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Holiday Parties

Saturday sutragirl and I went to three holiday parties. We started at Bruce and Beth Roemmelt’s Holiday/post-Campaign party where we ran into a lot of the Prince William County Democrats and had a great time. One of the strange and interesting surprises was the number of politically active Democratic organizers who are, or used to be, in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) or who were otherwise interested in living history.

We ran into most of La Belle Company and many more active and former SCA members at yorkshirelad and melaniesuzanne‘s party. Ran into kfitzwarin for the first time in years (I have always had a crush on her), and her new (to me) and very cool husband. The hosts for this party have a fabulous apartment, and it was decorated beautifully. Sadly, we did not stay long enough because we wanted to spend some time at sutragirl‘s work party.

image of lawn decoration deer fornicating We finished Saturday evening at the Marine Scene party over at Tom and Tina’s beautiful place, where their neighbors had re-positioned their decorative deer. Fajitas were awesome and much tequila was enjoyed, and the folks at Marine Scene play a pretty cut-throat white elephant gift exchange where a bottle of Patron was stolen 4 times after it was opened!

Sunday we had the monthly La Belle Company meeting and maille tailoring workshop. Tom showed off his fabulous new Landgraf long sword from Albion. After the meeting, a few of us stopped by Steve and Nadyne’s annual holiday gathering where we got to see how much Katherine, Helen, and Gordon have grown! Yet more current and former SCA friends (there is a bit of a theme here, but I have not figured it out yet). Insert usual medieval martial arts discussion and study of fight books (Fiore, Talhoffer, etc.) as you will.

2005 12 19 Scott Nolan Holidays
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Computers

A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made in 2000 was still running strong and quite useable after 5 years of use and abuse. That is remarkable for a Wintel box. While I am still using my 9 year old SGI O2, and 7 year old Macs, typically a Wintel clone is useless after 3 years. So this old A20m is remarkable, for it’s hardware.

thinkpad picture

Windows 2000 Professional is another story. As usual with Windows(tm), there is no security at all, so L.G.’s browser (MS Internet Explorer) had been completely hijacked by some weather toolbar that kept over-writing her registry. McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D were all finding this annoying application and deleting it, but it kept re-appearing through IE every time we rebooted. I suspect we’ll have to back up her data, re-install Windows, then restore only certain files. It is incomprehensible that people are not taking legal action against the companies that make this software that effectively steals their computer.

We had to settle for installing Firefox and Opera, and showing L.G. how to use them instead of MSIE, then installing ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and updating her commercial copy of McAfee VirusScan (thanks AOL – best thing you’ve ever done for your members); and showing her how to boot safe mode and use McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot from safe-mode. We also installed VideoLan because WMP and RealPlayer are both spyware of a sort too. I’ll be investigating how to cheaply upgrade to more memory and an external backup drive for her. I am so glad I no longer waste my time with Microsoft’s miserable excuse for an operating system, how frustrating. Updated (12/20) research is that she can get up to 512MB (two sticks of 256MB PC100 SODIMM 144pin) for about $96 and an external backup drive (40GB EZ Backit Pro) for $89.

2005 12 19 Scott Nolan Computer Security
Computers
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Weather

picture of snow falling in woods

Really large flakes of snow just started to fall outside my home office window here near Gilbert’s corners. It is very pretty, but I supposed I’ll have to drive in through this and that will be less than fun.

2005 12 15 Scott Nolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Politics

The Washington Post is hosting a new service online, you can now track the voting record of your elected U.S. officials (Congress and Senate) at this marvelous new site. This is awesome because it makes it trivially easy to track how effectively your elected official is actually representing you to your government. Step up to the plate, and learn how your own representative or senator is voting on your favorite issues.

Every time you hear about something the government is doing, go check to see if your representative voted the way you wanted them to. Write to them either way, with a thank you if they voted well, and with a firm statement that you don’t approve if they voted for someone else’s interests and not your own. Trust me, others are doing this all the time. If you don’t only that rarest of politician, the honest one with integrity will actually consider the needs of all before he or she votes on a bill.

Many thanks to Brian Patton for pointing out the new web service in his excellent blog.

2005 12 15 Scott Nolan Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Aeon Flux

aeon flux poster I am pleasantly surprised that Aeon Flux turned out to be pretty good. Pleasant, fun, and fast; a decent adaptation with surprisingly good dialogue. Marton Csokas really shines as Trevor Goodchild, and both Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux) and Sophie Okonedo (Sithandra) are very watch-able throughout the flick. Plenty of eye-candy for the tight-fitting clothing fans, and just enough special effects and stunt work (ok, perhaps a little too much), but not overwhelming.

Erci’s one complaint is that it was not as dark as the MTV Anime series, and I’d have to agree. They may have put too much effort into trying to maintain the Anime feel to it (the colors lacked depth and subtlety in tones – just like a comic book, just like the MTV series). One thing I did not like about the MTV series – was how waif thin everyone was – and that mostly remains the same in the movie. The movie actually has a plot (something the series mostly didn’t) and perhaps a message about nature versus human control, maybe. The real gem is Mr. Csokas’ acting though – I know I have seen his face before but am having trouble placing it. Perhaps it was The Bourne Supremacy or The Fellowship of the Ring, though he was not a major character in either. Worth a matinee price.

2005 12 05 Scott Nolan Movies
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Earth to America

I am not usually a big Will Ferrell fan, but his recent jabs at the current occupant of the oval office are hysterically funny and dead on the money! Check out this clip from DevilDucky.com for a really good example of why so many of us can’t take the president seriously.

2005 12 05 Scott Nolan Fun
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Holiday Gifts

Normally I find myself grumpy about the rampant over commercialization of the American Christmas season. I usually resent the constant bombardment of shopping catalogs (our recycle bin has been full every week for a month), the pervasive Christmas decorations in storefronts as early as September every year (WTF?), and the dependence the retail sector of the economy has on just a few months of shopping every year.

Bah Humbug.

I usually tell people not to buy me anything, and only to give things to me that they made themselves.

This year I don’t feel so grumpy about it, and I am not sure why.

I still feel that people who carry any debt at all other than a mortgage on their home and a car loan should not be buying holiday gifts for others. If you owe your bank anything each month, pay them off. Stop the blood-suckers from bleeding you dry. That comes before giving gifts in the list of priorities.

However, for those who are living debt-free, I am feeling a bit relaxed about the whole holiday gift-exchange thing. Perhaps I am inspired by the ever-lovely prehensile_wit, who suggests that we all go pre-order copies of Serenity so that Joss can make more shows like Firefly and movies like Serenity! What a brilliant idea! I’ve already ordered two copies – and someone will be lucky this season (or shortly after, I a such a cheapskate than I went for the free 5-9 day shipping option).

Here is my real wish list:

World Peace. I know that is a lot to ask for, but I believe we can do it one person at a time. Do something to make someone around you happy. Happy people are a huge step in the right direction, and a world full of happy people is a peaceful world. So, think a bit – and focus on helping someone who is unhappy find a little happiness this season.

That’s really about it. I could list many other things, but let’s focus on this one first.

2005 12 03 Scott Nolan Holidays Comments (0) Permalink

Computers

Wow, what an incredible difference a lot of memory makes! Yesterday, my employer finally delivered on a request for more memory my boss and I made in June for new (in June) PowerMac dual G5 desktop, that came with only 512MB of memory.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still of the opinion that 512MB is acceptable (1GB is better) for most things that most people do with computers (surf the internet, play some puzzle games, balance their checkbook, process digital photos, listen to music, write some letters or journals, play with spreadsheets, make presentations, read mail), and 512MB would have been barely enough for me at work except for an evil, but useful, Java application called Argus. It is internal to my employer, do don’t bother looking it up. It is a tool we use to monitor and graph metrics on many applications. It is a bloated pig, and when I tried to run it on my 512MB machine, I could reliably count on waiting minutes between each mouse click and change on a given graph’s view. Now, with 2.5GB installed – even Argus and Plucker Desktop move along at a respectable pace. The other bloatware application I used regularly was the Plucker Desktop, for fetching web content to my PalmOS handheld (kind of like Avant-Go, but open source); but I’d get around that by only running Plucker Desktop updates at night when I was not around to notice.

By the way, if you carry a small handheld around with you a lot, I recommend Plucker for PalmOS devices very highly. It enables you to snatch web content (I “pluck” BBC News and The Onion) automatically, store it on your handheld, then you can read offline whenever you have a few free moments.

2005 12 01 Scott Nolan Computers Comments (0) Permalink

Politics and Foreign Policy

I continue to enjoy reading Richard N. Goodwin’s excellent book “Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties” and had a sudden inspiration while reading about how America backed and stumbled into the Vietnam war. Conventional wisdom is that America became involved in Vietnam as a result of the continuation of a foreign policy practiced steadily since the end of World War II, a foreign policy centered on resistance to communist expansion. Why was United States policy geared to focus on the expansion of communism rather than the spread of totalitarianism?

On the surface, it may seem to be a small distinction, for many people the terms are synonyms. The truth is that communism can be anywhere on the spectrum between democratic and totalitarian, and while it is true that most of the world’s attention on communist nations through 1965 was exclusively focused on totalitarian communist regimes, there have been a few examples of communism that are more democratic (mostly amongst Native Americans). A change of policy so that America would focus on resistance to totalitarianism would also prohibit the support of capitalist totalitarian regimes as a way of blocking the spread of totalitarianism. What I am getting at, is that the terms used to justify a policy matter, and by focusing American attention (in 1965) on communism, the U.S. government felt free to back the regimes in Saigon, despite the knowledge that those regimes were repressive and authoritarian. Is it possible that if the fight had been against the real problem, governments that did not represent the people, that the United States would never have gotten involved in Vietnam? Guatemala? The Philippines? Angola?

Of course this ignores the business interests of certain companies who always profit from war and from exploitation of humans; but I remain convinced that they are a small group with well funded lobbies, but lobbies that are easy to shame with public opinion if one can pick the right terms. Imagine if Lyndon Johnson (or even Ike or Kennedy) had been able to frame a policy of non-involvement in Vietnam in terms of not supporting one authoritarian regime against another, rather than getting caught up in a reactionary resistance to expansion of communism? Might that same policy have kept Reagan out of Grenada in 1983? We’ll probably never know for sure, but it sure makes an interesting idea.

I have no problem with the foreign policy rhetoric that George W. Bush keeps pounding home again, and again: the attempt to spread democracy everywhere. The problem is that I trust neither him, nor his cronies, to actually carry out that lofty goal. They have shown no interest in actually improving the democracy we have right here in the United States (verified voting, anything better than pluralistic voting, really open debates, proportional representation), and they continue to back repressive and authoritarian dictatorships around the globe so long as it is good for business. Even if you help democracy in one country, it does not count in your favor if you have prevented it in other countries.

2005 11 29 Scott Nolan Foreign Policy
History
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Movies

This long Thanksgiving weekend has held both Erci and I house bound with colds, so we have been very domestic, cleaning, watching movies and shows off the Dishplayer, and catching up on kitty-play time with Bailey the cat and ferret chasing time with Leonardo.

Spanglish good clean fun. I have been wanting to catch this for ages, and it finally came up on HBO and got captured on the Displayer for viewing. I normally do not like Adam Sandler, but he managed another decent role here, and Paz Vega is amazing as Flor.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon looks to be beautiful, but our Netflix copy was scratched on arrival (that does not happen very often, only about three out of 60 discs so far), and it had to go back only partially viewed. It looks to be beautifully shot depiction of Francis of Assisi. though some of the costumes look a little anachronistic.

Rome (the HBO and BBC series) is really shaping up to be awesome. The physical settings, clothing, and material goods are 95% spot on dead accurate, which is astonishing for a mainstream production. I guess having so many great living history groups in England is really helping producers get this stuff right finally. There are some occasionally glaring anachronisms, but they are few and far between (stirrups!?). The show is making a point of graphically portraying a society with social morals very different from our own, and I love that about it. There have been scenes with full frontal male nudity, and scenes were servants and slaves of the great magnates of Rome stand by ready to serve their masters while their master have passionate intercourse. The raunchier side of Rome is show perhaps a bit too much, but I think they may be catering to a demand from their audience. I confess I was slow to warm up to this series because I saw it as bumping Carnivale off the air (grrr!) – but I have to confess Rome probably has much wider appeal.

24 was playing all day on Friday, and it is quite riveting, I was getting hooked by the end of the day. I totally missed this when it was in it’s first run, but wow the acting is great (though I saw several continuity and logic flaws that I’d probably have not noticed except for the all day marathon nature of my viewing them). Great stuff, I may have to find season two someday when I am home sick.

Donnie Darko – WOW! I cannot believe I missed this in on screen or even in the first rental runs of the DVDs. My SciFi buddies who saw it let me down by not making me go see this awesome causal time loop adventure. Stunning, beautiful, and artistic the way Dark City is, but far more intellectually engaging. If you have not see it, go rent Donnie Darko now. If you liked Being John Malkovich or Memento or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, you will like Donnie Darko too. Thanks very much Katrina for raving about Donnie Darko, I would not have seen it but for your recommendation.

2005 11 27 Scott Nolan Holidays
Movies
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