Diary of a Network Geek

TheCrazies

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

I saw The Crazies Friday night.

I’m not normally a big fan of horror flicks, but, well, there weren’t a lot of really palatable options Friday night, so we decided to roll the dice on this one. My expectations were low, but it was actually a pretty good movie. Keep in mind, though, I tend to pick these movies apart for sport. I’ll try to warn you before there are any spoilers, but, still, this is sort of your first warning, okay?

So, the premise of the movie is simple; there’s something making the townsfolk of a little, rural Iowa town go, well, crazy. In fact, to be more specific, there’s something making people become homicidal maniacs. The first “crazy” we see is on the local high-school baseball diamond on opening day. He’s the town drunk, even though he’s cleaned up, with a shotgun. Obviously, this ends badly for him and, frankly, doesn’t do much for the sheriff who has to kill him. He’s married to the town doctor, just to keep the main stereotypes all in the family.
Obviously, the sheriff’s all broken up about having been forced to kill the town drunk, but, his doctor wife assures him that he had no choice. Sadly, that’s just the start of the crazy behavior in town. From there, well, more people start going nuts and before long that other mainstay of the modern horror film, the U.S. Army, shows up to “help out”.

Naturally, the Army’s idea of “helping” is to contain the problem and, basically, kill the town. The only problem is, the sheriff and his wife, and his deputy and her medical assistant, are going to try and make a break for freedom. So, yeah, without giving anything away, that’s the movie in a nutshell. Pretty basic. Something bad gets into the water and makes the town go crazy and our ragtag band of survivors has to, uh, survive, both the bad thing and the alleged good guys trying to save the rest of the world from whatever is killing the town.

Now, there are a short list of problems I had with the movie. Also? Here there be spoilers, matey!
First, the town is filled with crazies and the Army herds the town into holding pens, until they go crazy and try to get out. This results in mayhem, of course, and a bunch of dead bodies. No problem so far, right? Here’s the thing, though, the survivors have access to an unknown quantity of military-grade automatic weapons at this point, but they leave them all behind. They don’t even look to see if they can scavenge one and some ammunition to use! Not ONE! At this point, I pretty much think these people might not have the survival skills needed to make it through this.

Second, they cut cross-country to get to a farm where there’s a car they can use to escape. Why? Well avoiding the roads until they get the car will help them avoid roadblocks. Okay, sure, makes a kind of sense. But, aren’t they supposed to be in rural Iowa? They’re going to a farm, right? But, no one has horses? Really? No one thinks, hey, horses would let us cut cross-country all the way to a major town or city, avoiding roadblocks all the way? I’m pretty sure it was at this point that I decided for the long-term viability of mankind, these fools no longer deserved to survive.

Thirdly, after all this, every time these trained law-enforcement officers go into a building or even room, they never, ever check it. Not just for blind spots or crazies in the back hall, I mean they don’t check a damn thing. Nothing. Nunca nada. Seriously? I’m just a dude who’s seen too many cop shows on TV and I’d be checking every damn thing before I’d relax at all.

Fourthly, they started to have incredible luck and exhibit completely out of place skills. For instance, at one point the sheriff finds a Zippo in a display that’s fully loaded with lighter fluid and ready to go. Pretty sure, that’s not how those things ship because, you know, they might accidentally catch fire. But, it was an important prop that drove the plot later, so we’re supposed to overlook that.
Also, they finally find a semi that just happens to be fully fueled and ready to go in a garage. Why, it’s almost like it was waiting for them! And, naturally, the sheriff knows how to drive a big rig. Now, I’m sure it’s a pretty straightforward skill to learn, but, uh, don’t they advertise schools for that sort of thing on matchbooks? Seriously, I don’t think that a sheriff is likely to know how to drive a semi, not even in a small town. This guy is young, for one thing, and, frankly, more likely to have been former military, as a lot of guys like that are, which makes it even more likely that he would have picked up one of those handy automatic weapons! (Yeah, that one really bothers me, because, c’mon, that’s just basic stuff, man!)

So, yeah, the movie takes you on a merry chase away from the infected town and the nasty government men who are going to nuke the town to save the rest of us from this terrible thing which killed the town. There are the standard horror movie moments, though, I have to admit, the director did a better than average job of setting those up. Most of the movie really is believable, with a few, uh, notable exceptions. And, people do react mostly as you would expect, again with a few notable exceptions.
So, as horror movies go, it was pretty good. No, I wasn’t scared. At least once or twice I was startled but that was as much the crowd effect and the music as anything else. And, granted, my expectations were set pretty low, but they were met and greatly exceeded.

So, to sum up, if you’re a horror or slasher flick fan, then this movie is totally worth seeing in the theater. If you’re not into that sort of thing, then wait until it comes out on DVD.

Oh, and don’t forget, I’ll be at a wedding this Friday (no, not my own!), so I won’t have a movie review next week.  Maybe I’ll review the Warren Zevon biography I read recently instead.  We’ll see.

Long time readers will know how I feel about the H1-B visa issue.

Look, in the IT business, the H1-B visa program is well known for the rampant abuse and the undercutting of salaries for American workers.
For you who are new to the blog, here’s the basic run-down.  I think American workers should get jobs, of all kinds, not just tech jobs, before we import workers.  But, we should import skilled workers who will pay taxes before we send those jobs off-shore.  The reason I don’t like the H1-B visa program in particular is because I know for a fact that it was used to unfairly, and apparently illegally, undercut American workers and put them out on the street in favor of grossly underpaid imports.

Well, in a small bit of good news there, eWeek is reporting that the Federal government is going after $1.4 million in wages that H1-B visa holders were cheated out of via Peri Software Solutions.  For those of us in the industry, I don’t think it’s any surprise that these folks had offices in India and had cheated 163 Indian IT people out of more than $1.4 million dollars in fair pay.  Pay, incidentally, that they would have paid taxes on to the U.S.

While I think this is a great step, I can’t help but wonder, how many more companies like this are there who haven’t been caught or prosecuted?  How many people have been unfairly abused this way?  How many jobs were lost?  How long will it take to do something and fix this broken system?

I almost never think of what I do as “art”.

I mean, I’m mostly a network plumber, you know?  I make functional networks and good, solid, dependable machines that, well, that just run.  But, there are people who take hardware to a new place, where they are, in fact art.
The Edelweiss by Pius Giger is just that, the PC as art object.

Don’t believe me?  Just click the link and go look at it.  Trust me.

UnMovieFriday

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

By this time of the week, my regular readers know I’ve usually reviewed a movie, but not this week.

This past Friday, instead of seeing a movie, as is my usual habit, I was on a plane coming back from Belle Chasse, Louisiana.
Now, to those of you who haven’t done a lot of business travel, this may sound fun and exciting, but, honestly, it wasn’t. I caught a 7:30AM flight out of Houston Intercontinental to New Orleans, where I was picked up and driven to our local office. There, I did some basic troubleshooting and got the “new guy”, who’s only part time so far, up to speed on a couple of things. Also, we got a problem or two that he’d not dealt with before knocked out pretty fast.
Mainly, though, I was there to make folks feel better and assure them that everything was as it should be. In other words, outside of a couple things I probably could have done on the phone, I was mainly there to take people out to lunch.

The books you see in the attached picture are what was in my bag.
I’m still wrapping up A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, who is one of my favorite authors of all time. It’s been ages since I read anything by him and, frankly, this book is making me fall in love with language all over again. Hemingway has that effect on me. And, considering how concise he was and how conservatively he used words, I find that deliciously ironic. Still, there’s just something about the way he crafts a good sentence that just makes me want to write.
“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

The other books are something else again.
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is about finding hope in the most hopeless of situations. It’s about finding a purpose in life, no matter how small that purpose my seem to others, and clinging on to it for dear life. It’s the book I was reading when I was diagnosed with cancer and I really need to re-read it and refresh my spiritual memory of the lessons that book brought me.
The Canon Speedlite System Digital Field Guide by Brian McLernon will be, I hope, the guide that gets me going finally with hot shoe flashes, both on and off-camera, for DSLR. I brought that with me Friday in the hopes of being able to get to it and finally start to play with my new camera equipment that my tax refund bought me.
No such luck.
Thankfully, I still had Hemingway to keep me company.

So, movie reviews again next week, but the week after, I’ll have been at a wedding on Friday, so I’ll probably miss my regular review then, too, unless I hit a matinee.
Who knows? Anything’s possible!

Wow, maybe Novell isn’t quite dead yet after all!

According to this story at Computer World, the New York-based Elliot Associates, LP, a hedge fund that is already Novell’s largest stock-holder, has made a public bid for the company.  They claim to have extensive experience and good fortune turning around tech companies, and they see the potential in the once great Novell.

I’m not holding my breath, but I hope it works.
It’d be nice to see a company like Novell get turned around.  Their products consistently win awards, but their marketing never seems to get them where they need to be.  Novell basically started the local area network market, but now they’re very much the “also ran” in that category, coming in far, far behind Microsoft.
Again, I’m not holding my breath here, but I hope they can do it.

Houston is a strange town.

Now, I don’t mean that in a bad way!  I like strange.  Strange is different, interesting.  The problem is, finding it.  Think of all the chance encounters that have led you to something weird and beautiful.  How often does that happen?  If you’re like me, not often enough.

Back when I started doing “Friday Fun” posts, I used to scour the Internet for unusual bits of flotsam and jetsam. Now, I usually let my feed reader bring them to me.  But, the fun, weird, wonderful things are all around us.  In Harris county, we have plenty of interesting, unusual things to find.  Some of these have been collected at the Harris County page of the Atlas Obscura.  If you haven’t been there, go take a look.  They talk about a couple things of interest, but I encourage you to find and add more.

Incidentally, of the things they mention, I’ve only been by David Adickes’ studio and seen the giant heads outside his workshop.  I have heard of the Museum of Health and Medical Science and the National Museum of Funeral History, but I have to admit, I haven’t been to either yet, not to mention the several places of interest that I hadn’t even known were here before.
You know, now that I think about it, they do seem like great photo adventures that would be easy to do, and I have all that nice, new flash gear….

ShutterIsland

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

I saw Shutter Island Friday.

I have to admit, I was a little surprised by this one. I’m not entirely sure what I expected here, but it wasn’t this. Incidentally, I’m not a big Leonardo DiCaprio fan, but he did a really good job with this one, as did the rest of the pretty amazing cast, including Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, and Ted Levine, to name a few.

DiCaprio plays Teddie Daniels, a U.S. Marshal investigating a disappearance on the infamous detention facility for the criminally insane, Shutter Island. Apparently, this very special and secure federal institution has a secret, too, and Daniels has an axe to grind in finding it. We meet Daniels on the ferry to the island, getting very seasick in the head. We meet his partner, Chuck Aule, played by Mark Ruffalo, at the same time he does, on the ferry. They’re met at the only dock on the island, the only safe way on or off, by the assistant warden who informs them of the rules, which include surrendering their sidearms. Obviously, they’re not happy about that, but it’s the only way the doctors in charge will let the Marshals into the patient wards to investigate.
The institution is separated into three wards; Ward A for the male offenders, Ward B for the female offenders, and Ward C for the ultravolent cases. The patient who disappeared vanished from her cell in Ward B was the delusional murderer of her children and, frankly, doesn’t seem like she’s capable of escaping from this sort of prison. But, that’s not the real reason Daniels is here.

Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island because something’s not right. People come to the island and all record of them is lost. People with relatively minor problems come back from the island broken, changed, and more unstable and dangerous than when they went there, though most are simply never heard from again. And one former “patient” told Daniels that they’re doing experiments on the patients, surgeries that make the most violent men easier to control, but no less violent. That, and the search for what happened to the man who’s responsible for his wife’s death, are the real reason that Daniels has come to Shutter Island. But, even that’s not so straight forward.

Now, before I give too much away, because frankly, there are more plot twists in this movie than any I can think of in recent memory. Keep in mind, this is all happening in a mental institution, so many things, and people, aren’t what they seem. Also, the movie takes place a few years after World War II, so there are plenty of references to veterans and what we now call post traumatic stress syndrome. And, yes, Daniels is a war veteran who helped liberate Dachau, so that factors into some of the plot.
This is far from a straight, linear, direct movie. And, while there is plenty of action, it’s mostly a psychological thriller. In fact, though I did like the film quite well, the first two-thirds of the movie are actually quite slow. Things pickup near the last third and then run from there through the end. And, while this is a bit of a spoiler, the ending leaves you wondering just a little bit what’s really just happened. It’s pretty remarkable, actually, and still a satisfying ending.

So, while I don’t think this was a great movie, it certainly was very good. DiCaprio did a very good job of portraying a driven man, who had issues, and was spun through a bewildering psychological landscape. Of course, Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow were fantastic as the slightly sinister doctors who had some mystery they were trying to hide. Really, the entire cast delivered good individual performances. There were a few weak scenes and a couple of holes in the plot, but, by the time you get to the end of the movie, I think those inconsistencies are actually explained, at least in an indirect way.

It’s an interesting film and well worth seeing. If you are a DiCaprio fan, you’ll definitely want to see this movie. However, if you just want to see something different than I think you’ll see all year. Incidentally, based on a book, this really is an unusual story these days, especially to see from Hollywood. In fact, one of the things I liked about this movie was that it was a bit of a surprise to me how some of the plot ran, which is pretty unusual, frankly. Not that I’m a genius or anything, but I read a lot and see a lot of films and when you combine that with my own study of plot and attempts at writing, plots become sort of predictable after a bit. So, again, there are some pretty surprising twists in the plot that make this movie really different and interesting.

In the end, I think this movie was well done and well worth the money to see it in the theater. Go check it out for yourself and see if you agree. I think you’ll like this one.

Okay, I know the iPhone is amazing, but this really is cool!

So, when I was on the road a lot, I would occasionally have to do presentations.  That usually meant lugging a laptop which I could hook up to a projector, if they had one available.  Often, it meant added pounds for a day trip just to show a team a few screen captures or a short slideshow.  Not good.
Well, now, if you’ve got an iPhone, you can carry a tiny projector with you instead and reduce your overhead without losing any production value.

Okay, it’s not quite available yet, but it will be soon.  Personally, I can’t wait to see how much it runs!  And, with everyone talking about the new iPad that isn’t quite available yet either, I thought it’d be okay to talk about a vapor-ware add-on for an existing product.