bogolode.org

Argo

2013-03-23T08:05:00-05:00

I watched Argo on Thursday night.

It is a good, not great, movie. The craft is evident. There are few visibly flawed choices for actors or methodology. However, it’s hard to care about any of the characters in the way great movies inspire you to love and hate, and there is no rewatchability. I suspect if I either knew more about the events in question, or if I didn’t know anything at all about the events, I would be more interested in the story being told¹.

The whole thing reminds me of The Good Shepherd or Charlie Wilson’s War in how the movie mixes biographical events and details into a story about an event or series of events². It also reminds me, stylistically, of The American, with a long, almost boring build to a climatic finale, and with a subdued use of color and tone.

I recommend the movie if any of the comparisons strike interest, or if you know and care about the Iran hostage crisis and want to learn more about the events depicted in the movie.

As such, I am refraining from delving too far into the details of the plot, in hopes that I won’t potentially taint someone else’s viewing experience too much. ↩
Both movies are highly recommended. The former is a fictionalized depiction of James Jesus Angleton, one of the founding officers of the CIA, and a fascinating figure whose skills and failures shaped American policy and politics. The latter is about U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson’s support of American efforts in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in order to produce a situation like unto the American experience in Vietnam for American Cold War enemies. ↩

Being Deaf

2012-07-17T17:20:00-05:00

I’ve struggled for years to articulate what being hearing impaired and deaf was and is like.

This¹ video demonstrates what I heard with hearing aids. When I was 13, I got a cochlear implant. At that time my hearing with a hearing aid was somewhere around severe on the video’s scale.

This² video is what I heard with a cochlear implant when it was first turned on and for the first few months. Somewhere along the way the mental switch flipped and I just hear it as sound instead of a set of beeps and tones.

I now hear between most of the frequencies I should be expected to hear if I were a person with normal hearing. Because I never had the full range of frequencies as a kid, I never quite got and still don’t really have the mental map of what sounds are a given thing so I still rely on lip reading quite a bit and avoid using the phone and require captions or subtitles for movies or videos. If you ask the people who know me, I speak intelligibly and can usually make myself understood, and can understand what they say pretty well.

Sourced from here ↩
Sourced from here ↩

SFxT

2012-03-08T08:22:00-06:00

Street Fighter X Tekken (SFxT) came out Tuesday.

Got my copy, been playing and enjoying myself.

I’ve been playing Street Fighter 4 (SF4) and Super Street Fighter 4 (SSF4) and the subsequent releases in that series for the last few years with a few friends. It is one of the best crafted fighting games ever and has been a lot of fun. SFxT is similar in how the engine works for large portions of what it does and how stuff tends to look, and different in the visceral feel of things and how the new mechanics and the new characters work. I’m looking forward to spending a while over the next year or so playing it and learning to appreciate it.

Dead Open Source Projects

2012-03-01T18:03:00-06:00

I was talking to some folks today about what constitutes a dead open source project.

As an example of a dead project, see Colloquy. Growl support has been broken on their latest release for years. There are several long standing, show stopping bugs which have never been fixed¹. There are no apparent plans to make a new release and while the source tree shows activity, almost all of it appears to be dedicated to just keeping Colloquy building as Xcode moves on, with some effort given to updating the iOS port in the same way.

I think the best definition of a dead project is one in which there are outstanding issues being actively complained about in the project’s support forum², and there are no new commits to the source tree and no plans for a release. For projects that a purely source based, this is a little iffier but if there are no new commits and no active management of the source and community, I would conclude the project is defunct. Mature projects may go multiple years between releases, but a mature project that has active management is different from a mature project where no one’s there to run the shop. I expect a mature project to respond in a timely fashion to major issues with the latest release(s).

If a project you rely on is dead, it’s time to look for an alternative.

For example, if you have Colloquy set to join multiple servers and channels on launch, you may encounter one of several variations on the “blank chatroom” bug where it renders a blank channel window and either you can’t get it to show anything without restarting, or you can make it show new content by issuing a /reload style command. Or a bug where if you drag something over the Colloquy window, it may shift the channel view a few pixels upwards and leave a gap of those pixels between the channel view and the text entry box.↩
Web based forum, IRC channel, or mailing list for example. Whichever applies to the given project.↩

Useful Bash Alias

2012-02-27T18:54:00-06:00

I was fiddling with bash earlier and thinking of ways to script out some stuff for octopress and other things I do from the shell. One thing I thought was handy was an alias in my .bash_profile to open the most recently modified post in my chosen editor and do a couple other things. That one liner follows below.

$ octopost='cd path/to/octopress/source/_posts && $EDITOR `ls -tr | tail -1` && cd path/to/octopress'

This will open the most recent file in your chosen editor¹ and then move back to the root of the octopress install so you can do further tasks as needed. If you find it useful, you might want to add it as an alias in your .bash_profile or .bashrc. I’d suggest tweaking as needed for your own personal habits and workflow.

If you’ve got comments or suggestions, love to hear them.

BBEdit for me. ↩

On Footnotes

2012-02-26T16:10:00-06:00

Been fiddling around with the blog and realized that octopress has a limitation as of the last stable version; it’s designed to work by default with rdiscount, which is a markdown parser. Quite a few people using markdown use extensions from markdown extra which allows for prettily formatted footnotes. Rdiscount does not support any of those extensions, and while octopress can be told to use 2 other markdown parsers¹, the default theming isn’t setup to format footnotes nicely.

~~As a result, I won’t be using footnotes on posts until or unless I can adequately present them. If and when octopress or rdiscount gain support for footnotes, I’ll be celebrating.~~

Addendum: I spent some more time googling and discovered a few sites with some helpful code snippets and suggestions. So for now I’m using kramdown and have functional footnotes.

kramdown and maruku ↩

The Appeal of Bad Movies

2012-02-26T14:52:00-06:00

Would you rather watch a great movie, or a terrible one?

I love movies. And I’m not sure I’d choose the great movie.

I love great movies. But I also love me some terrible movies. I’m just as happy and sometimes happier to be watching Santa’s Slay¹ than watching something like The English Patient².

Was thinking about why I liked some movies and realized I’d been watching a run of terrible movies via Netflix lately (purposely and with no small amusement). But most movies are either great, good, bad, so bad they’re great fun to watch, or just bland and pointless.

I’d rather watch a great to good movie, or one so bad it’s fun to watch and mock, than watch something just tepidly bad or bland. I especially detest the bland stuff because there’s no entertaining value and it feels like a pure waste of time. But a terrible, terrible movie like Freddy Got Fingered has some great moments where you wonder what was going on and how that movie got made and how it didn’t get stopped.

All this movie talk makes me ready to go and tackle Troll 2.

Jewish ex-pro wrestler Bill Goldberg as Santa running around slaughtering people. Yeah! ↩
Which I consider to be a great movie, and one that always moves me to tears. ↩

Rebooting

2012-02-25T20:00:00-06:00

Welcome to the new blog. Got tired of wordpress and decided to fiddle with something new and octopress came up a few times in conversations and recent readings. Fired up terminal.app, followed the documentation and here we are!

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to fill this blog with interesting posts.