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.

Groesser Family Humor

Some Groesser humor to keep for the ages.

Setup: Our house has a central 2 story foyer and the rooms spoke off from it and the “hallway” of the second floor is open to the foyer with a banister looking down to the first floor. I liked the house because it was so open. My childhood home was actually a mobile home so I didn’t want my house to be just a series of rooms. Plus, you can yell, excuse me, “talk” to anyone in the house by standing in the foyer and having 4 children makes this a great thing.

I wanted to talk to Tracy more or less in private so we retired to the master bedroom but our two year old, Bennet, would not have any of that. He kept running in and out of the room with his imitation of various animals. Now, Bennet is at that age where most of what he does is cute. I couldn’t get any serious conversation going with this kid constantly interrupting being so blasted adorable. Tracy realized that nothing was getting done so she handed him something and told him to take this to Madsen. He wandered off to the railing and threw it down to the first floor. Tracy and I looked at each other with the knowledge that this kid isn’t going away.

Bennet: BLAHM BLAHM!

(Blahm Blahm is Bennet’s name for Madsen. No idea why.)

Madsen: WHAT?

Bennet: (pointing to the first floor) THIS!

Realize that this all took place at a high decibel level. I know some of it can be lost in translation but we laughed pretty hard. He’s figuring out how to foil our efforts to be alone. That and he’s seen us throwing things at each other up and down the foyer and is taking up the torch. I just hope he doesn’t pick up Hayden’s “sniper mode” with the Nerf gun.

The other item of note is when Tracy and I finally did get to talk; I was sitting on the bed and she was sitting in her dad’s rocking chair. She grabbed her thigh and struggled to talk. What I heard her mumble was “Not the word, not the word” or something like that. When she did find whatever she wanted to say, “I wanted to say ‘debilitating leg pain’ but the only word I could think about was ‘decapitating’.” Well, that isn’t a good vision, my wife’s leg hurting and having her head fall off. I really couldn’t figure out how to explain that to the police. “Officer, she grabbed her leg and her head fell off. I didn’t have anything to do with the gruesome sight before you. I don’t know what happened. “ Yeah, we sometimes have a morbid sense of humor. I watch enough forensic shows that I tell Tracy that she can’t die in a peculiar way because I’m the first one they will look at. I can’t take care of our kids with my being in prison, you know. Anyway, I suggest if you do have a decapitating leg pain, you get that checked immediately.

Musings on the Universe.

I have some musings on the universe. How’s that for a topic, eh?

I’m one of those that likes to look at the stars and at least try to understand exactly how insignificant we really are. This came up on Astronomy Picture of the Day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek

This puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Then there is this. I didn’t like this one as much, but it is interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVjF_7ensg

How they use redshift and calculate distance has always been iffy to me. It doesn’t seem to ring true, mathwise. It seems distance in the universe is always inconsistent. How can something be farther away than the size of the universe, or how we can look in any direction and see the formation of the universe. Space and time just don’t seem to make sense to me in that regard. For example, the idea that galaxies are fleeing from us at greater than the speed of light. The relativistic effects of that astound me, as well as the energy involved. How light can be determined to operate at those speeds, well, it appears to be beyond my pay-grade.

I once came upon a theory that red-shift isn’t a constant, but is quantized. If that is the case, then you can’t use redshift to determine distance. Distance wouldn’t be quantized. I read this on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_quantization

If that is the case, that we are only seeing filaments and stars and galaxies within filaments…that makes some sense, but I’m still dubious. I guess I should be used to not understanding things by now.

Zoo, and all that other stuff.

I’m trying to find an outlet for all my nervous energy. Looking at me, you might wonder what nervous energy I could possibly have. Well, I have it. Believe me on this. I’m trying to become less of a burden of those around me, you see. That is one reason why I’ve been cramming another programming model into my skull, so that I have an outlet. Well, not actually. I’m really trying to find a way to dynamically present data to my company in a meaningful, comprehendible manner. So that is why I’m trying this Silverlight application stuff. That and a professional curiosity is driving it. It is making me delve into graphics, which I have historically sucked at, as well as animation and other items. I’ve always wondered how flash worked but I couldn’t afford the tools to do it, or at least, do it right. Buying a Microsoft product at work is an easier proposition, plus I can leverage all that I already know.

So here comes the disappointment. I’m banging away, getting a handle on what all this is about and I get to the part about data presentation. That is what I want. I knew that it uses web services to bring in data, and that is fairly straight forward. Javascript is the underlying mechanism the client uses, I think, to bring in the data into the object without forcing a server call, like traditional html or scripting. So most of the examples I see use SQL Server, of course. I like SS, however it costs about 5k a pop where I work and we have a site license for Oracle. I hate Oracle. Still, it is what the company uses if it can, so I have to accommodate my training for that. Then most of the examples don’t merely use web services, but things like the Entity Framework, or more advanced web services, like WCF and WPF. Great, I finally have to figure out what that stuff is. Can’t delay that any more. So, I crack open my Books24x7.com account and start searching for a good text.  I start reading about it and conclude that I can really use this. This is actually some very good stuff…Wait for it…BUT, oracle doesn’t support it. I’m frustrated and ticked off. Once again, Oracle comes through and sucks. Now I have to think about what my alternatives are and how to change my thinking back to the more traditional .Net scripting and procedures. Keep that Silverlight in my back pocket for now.

It has been warm all week, relatively speaking. All that snow we had from the blizzard is now gone. Only a few spots and piles of snow remain. I figured that since Thursday was going to be so warm, that we could take advantage of the free admission at the zoo. So off we went. We had a good time. The last time I was there, I think, was another free day. I took the three kids and off we went. We had 6 inches of snow that day. Had a miserable time. This time was significantly different. Hayden was his moody self and the other kids were bouncing all over, like normal. They had moved the bears around to the other side of the park and created a decent habitat for them. Bennet was completely freaked out by the tidal pool in the Seas pavilion. They have greatly reduced their bird displays, which was disappointing. They did see the dolphins and Bennet saw his dolphin toy being made in those plastic press machines they have scattered about. The lion roared frequently, and while Hayden was “standing” by it, no less. We have that on video somewhere and I’ll post it when we find it. Overall, it was a good day.

Friday I had a surprisingly simple day of mirroring databases. I guess that is what happens when you become more familiar with a piece of software and can see what it is doing conceptually. Databases used to scare the crud out of me, mostly because it is so simple to screw them up. Now, I can handle most of the day to day stuff. The rest of the day, aside from a database failure that was easily remedied, was devoted to report generation for some customer that we have coming up. It requires a whole new set of servers and, of course, reports, and I’m just beginning to see what the data and background processes need to be. Boring stuff for most anyone, I’m sure. It’s my job to be interested in it, so I am. Once again, I collapse at 8:30 and once again, I’m up at 3am. Sometime I will get some sleep, at least more than 6 hours. Some wonder why I get to work at 6am. This is why. My whole internal clock is off.

One of the more amazing things is with Bennet. We’ve been having trouble getting him in bed, or rather, having him stay in bed. Tracy figured that maybe he needed a pillow, and that seems to have done the trick. Yeah, maybe he’s just getting older and doesn’t want to wake up as much anymore, but we’re sticking to the pillow story. Tracy, for the first time in over a decade, is finally getting to sleep through the night. At least, on those nights where she isn’t running around at all hours with certain people from the ward, that is.

 

Zoo, February 2011