Adjustment Bureau

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

My favorite movie reviewer can be found here.

http://www.ericdsnider.com/movies/the-adjustment-bureau/

Now understand, this is the first time out to a movie with Tracy in well over 8 months. I wanted to get a good one, but something that would interest us both. Snider mentioned that “This is exciting, thoughtful stuff, overall, and at its core deeply romantic. “ SOLD!

Ok. I’ve read a lot, if not most, of Philip K. Dick’s stuff. I’m sure I read this story, but I can’t remember it off hand. He also wrote Minority Report and even having read that, found little in common with the movie. So, while the author interested me, I can’t trust Hollywood to make a good adaptation.

I found the pace to be good. Some of the excitement was contrived as the story didn’t suck me in that much. General Zod made an appearance, which was a plus. The acting was very good. It made me believe the characters.

Since I am a complete, die-hard romantic, I had to chuckle at the line one of the Adjustment Bureau’s agents said when he found out the main character was still trying to find this particular girl. “Three years of riding the same bus every day. What kind of person does that?” I think that is an understatement when it comes to matters of the heart, which is why most in the audience also laughed. Perhaps some thought it was about the daily grind, and that lots of people ride the same bus every day for a lot longer, but I knew better. That isn’t hard for me to imagine at all.

Good flick. See it with a friend.

Waiting for Superman

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Documentary

We watched “Waiting for Superman” yesterday. While we homeschool, I have heard that this film is something to watch. I did have some reservations as the director also did “An Inconvenient Truth” which I do not accept the premise.

Tracy and I homeschool for a variety of reasons. Our first interaction with the school system here with our children labeled our oldest, something that we didn’t want him to have to live with. Tracy’s interaction with the school system in a work related setting was far from stellar. My reasons are probably less concrete. I had a bad time in my seventh grade, and was put on a specific track. It took me 4 years to get off that track into the college prep track. I was not reacting well to the lesser demands and I needed the challenge. My middle school years I considered wasted because I was so labeled. I didn’t want my children to have to face that, the whole institutionalized feeling of the system. In one class where I tanked my first grading period, history if I recall, I put my mind to overcoming whatever the heck was keeping me back, only to be accused of cheating by the teacher. (Certainly someone can’t change that much just by applying one self.) Ideologically, I have problems with the entire setup. My worst teacher, who was completely disengaged and hostile, I found was the union leader. I went through a couple of strikes. My father, an accountant, told me to not cry for the teachers, that they were well paid but couldn’t elaborate due to professional ethics.

The movie is sobering. It wakes you up to how bad off our children are in this system. I bordered on rage when the film went to the lottery where children were selected to go to the charter schools that are in their districts. Each politician, school board, etc. should be taken by the scruff of their neck and made to watch and experience the hope and grief of these parents and children are made to go though just to get the education that they are paying for. It is criminal.

I recommend the movie. Every parent should watch it. Every taxpayer should watch it (especially those in Wisconsin). Every teacher should watch it. It is a condemnation of the system that the adults have built for themselves. And it is about the adults. I want to gag each time we talk about “the children”. Stop it and grow up. I know what education costs. We do it. We pay extra every year, even though a significant amount of my money each and every year goes to the public schools.

Some take-aways. The television is going dark. The kids will read more, write more. Their education will become our focus. We will stop wasting time and money on things that don’t matter. It will be more of a life-style change than I was contemplating, but that is life. It doesn’t work out sometimes the way we plan, but what is important, if not the education of our children.

For another review, try
http://www.ericdsnider.com/movies/waiting-for-superman/

Nerd Convention

Trying to explain to our five-year-old daughter how much computers had changed, my husband pointed to our brand-new PC and told her that when he was in college, a computer with the same amount of power would have been the size of a house.

Wide eyed, our daughter asked, “How big was the mouse?”

 

I have had conversations like that with my own children. Hayden just can’t fathom it. I mean, my phone now has more power than I care to think about. My first purchased computer was 16MHz with a 100MB hard-drive. My phone has higher resolution, is 500MHz and has 16.5GB on flash memory. I work with servers that have 16 cores, 24+ Terrabytes of harddrive space. Unbelievable.

I showed my dad my phone, and mind you this was over a year ago. I flipped out the SD card, you know, the one about the size of a fingernail, and said, “That is 16GB.” He remembers his first computer that filled a room and it had 16k. My first embedded projects used micro-controllers with 4k of memory (and you can be surprised with what you can do with 4k.).

A colleague here at work whispered to me out of our small lab…”Take a look at this.” He was setting up a 2U 24TB disc array with 24 SAS drives with a 6 Gb/s output. My data warehouse has the same amount of disk space but a slower bit rate and 12 drives. This was quite impressive. Pretty soon, others in my group were looking at it, doing all the questions, “What is redundant?”, “What kind of power does this use?” Just then our manager walked by and said “What is this, a nerd convention?” Yeah, but it wasn’t too long before he was squatting down looking at it and asking the same questions.

Matt then cracked open a server. Now, I haven’t looked at the guts of the 1U servers in quite a while. I haven’t had the need. I’m the one that tries his darnedest to heat them up. It is very impressive what they look like. They are very engineered. No waste of space. The heat sinks are compact and the fans were positioned at the front, which surprised me. It had space for 12 memory dims. I just can’t get over how much things have changed over the years I have been in this industry. What is even more surprising, is that I still can bring a system to its knees. I still can saturate a network. I have more computing power than I ever contemplated, and it still isn’t enough.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Not much, but you aren’t paying for them either.