Watching movies as a kid

When I was growing up, our family almost never watched movies right from the start. Rather, our parents insisted on walking into a movie midway through the story. Only once did I ever catch a movie right from the start -- an obscure Pinocchio movie that I watched on my fifth birthday. Little did I know at the time that I would never get that experience again until I reached my teens and could watch movies on my own.

I can understand missing the start of a movie once or twice, but consistently? Clearly, something is wrong.

The problem was that our family never properly appreciated the artistry that goes into a good movie. Start watching midway through, and you don't know what all the backstory is. You wind up guessing needlessly, perhaps missing some of the humor and dramatic subtleties.

Oh, and of course, you have to sit through maybe 15-20 minutes of idle time between films as you wait for the next showing. Talk about poor use of time!

Ultimately, this was all caused by poor use of time. We'd be out and about, shopping or having dinner. Well, with judicious planning, we could have taken a break from the shopping to watch the movie, and then resumed shopping afterwards if necessary. That never happened, though.

So what's the big deal, one might ask? After all, you still got to watch the film, right? True, but one is robbed of the experience of seeing the story unfold as it should. One can still enjoy the film, but one cannot savor its full experience. It's like hoping for a rich steak and settling for hamburger instead.

Sledge Hammer

Just finished watching the final DVD of the 80s cult hit, "Sledge Hammer." Now that was a clever show. David Rasche is a comedic genius who should have won an Emmy. Anne-Marie Martin was also perfectly cast in her role.

Too bad this show didn't get the exposure that it needed. I do have to give the network credit for airing it in the first place, though. That's more than what most TV suits would have done.

Take names to kick networking b*tt

The following has been excerpted from an article by Keith Ferrazzi, "The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker." It's good advice.

"I'm constantly ripping out lists in magazines. I was one of Crain's '40 under 40' when I was 30. Interestingly enough, I had been ripping out 40-under-40 lists for years and continue to do so. Those are individuals who somebody has spent enough time to identify as an up-and-comer, a mover, an intellectual, and these are the kinds of people I want to surround myself with. I rip out lists of top CEOs, most admired CEOs, regional lists. A recent book by Richard Saul Wurman lists the 1,000 most creative people in the United States. It's fantastic."

Either Ferrazzi or his assistant enters the gathered names into a database. He has call sheets by region, listing the people he knows and those he'd like to know, and when he's in town, he phones all of them. The numbers are also put into his two PalmPilots, one that has names strictly relating to the particular business he's involved in at the moment (YaYa now) and another that contains his own personal contacts. There are more than 5,000 contacts in all, some of them people Ferrazzi doesn't know yet. Those are what he calls "aspirational contacts."

He pulls out his Palm and shows me the contact information for Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin empire. "I don't know him. But I want to," he says. Then he scrolls down and comes to Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony Corp. of America. "He was on my aspirational list once. I now know Howard," he notes.

Celebrities and money

Here's what one netter wrote about Bill Cosby and financial management. I think it's worth noting.

Bill Cosby is one of the richest men in show business now of course, but in the '70s he was a total mess (broke and deeply in debt) due to bad investments, unpaid taxes, and a thieving manager.* He talked in one interview about how he was world famous, had a hit comedy record, could dial up half of the Hollywood A-list by memory, but he wasn't able to buy one of his kids a birthday present because he had no cash and all of his cards were not just declined but seized, and how he had to borrow the money from a fan who was in the toy store (who he said he still sends gifts to on his daughter's birthday). His advice to all up-n'-comers is "NEVER EVER EVER give anybody but your wife the power to sign your checks, and only let your wife do it if you've been married a while and have kids and you 100% trust her" (i.e. not some newlywed trophy wife or Sharon-Stone-from-Casino character). This would seem a no brainer, but apparently there are people who allow their managers to just have full access to everything they make.

Sadly, many celebrities with beaucoup megabucks never learn these lessons.

MS Vista is infuriating!

MS Windows is an abominable product line, and Vista is especially horrible. Ugh!

Okay, sure. It accomplished a lot of nifty things. The problem is that the Microsoft designers, thinking like a bunch of high school students, decided to focus on superficial 'gee whiz' features to the deteriment of functionality.

When you boot up the computer, it should NOT attempt to do too many things in the background. When you call up Windows Explorer, it should come up fairly quickly, without a lot of pre-processing; after all, it's primary function is to let the user navigate through the directory structure, and that shouldn't take much effort at all. Instead though, calling this program up can be a slow and tedious process, all because Microsoft insists on doing so much stuff in the background. (What exactly? I don't know, but I'm sure that generating thumbnail images and/or picture indices is one of them. Who cares about that?!?!? You don't do that sort of thing unless you KNOW that the user will be navigating to the folders in question.)

Great googly moogly.

Geekiness and fandom

Somebody once said the following:

Even among men, obsessions are not treated equally. Fill a room with Star Trek memorabilia and you're a geek. Fill it with New England Patriots merchandise (along with a nice expensive fathead) and you're a super-fan.

True. Unfortunate, but true.

Preparing for a layoff -- well in advance

The following bit of advice came from an article titled "Surving a Layoff." I don't know who originally wrote it, as the fella who passed this on to me didn't include that info. For this reason, I'm only posting a brief excerpt.

Get everything you've been promised in writing. Remember, you cannot be forced to sign something on the spot. Take the paperwork with you, and agree to drop it off after you've had time to review it with a cool head. Consult a lawyer if need be -- especially if a lot of money is on the line or if you were axed before a bonus, commission, vesting period, or some other important deadline. Then schedule a time to come back with questions and show off your new golf swing. If you are dismissed "with cause," however, your former employer may not owe you a cent.

Gas prices

While driving to work today, I came across a guy standing by the side of the road. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a handwritten message that said, "Fuel up only once a week!" in an obvious attempt to protest gas prices. He also held up a sign that said, "Politicians, this is your job!"

I understand his frustration and his obvious desperation. Still, that's just no solution. Fuel up only once a week? That's easier said that done. This suggestion is only marginally better than those idiotic "Boycott gas on Wednesday!" campaigns or those petitions for gas companies to lower their prices.

And in what sense is this the job of politicians? Sure politicos be doing something? Maybe; I won't debate that point right now. But to simply declare that this is the politicians' job is woefully simplistic at best.

Batman and Robin on the SuperFriends

A few weeks ago, I saw a few episodes of the first season SuperFriends on the Boomerang Channel. It was interesting to see how very differently Batman and Robin had been portrayed back then. Neither one of them ever hit anyone, in keeping with the sanitized standards of the seventies. Nevertheless, they were written in a much more appealing way than in subsequent SuperFriends incarnations.

In most of the subsequent seasons, Batman and Robin would always win battles by swinging from one place to another and wielding whatever outlandish Bat-paraphernalia happened to be convenient. (An umbrella in your utility belt, Robin? Really?) Not so in the first season. The gadgetry was kept to a minimum. Instead of using some elaborate Bat-pulley mechanism to traverse some ski lift cables, for example, they simply slid down using their batarangs.

And they were written so as to focus on their intellect rather than their gadgetry. That was great.

ICS vs. ELISPOT

Blood cells need to be killed for detection via intracellular cytoplasmic staining, (ICS) whereas they survive ELISPOT assays unaffected. These cells can thus be reused for subsequent testing in other platforms (including ICS itself) or the can be frozen for retesting. If necessary, ELISPOT assays even permit serial testing of the very same cells in different assay formats. This optional maximization of sample resources can be critical when conducting clinical trials in which the number of peripheral blood mononuclear cells available is a limiting factor.

In ICS, cells are killed at some supposedly ideal time point and the intracellular cytokine content is measured. In ELISPOT assays however, the cytokine is continuously captured around the secreting cell during incubation time. This generates the characteristic ELISPOT spots long after the secretion process has halted. This basic feature makes ELISPOT assays largely independent of the secretion kinetics of the individual cells. This is valuable because the kinetics of T cell cytokine secretion is unsynchronized even when a single T cell clone is tested. This principle of nonsychronization is even more relevant when using a potential polyclonal population of effector cells reacting to the diverse APC population.

In addition, ELISPOT assays lend themselves more thorougly to high-throughput testing. The initial phases of both ICS and ELISPOT assays are identical whenit comes to setting up the activation cultures. In addition, the subsequent processing of the cells, including the washing steps, require about the same amount of time. However, the actual data acquisition and analysis phases are much shorter for ELISPOT assays. Typically, ELISPOT footprints generated by 300,000 PBMCs per well can be analyzes from a single image with an acquisition and analysis time of about three seconds per 300,000 cells.

Habermas on Post-Modernism

A few words from philosopher Gary Habermas on post-modernism:

Postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, so it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since it friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and weaknesses.

As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self and other notions. On a postmodernist view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices and, as such, are relative not to individuals, but to social groups that share a narrative.

Postmodernism denies the correspondence theory, claiming that truth is simply a contingent creation of language which expresses customs, emotions, and values embedded in a community’s linguistic practices. For the postmodernist, if one claims to have the truth in the correspondence sense, this assertion is a power move that victimizes those judged not to have the truth.

He is not a fan. Not at all.

This scene lacked credibility

Okay, I watched this episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries on DVD. It's the episode where Janet Louise Johnson was introduced as Pamela Sue Martin's replacement as Nancy Drew. You can see some vidcaps here.

In this silly scene, Nancy accosts the Hardy boys, confronting them in disguise. She was wearing some sort of mask (which, unfortunately, is not shown in the aforementioned vidcaps). This mask covered the upper part of her face, but left the lower part quite visible.

Why is this silly? Because Ms. Johnson (now Janet Julian) has this great big mark on her left cheek, near her mouth. It's not unattractive by any means, but it is distinctive. The boys should have immediately recognized her based on this mark alone.

Proper ad English

I always cringe when I see ads that use sloppy English grammar or inelegant phrasings. I realize that not everybody has great wordsmithing skills; however, it seems to me that if you know this to be a weakness, you should solicit help from people who do have better writing skills. At the very least, have somebody check your work for grammar and style!

These shortcomings are more understandable when dealing with ad materials from overseas, especially China. That's why I was impressed with this site. These folks clearly took the effort to ensure that they used elegant wording and proper grammar. Very few companies do that sort of thing nowadays.

SuperFriends. Ugh.

Caught a few episodes of various "SuperFriends" shows on the Boomerang channel. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. I know that the writers weren't trying to create high art, but for pity's sake, they could have avoided dumbing the stories down so much.

Okay, I'll admit that the last season ("The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians") wasn't so bad. And except for the use of Wendy, Marvin, and Wonderdog, neither was the first season. The rest of the seasons were simply stupid though, and the dialogue was beyond atrocious.

Ugh. Yech. Blech. Phooey.

I once read an online singles profile which said the following:

I have friends of all types, but I'm not looking for another "just friend" on here, and I don't have time for world-wide pen-pals -- even with otherwise great people. I promise I'm not a negative person, but because I am in the similars-attract camp rather than the opposites-attract camp and because there's no point wasting anyone's time by lack of full disclosure, things which are deal-breakers and complete turn-offs for me include the following: beer, liquor, smoking, chewing tobacco, gambling, lying, manipulation, cheating (on taxes, girlfriend, timecard, etc.), meanness, perversion, less-than-full-time employment or income of less than 80% of mine, long-distance (anything greater than 25 miles; Garland is on the NE edge of Dallas, TX in the USA), IQ less than 135, history of promiscuity/STDs, history of gay/bi, divorced (more than once, with kids, in the past five years, or for any reason other than her adultery or abandonment of you), shorter than 5'11", fat, under 30 or over 45, less than a full set of teeth, poor personal hygeine, not white/Caucasian, not a U.S. citizen from birth, lack of at least a bachelor's degree, poor grammar, poor spelling, living with parents/family, history of or current psychiatric meds or need thereof (that is if your psychiatrist, doctor, family, friends, coworkers, ex-girlfriends, ex-friends, or ex-coworkers think you need meds -- whether or not YOU think you do), criminal history (whether convicted or not), overall negative attitudes, lack of proven leadership experience.... That is not an exhaustive list, but is a good start. If ANY of those describe you, please do NOT write me... especially just to tell me that what is important to me shouldn't be important to me simply because it isn't important to you.

This woman is incredibly shallow. Based on her profile, she was a bright woman, and based on her photos, she was rather pretty... but I would pity any man who wound up with her.

Some of her demands are reasonable -- proper hygiene and a lack of criminal history, for example). Many of them are downright petty, though. She won't date someone who was not born as a US citizen? And she would never even consider dating someone who's non-Caucasian? Boy, this gal must have a superiority complex.

She also won't date any man who makes less than her. Well, what if that man deliberately took a moderately well-paying charity job for the sake of helping the poor? Or because this person wants to help disabled people? I guess that money matters way too much to this woman.

Somebody tried to sell me a rapid prototyping workcell. It was pretty darned neat and it would have been a great toy, but I couldn't justifying buying such a device for our company.

Their processs involved curing plastics that were dyed in multiple colors. Great technology, but personally, I prefer the use of laminated materials. It permits the use of a wide range of functional materials such as aluminum. IT even permits the use of transparent materials such as plexiglas. Very cool.

A few notes on Abilene, Texas

I got to spend a couple of nights in Abilene, Texas, on business. A few observations:

First, their tiny little regional airport is quite nice. Because the airport is small, the check-in and security checkpoint lines are short and efficient. Parking is affordable, and despite their small size, they offer free wireless Internet access. Very nice!

Second, the taxicab service around here stinks to high heavens. Abilene is a small town, but it has a reasonably large population, so you'd think that they could manage to have more taxis. Unfortunately though, most of the taxi companies in Abilene (such as "Classic Cab") are owned by the same family, and they clearly don't have enough taxis (or perhaps taxi drivers) to around.

I've called for a cab three times over the past two days. The first time around, I had to wait a long time for the cab to arrive, and I had to share the ride with a local family. The second time, I was told that there would be a 45-minute wait. (It turned to be more than a 75-minute wait, at which point somebody else offered to give me a ride instead.) The third time around, I was told that I'd have to wait for 2.5 hours, which would have caused me to miss my outgoing flight. (Again, by God's grace, I managed to get another ride instead.)

There is another company that I could have used, but they didn't even pick up the phone. Good grief!

Clearly, the problem is not a lack of demand. I don't know what the problem is. Mismanagement? Difficulty in retaining employees? Who knows? All I can say is that I'm never going to use their taxi service again. Heck, the local airport should put up a big sign, warning everyone that the taxis here are horrendously unreliable.

My morning in a motel

So I'm sitting in a motel, waiting for a cab.

I spent part of this morning in vigorous cardio exercise within my hotel room. That was great. Thankfully, the rooms seem to have pretty good soundproofing. I like that.

I also got some reading and computer work done, but not as much as I would have liked. I also bought some frozen dinners at a local WalMart. That way, I can eat more nutriously than I would at a restaurant. I can also keep my food expenses down, which my employer would hopefully appreciate. After all, they're paying for this business trip.

I called for a cab, only to find out that there'll be a 45-minute wait. Yoiks! I'm in a small town right now, but I wasn't expecting that. Yowza.

Important ad messages!!!

I remember using the newsgroups on a local freenet way back before the Web was available. Every now and then, you'd get some wonk posting a message with a subject line that said, "Important news! Please read!" I'd open the message up, only to find that they were just shilling some sort of product -- commemorative artwork or whatnot.

These messages got to be very irritating, especially when one only had a slow network connection. I actually wrote to one guy and said, "You call that an important announcement? I call it false advertising." Yeah, I was being kinda snippy, and I could have phrased things more tactfully. I guess I was bristling at the implicit manipulation involved in urging people to read an "important" announcement about some trivial matter.

As the years went on, I discovered that many other vendors use the same tactic. We all get envelopes in the mail that are marked "Important!" , right? As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to insist that something is important, it had better be true. Or better yet, tell me what it's about, dangit!

Animal lawnmowers

I really hate the time involved in mowing my lawn. I don't mind the physical effort; in fact, I deliberately got a mower that was not self-propelled. I figured that unless you have any tall hills to climb, any halfway healthy adult male should be able to push one of these things around.

That didn't stop one fella from urging me to get one, though. His comment? "It makes things so much easier!" No, dude. I don't have any difficulty pushing a low-end mower around; I just wish it didn't require so much time.

Yet another fella was telling me to use this riding mower. "It's so sweet!" he said. Dude, unless you have a huge amount of property, getting a riding lawn mower is waste of money. These things cost $1500 or so. Why not get some exercise instead?

Which, BTW, is what makes investing this time somewhat more palatable. I just wish that it was more of a thorough cardio or resistance training workout.