abandoned years before, who finally find him. Some interesting ideas about how the really well off are treated by their intimates, and some flashes of interesting writing, but I didn't really think much of this novel. OK for reading in hot weather (like Maui, where I read it), when you don't really want to think much.

I read this book while we were in Maui. A short lively history of the search for time-keeping methods accurate enough to help sailors determine their longitude. Nothing spectacular here, but a decent illustration of how a great innovation occurs, and also how it actually becomes widely used.

A loopy cartoon site, apparently made from a small collection of clip art, primarily made of people talking on the phone and yelling about how the War on Terrorism is scaring them silly. The dialogue is a crazy pastiche of youth slang, media phrases, and lots of language not appropriate for my parents. But it's funny as hell.

The book cases now appear to be completely built. We now only have to paint them and fill them, during which I'm fairly sure this computer can actually stay up. I will be installing Windows XP at some point soon, but that should be a fairly minor outage compared these past ones.

So, the machine is back up for now. We'll see how long it lasts. Some, but not all, of the bookshelves are here, but they're not all here or installed or painted. And we'll be in Maui next week (whoohoo!), so i won't be around to look after the box. It almost enough to make me consider hosting elsewhere...

For the past few months I have become increasingly obsessed with Wikis, sites that can be simultaneously viewed and edited by anyone. I've set one up for internal use at work, I've been frequently contributing to JSPWiki, and most recently I've been collaborating with the Finnish author of the JSPWiki code on the JSPWiki code and a client for the XML-RPC interface to the Wiki. I'm calling the client "Hula" (nothing to see there yet), and it's my first Free Software work ever. Yep, GPL'd and everything. My mind is constantly brimming with ideas on how to improve or use Hula, so much so that I haven't been playing video games. Instead I sit on the couch with our laptop and work on it. I'm enjoying this high while it lasts.

This is a movie that only a French-antique fetishist could love. A lavish period movie about a, well, 17th century party planner (Gérard Depardieu) who falls for the aristocratic beauty (Uma Thurman) far above his station, and also discovers that the world he travels in, while gilded, is a cage nonetheless. I found the film, particularly the ending, quite unsatisfying, but Diane says, "If you are interested in French history, interior Design or French Gastronomy watch this movie. The set designs and food presentations are fabulous. From French Gastronomy: 'When Louis XIV (1638-1715), "Le Roi Soleil," lived at the Château of Versailles there were always approximately one thousand aristocrats in attendance. Another thousand lived in the neighbourhood. This situation presented obvious catering problems which a staff of four thousand did its best to solve. On one occasion the entire company made an excursion a few miles north of Paris to the Château of Chantilly to visit the Prince de Condé whose maître d'hôtel, Vatel, was expected to produce at least one banquet a day for five thousand guests. As will be seen, the ordeal was too much for Vatel.'"

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of this book's publication, this is the highly celebrated story of the Black man who "lives in a hole", and how he got there. I was not quite so impressed with the beginning of the novel, but eventually it does pick up steam and become quite something. I was actually expecting to like this book more than I did, but I now wonder if, knowing it was a celebrated work by a Black author, I was expecting the book to be something else. Very worth reading, though.

Just mentioning that soon the bookshelves will be getting nailed into the office/library/computer room where this server lives, so it may be down for several days. To make up for that, I'll try and finally post something here before then.

All weekend we've been painting the office that this server lives in three different shades of yellow, in anticipation of getting bookshelves installed into the room next week. That meant that this computer was offline for several days, as well as all internet access. I was getting so desperate for connectivity that I was driven to using my tiny Palm connecting to the web via my cell phone at all of maybe 9600 bits per second. Anything to catch up on my Slashdot!

Diane and I saw this when it first came out, but somehow I forgot to review it at the time (well, now you can buy the DVD). A really good martial arts film, though i remember almost none of it. It's kinda hard to register fight scenes that intense and exciting, they just sort of jack straight into my adrenal gland and make me drool. Definitely a good movie if ya dig the "no way!" style of kung fu movie.

Oh, wait, now i do remember that it had some tender scenes where Jet Li had to kinda act. Plus of course, Bridget Fonda as the whore with a heart of gold. Goofball, i know, but like porn films, you need that thin veneer of plot to bridge between the parts you want to see.

Bar none, the definitive guide to who played whom in what movie. You'll note that just about every film i review has a link to it's IMDb listing, cause that's where the straight dope on that film is. An indispensible resource, for settling those nagging which-actor-was-that questions (or arguments).

Diane and I saw this on Friday with Rom, my coworker. Part gory horror flick, part martial arts movie, part costume drama, this slightly over-long film about a mysterious Beast that is terrorizing rural 18th-century France was pretty good. It had enough red herrings that I could posit a number of ways to explain the Beast attacks as the film went along. While not quite as gripping and over-the-top as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, still a nice multi-layered film, though gory enough that I was worried about Diane at some points.

This site, along with the other sites on this machine, will be down for a few days I expect, as the machine it lives on will be shut down while bookshelves are being built in our office. We'll be back soon, though, and we won't be any different!

Hooowee, it's a bit cold this week in San Francisco. This morning before going to work the windows of the car were frosted over, so I made a snowball and showed it to Diane. She was surprised that I didn't throw it at her instead, and I admitted to having been sorely tempted, but not wanting to miss and hit the art on the wall behind her. Plus I would likely have to clean it up. I offered her the snowball, but she said, "I don't like cold things. The only cold thing I like is ice in my Diet Coke."

This is a hatchet-job biography of Nixon, recounting and speculating on every misdeed and lie he's ever told, and that's a lot of them (it's 640 pages long). It seems pretty carefully researched, and convincingly portrays the Nixon White House as being run by a man quickly losing his grip on reality, surrounded by inexperienced and clumsy yes-men who can barely keep Nixon's destructive impulses in check. A pretty lively read, though slogging through the details of every time Nixon took money from the Mob gets a bit tiresome occasionally.

I've going to the gym around the corner from Harmonic for a couple weeks now, and there's this pretty good smoothie place inside, for the after-workout drink thing. It's called Extreme Blendz, so you can guess it's big on the scoops of something ("fat-burning protein!", spirulina, kava, and so forth) put in the smoothies. Yesterday I noticed that they had cayenne pepper on the counter, and i had to find out what kind of smoothie had cayenne in it. They call it a Green Hornet, and it had all manner of odd things in it, none of which really bothered me when i ordered it. It tasted like a decent smoothie, but it left a burning spicy aftertaste. I really couldn't finish it, and I'm glad, cause even with the 2/3rds I had, i wasn't really feeling all that great later in the afternoon. I'm glad i tried it, but i won't be ordering another one; I'll stick with the Peanut Butter Dream.

A spectacular novel from the very beginning, this is the story of two young men who leap onto the bandwagon and stretch the boundaries of action hero comic books in the 1930's. Full of original and complex characters, plot twists aplenty, and a love of the comic art form that drips off the pages, it's a great book.

It's hardly a surprise that we saw this film, that we loved it, or that it seems to create a whole new kind of film. While I have to admit that I've never read the books (my cousin Ron gave them to me when I was far too young to enjoy them, and as I got older they just sat on the shelves as 'the books I'd never read'), this film was just dazzling in all ways, and is even more enjoyable than I expected. I particularly like the fact that, unlike typical action films, where the heroes are prepared for most of everything thrown at them (until that final clash, where they seem to have lost control), these heroes are in waaaay over their heads from the very beginning. Just wonderful, and definitely a film to see on the big screen.

Due to a under-cover-of-night shipment of MPEG video files arriving here at Mahlen.org Tower, we now have a bunch of movies for you to glaze-eyed stare at in wonder, all featuring the high-end production values you can expect from a professional video editor like Clark. These videos were all shot around these just-past holidays, and include a fast-paced tour of our house, footage of Kyle (named People's Silliest Child for two years running!), and holidays spent with people I could only identify as "apparently distant relations of mine". All this can be found, in both high and low-bandwidth versions, in Clark's Download Vault. Go there henceforth!

Please do note that no matter how high-bandwidth you may be, my server only uploads at around 14KB per seecond, so you can grab and drink a cup of coffee while each one downloads. Don't get too wired!

As I've mentioned before, I love the Penny Arcade online comic, so i was thrilled to be able to both support them and to enjoy this book. Even though I'd read all the comics before, they were even more enjoyable on the page, and the commentary ("Fascination with hats in this strip. But for some undefined and undefinable reason, I find Tycho's sweater to be a bottomless humor mine. It doesn't take much to please me, folks.") is worth every penny. Year Two anytime soon, guys?

We just got back from a four day vacation in Hillsboro, Oregon. I may (or may not) have a much fuller account later.