rotomonkey.org

1) Elle peut avoir un nom français, mais Beyonce ne le parle pas....

2) I'm glad Million Dollar Baby won. OK, look: Scorcese has made some of the best films ever made (I remember being a dumbass college boy going to see Goodfellas and being floored - I kinda fell in love with film history through the followup research of watching Taxi Driver), but The Aviator is only getting the press it is because it's a Scorcese film. If anyone else had made it, it would be considered an over-wrought, sadly non-insightful look at someone whose life really deserves some attention. Cate Blanchette notwithstanding, of course. I'm glad it didn't win (and I think "Marty" is too).

Oh, and finally, it's weird being on the left coast and watching the Best Picture award not freaking out about needing to get to bed to sleep off the hangover (not that it helped).

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You know what I hate more than anything in the world? The stupid low-end packaging that lower priced consumer electronics come in. I don't know the name of it, but you know what I mean: they take a clamshell-like piece of really hard plastic, fold it in half around the product and then heat seal all of the seams. The problem is that the plastic is so thick and tough that you have to use a really good pair of scissors to cut through it. This, of course, dulls the hell out of your quite expensive Fiskars, thus ruining them for their intended purpose of making nice clean cuts in wrapping paper or fabric. Once you find something strong enough to cut through the kryptonite, however, the fun really begins. Because you've had such a hard time cutting the plastic, you are left with a nice ragged edge that you must reach through and around to attempt to extract the product. This ragged edge is slightly less dangerous than the top of a can of baked beans opened with a swiss army knife. Call me crazy, but I don't like to gash my hands open for the sake of a AAA battery or a Pleather case for my mobile phone. I don't want to even think about what that stuff (and its manufacturing process) is doing to the environment.

When the historians come to ask me when I thought western civilization began its descent, I will point to this moment: when package designers stopped caring about the user's opening experience as a trade off to being able to save a few cents in the manufacturing process.

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Peace out. I think maybe I'll go re-read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" again.

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having grown up in an academic environment, I've been watching with interest the recent brouhaha over Harvard President Lawrence Summers' remarks at a conference last month. It's an interesting controversy: he appears to have offended several attendees by suggesting that research should be done into whether there are biological reasons behind the fact that there are more men than women in math and science. While I'm sure he deliberatly chose controversial language, I wonder if the historical politicization of genetic differences is preventing an open scientific inquiry. Clearly there are some genetic differences between men and women (otherwise we'd have b00bs), but is it possible that there also differences in brain chemistry and structure? How about different genetic predispositions between people whose ancestors grew up in the Northen British Isles versus the Meditrranean basin? It's a shame that it's so hard to have conversations like that without cranking people off.

Of course, Summers raised the question using as proof (according to the transcript he released yesterday),“that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the national basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and agriculture.” That probably didn't do much to help his cause.

Posted by rotomonkey at 10:48 AM | Permalink

I realize that it's probably a good thing (hell, half the time I have trouble reading L337), but I find this Parent's primer to computer slang very amusing.

SYDWBY.

Posted by rotomonkey at 10:23 AM | Permalink

While, frankly, I'm surprised it took this long, I got my first dose of trackback spam over the weekend. Not much (which means that my blogadmin has done an excellent job of configuring his MT), but it does mean trackbacks are going to be disabled from now on. Nobody ever tracks back to me anyway (sniff).

The amusing thing is that work's mail servers, which receive all rotomonkey.org email, flagged the trackback notification email as spam.

Posted by rotomonkey at 4:58 PM | Permalink

I'm gonna have to geek out for a second here. I've finally needed to bite the bullet and start using python at work. So far, I'm mighty impressed except for the odd fact that whitespace matters (which has bitten me once already). It offers a ton of higher-level design options and the plain-er language makes code so much easier to read (and therefore write) than perl. They even have good documentation (not that perl doesn't, mind). Now, if I could just get my xemacs configs set up the way I like them....

Posted by rotomonkey at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Don't you hate it when you know someone's reading your blog but they're too chicken to comment?

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I don't normally like going to the well this many times in a row, but it's surprisingly difficult to find time to shoot these days.

Posted by rotomonkey at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This quiz is surprisingly tough. I only got 36 right.

Answers tomorrow!

Update: As promised, the answers to the quiz can be found here. No peeking.

Posted by rotomonkey at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Gothamist and others are all a-flutter about the supposed spoiler ending to Million Dollar Baby. I've been studiously avoiding any hints on the distant miracle that I want to be surprised by the ending and don't have enough contextual information to figure it out anyway. I do find it it interesting that, with some films, the mere mention of the existence of a spoiler ending ruins the possibility of being surprised.

Got me to thinking about other canonical surprise twists from films. Some you need give only the barest details and everyone will know what you're talking about:

• He's dead too.
  
• He's his father.
  
• His wife is the killer.
  
• "And like that, he's gone."
  

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)