The Podium

Last year, my family and I applied for passports. We got ‘em and used ‘em, so no big deal, right? Recently, though, I was looking at mine and noticed that, inexplicably, my gender was marked as “F” instead of the correct “M.” Ha-ha, very funny, but I have a clearly male name, my photo shows a clearly male person, my birth certificate shows a male birth, and my application form was properly completed to show a male applicant. All I can imagine is that the person entering in the data for my family (3 females and 1 male) got a little carried away with the “F” key.

Okay, so I’m within the year allowed for getting a new passport without having to pay for it. I still have to pay for and get new passport photos, but the form for a correction is pretty simple and I have a very simple case: I haven’t changed my name or anything legally complicated.

Today, a couple weeks after sending in my info, I get a letter from the State Department requesting that I send in some additional documentation, namely an official and original birth certificate. Not a copy, either, but the real deal. This is somewhat confusing to me, as we’ve already established I’m a citizen, etc., and my request for an amended passport is not because of a name change, lost passport, etc.

Hoping to shortcut an irritating and not-free process to get an original birth certificate from my birth state, I call the Passport Center to say, essentially, WTF? I explain the situation and ask the question. The answer? Because that’s what the letter from the Passport Center says I need to send. Well, duh, yes, I got that part already, but WHY does the Passport Center need an original birth certificate? To show that I’m male. Uh, no, it just shows that I was BORN male. I could be a woman now, for all anybody knows. (Hell, that’s what my passport says…)

We go around on that for minute before I, as have millions before me, realize the utter futility in trying to explain a logical fallacy to a low-responsibility government employee. Original birth certificate it is, then. :sigh:

Huh. After a few months of working at home, I’ve just finished two days working in the client’s office and rediscovered several annoying things I’d forgotten:

• People with loud and/or annoying ringtones who let the phones ring and ring (and RING) while they decide whether to answer the call. You know, you CAN silence the phone without also sending the call straight to voice mail. Really, you should try it sometime.
• People whose idea of merging from a lane that’s ending is to wait until the LAST possible second and then simply move over without signaling or, possibly, even looking. Disproportionately women, for some reason.
• People who can’t park, especially those driving cars. Extra-especially people who can’t conclude they’re in the parking space until their front tires hit the curb.
• People who think posted and very clear rules don’t apply to them.

The Divine Miss P, despite being only 3 1/2 years old, is an absolute KILLER when it comes to the card game “Crazy 8s.” She gets confused about the suits sometimes, she has NO concept behind the strategies for using the “8″ cards, she even shows her hand regularly… and she wins over, and over, and over. She wins one-on-one and she wins when the whole family plays. She beats her older sister and both her parents. She beat me 3 times straight last week. Despite two recent losses, her record (since I started paying attention, anyway) is something like 13 and 4. It’s insane.

It’s too bad she’s not old enough to visit one of the local card rooms or casinos: She could earn her college money before she even hits kindergarten.

Okay, “reference post” alert, but this article by Sam Smith at jalopnik.com hits so many nails on the head that he should probably consider joining the carpenters’ union.

This video amply illustrates how ukeleles are simply stringed instruments with a constrained tonal range when compared to a more-typically “rocked out” instrument like a guitar. (If you think it’s a little too slow or whatever, wait until the middle section. This is what guitar geeks call “shredding.” ) After you’ve watched Jake Shimabukuro cover George Harrison, check out this video of an original composition.

What, you want more? How ’bout a cover of Michael Jackon’s “Thriller”?

Okay, so nothing but a link this post, but: A whole series of 1/24th-scale photos that look like the real thing. (And they are, too. No Photoshopping at all.)

Now that the Avatar juggernaut is heading into the Oscars, I thought I’d post a quick note about two very different SF movies: Avatar and Moon.

I saw  Avatar the week after it opened, in 3D. Having actively avoided the 3D versions of movies the past several years, I was somewhat apprehensive about seeing this in RealD Cinema, but it was truly amazing. Not only did Cameron not go for too much of the “spear coming out of the screen” effect, leaving the whole thing to just look, well, three-dimensional, but the overall visual nature of the film was just spectacular. The kind of movie you want to see more than once so that you can spend more time “looking around.” Way, way cool.

Moon, on the other hand, is way on the other end of the VFX spectrum. In fact, they even used some very old-school techniques for their exterior shots.

So, okay, big differences between the two in their visual presentations. Avatar, unsurprisingly, is nominated for and likely to win a whole slew of technical Oscars. Moon, not so much. But here’s the other enormous difference between the two: Moon actually has an interesting and original story. You really, really care about the characters. You get caught up in the story. There’s actual, you know, drama. The script isn’t simply a convenient container for a series of VFX shots and action, but something that draws you in and causes you to invest yourself in the outcome. The ending actually has an impact on you. In fact, and in a whole number of ways, Moon‘s story is an example of some of the very best things good SF storytelling has to offer.

So: Best Picture for Avatar? I don’t think it even deserves a nomination from a story standpoint, but financial numbers do have an impact in the nominations and voting, as do pure audience numbers. In those categories, Avatar really is the 800-pound gorilla. I just wish, in my usual tilting-at-windmills way, that movies like Moon would get more popular recognition. They are, at their core, much more fulfilling than big-budget VFX-fests like Avatar.

(On a related note, why no “Best Actor” nod for Sam Rockwell? I’ve never been a fan of his, but his work on Moon was really impressive, especially if you know anything about the practical, behind-the-scenes aspects of his performance.)

I know that LED lights are becoming more and more popular for cars, especially for tail and brake lights (I seem to recall reading that the brighter LEDs cause people to react some-tenths of a second more quickly), but I would like to register a complaint: They’re freaking annoying.

I’m sure they’re phenomenal in the rain or at a distance, but they’re murder in stop-and-go traffic, especially in the dark. I was following one of those stupid “mini-SUVs” (I’m sorry, but they are) on the way home tonight and I was getting blinded every time the driver tapped the brakes. Worse, he/she seemed to be having some sort of foot spasm at the same time, ’cause the lights would flash-flash-flash constantly. Good thing I’m not susceptible to epilepsy.

I finally had to back off far enough that I “invited” someone to change into my lane. Problem solved.

Back in the day, when the grunge movement was getting going, I was fairly “cool” for a while. I went to the “right” clubs, knew a lot of the bands, hung out with a lot of the movers-and-shakers, and so on. Hell, I’m even in the movie “Singles“… if you know where to squint in a couple of scenes.

But do you know what the highlight of this past week-end was? Something I was very excited to buy and even more excited to try out? A new vacuum cleaner. Jeez.

Let’s anthropomorphize a little, shall we? http://xkcd.com/695/ (Still kinda sad, though, innit?)

The same J-hole who prompted me to post about hallway etiquette sits across the hall and a couple doors down from me. He sits right next to the open door of a shared office. Why are these details significant? Because he has this disgusting habit of belching loudly and with annoying regularity. Not polite, easily-covered burps, either, or even nasty-ol’ vibrato throat-farts, but these horrible, wet-sounding things.

You know that dry-heave retch that people make just before they throw up in a particularly violent way? Yeah, like that. And people wonder why I keep my office door closed.

The kitchens here at Microsoft have these nifty little Starbucks brew-on-demand coffee machines. One of the two in my floor’s kitchen has suffered some sort of failure and is showing a “brewer failure” message on its small, text-based display screen. Someone stuck a Post-It next to it saying “Brew Screen of Death.” Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…

A few weeks ago, early in November, I upgraded my desktop machine at home to Windows 7 Professional from Windows XP Professional. Why Professional? For a number of reasons, but one of the big ones is the ability to use Remote Desktop. While I use RD to manage our “headless” server and other PCs in the house (not to mention hosting RD sessions so I can use my laptop to work from somewhere other than my home office), I also use it to access my computer at work so that I can work from home sometimes. To get to the computer at work, though, I have to go through a complicated series of hoops to make and validate a VPN connection… and this is where the fun began. Read more…

That 10lbs of body weight I puked out over a 48-hour period a couple weeks ago? Yeah, I’ve successfully gained it all back, along with another pound or two for good measure.

<grumble>

The last dream I had last night was a borderline nightmare. Wanna know what it was about?

I was relaxing near the swimming pool of a Hawaiian resort, listening to a heavily-tattooed Madonna sing a quiet song in a language I didn’t understand, when an apparently-amphibious moray eel came out of the pool and started attacking guests, including my aunt/uncle’s long-departed poodle and the actor James Cromwell.

No, I don’t know where to start with that, either.