Try this clock

http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/~yugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/29/bclock.html

Great Movie

Here is a movie trailer (passed on to me by Kevin Kozoriz) well worth viewing:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/lost_skeleton/
Somehow, I think this might be a movie that might not make it to Lethbridge -- though in this case, because Lethbridge is too cosmopolitian....

World SF Convention

A report on the World science fiction convention, held this year in Toronto, from CBC radio (starts at minute 15) for those with RealRadio software: http://tinyurl.com/o0x8

Unsolicited Manuscripts

Interesting editorial that compares reading unsolicited manuscripts for a magazine with American Idol at http://nakedbootleg.blogspot.com/ (under "Wednesday, Sept 17").

Proofreading

Internet tidbit came across my desk today -- I can't vouch for it's authenticity, but it is of passing interest:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy,
it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,
the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Initsereg!!

I forwarded this to a couple of colleagues who responded that it took them a minute to recognize that there was even a problem. So the question arises, is this response sufficient to verify the content, or does it indicate that my colleagues have spent too many years grading undergraduate papers?

Still Moving

Following ten days of frantic packing, the movers arrived, took one look at our house, and phoned into the boss that they were quiting. He responded by sending a fourth man out to help with the move, but even so, it took them nine hours and two truckloads to move us, and that was after I had designated a bunch of stuff to be left for me to take myself. Consequently, I have spent the last 7 days moving all the things the movers missed. I finally brought over the last load last night. Of course, we still left 4 desks, 2 office chairs, a couch, a hide a bed, a kitchen table, a work table, an amoire, 3 paintings, garden furniture and a stack of dishes for the new owner. (I sold the house to a colleague who only had enough furniture to furnish one room of his two room appartment, so he was glad to get some left over furniture, and we were glad not to have to move or dump it.) And we threw out even more garbage than my earlier estimates. In the end, we produced 85 67-litre bags of garbage; 24 92-litre bags of donations to Diabetes Association's charity drive. It has all been kind of mind-numbing how much stuff we had crammed into our house.

Of course, we now have the challenge of unpacking. Currently, two thirds of our three door garage is filled floor to ceiling with boxes waiting to be sorted and correctly placed in the new house. I estimate another 20 days labour....

We have officially voted never to move again; or at least until we retire to Victoria in 23 years.

Ultrasound confirms...

...that we are expecting a girl.

Of course, I was confident from the beginning in my feeling that this one was a girl, but it is nice to have this actually confirmed. Mary has had a couple of previous ultrasounds, but our daughter was apparently shy about showing the relevant region, so the technicians couldn't tell us what she was until yesterday's ultrasound.

I'm glad our daughter is a girl, because (a) I justed moved 47 cartons of girl baby and toddler clothes from our old house to our new house, and would have been royally ticked off if we then had to dump it (contengency plan called for this ad in local classifieds: "It's a Boy! Infant girl clothes available cheap!); and (b) we were having a terrible time coming up with suitable boy names. We wanted something as original as Tigana, but all the boy names we thought of were either too common or too effeminate. We couldn't find one we liked at all. Mary proposed "Kerrison", my mother's maiden name, but it abbreviates as "Kerry", which Mary did not like at all. I suggested "General" or "Sir" to give the child a leg up in their future career, but Mary vetoed that. Mary suggested "Grayson", but I figured out that was a shot at my age, so I vetoed that one! And everything else just seemed, well unsuitable for one reason or another.

But then, we were not really trying because we both knew boy names were a mere intellectual exercise. We knew it was a girl, and we know what her name is. Well, more accurately, we know two out of three of her names -- we've told Tigana she may choose one (middle) name for her baby sister, so that has been subject to change -- we've had "Grace" and "Rose" (neither of which Mary and I like much, but which do oddly fit with the names we've chosen, so we would have been okay) but which this week is Pocahontas. We may have to exercise a parental veto....

Moving

I have spent the last ten days, 10 to 14 hours a day, packing for our move to a larger house. Mary's expecting, and so can no longer bend or lift, so all the packing comes down to me. The movers come tomorrow to move the heavy stuff and as many boxes (about 200 at this point) as they can do in one day; I'll move the remainder myself for the week or so we still have the house afterwards. But the packing has been interesting.

We were living in a three story house, but had essentially abandoned the basement to storage. I had a house full of furniture when Mary moved in with her house full of furniture six years ago, so we moved all of the junkier stuff (which, as it turned out, meant all my stuff apparently) into the basement. Then Mary inherited most of a house of furniture from her Aunt. So we had three houses of furniture in one small house, and we kept buying new stuff. (Mary is one of those people who has to go out at least once a day and there is often no where to go in the Winter in Lethbridge except the Mall, so we end up buying a lot of stuff. Which meant, more stuff shuffled into basement storage.)

Sorting through the basement took a long time. Much of what I discovered down there we hadn't seen for years. There were boxes of stuff the movers had brought from Mary's former home which had never been unpacked and examined. (Mary had been away at grad school when she sold her house and had the furniture sent to my place, so she never got to do the usual pre-move purge.) There was an entire backroom devoted to Gestetner printing equipment (four machines so I could run four different colors to produce the equivalent of a four color press) and supplies, which I had lovingly purchased second hand just after the process had become completely obsolete with color photocopying/computer printers. I had a complete photography darkroom set up which I was sure to get around to using again any day now, except I have tossed all my film cameras and gone completely digital. There were the bookshelves of Social Studies reference materials in case I ever wanted to teach social studies again (yeah, that could happen!) and the ten years supply of food, purchased at significant savings in bulk from Costco etc., which had stale dated sometime in the late 1990s. There were the two Osborne computers, both broken, which I intended to fix by cannibalizing the one to fix the other so that I could read the 700 diskes of obsolete research data piled next to them. And so on. Given the impending move, I had no difficulty throwing all this stuff out, and had to wonder why much of it had ever seemed worth saving. But without the deadline imposed by movers, there is always something more pressing then cleaning out the basement, and always some good reason why this or that might come in handy at some indefinite time in the future.

Physically getting rid of all this trash was a different matter. Half of it went during Lethbridge's annual spring cleaning day, when the garbage collectors carry away anything, including stoves, fridges and printing presses, that people want to get rid of. I don't know of any other city that does this, but it is a great service. The other half I had to put in green garbage bags and throw out with the weekly trash. As the deadline for the move came closer, I had to up my output from a couple of extra bags a week, to a mountain of trash. Which was a problem, because normally the crew only collects two or three bags per house. So, faced with a stack of 26 bags of garbage last week, I was at a bit of a loss what to do. I piled the garbage into two different stacks, one on the far right of my property line, the other on the far left. Since we lived on a cresent and our pie shaped lots met at the street, it wasn't always clear which pile of garbage belonged to which house, and with my two piles, I hoped to make it looked like they were collecting from two houses rather than one. Then, still faced with a gigantic surplus I moved up and down the block adding a bag or two to each of my neighbours piles filling up their quotas.

Garbage collectors were not that easily fooled, though. One has to acknowledge that they are professionals in their own right. They took about 10 of my bags, and left everything else, including all the bags smuggled into neighbour's piles. (Mine were a slightly different shade of green, and had tie tops, which apparently are less popular with my neighbours, so the garbage staff just ignored my bags.) I had to quickly collect back my bags into my pile before my neighbours got wise. So I just left the pile lying out front for the next round of collection, but the next week, the garbage guys only took one bag, and started to drive off. A neighbour who was out there started to argue with them, and by the time I had run out to join him, the garbage guys had called into their foreman to complain about how much there was. But my neighbour kept at them and eventually they took everything, including a number of new bags I hadn't had the nerve to put out on the street. I told my neighourbour he should have been a lawyer, he was talking so fast.

Of course now I still have another twenty bags or so to go, but dare not put out more than three or four a week. I still have the house for another two weeks, so that accounts for say 12 bags....but being too cheap to rent a bin or pay the dump fees, I'm going to have to take my garbage with me and put it out at the new house at three bags a week until it is all gone.

Well, back to packing. One day to go to movers. They are going to freak when they see how much stuff is still to be moved.

Matrix Reloaded

Saw Matrix Reloaded last night. What a disappointment.

First, the theater screwed up the projection, so the top 20% of the movie was projecting off the screen and so was invisible. Then they stopped the film 8 or 9 times trying to get it right, each time losing two or three minutes of plot, so the confused writing became even harder to follow. They finally got it down to 5% off screen before they gave up, so we watched the rest of the movie with everyone missing top inch of their hair. Everyone could have been bald, I would never know.

Second, the movie itself was badly directed and cut. The pacing was all wrong -- some of the fight scenes were intolerably and pointless long, for example. Why have a fight scene drag on for 20 minutes when the hero can, apparently, simply choose to fly off at any moment? It is illogical! And the writing made no sense. One speech by M, and the entire populace goes from frantic worry to sex orgy. Yeah, that could happen. And how come there were no old people or children at that meeting/party? It was just very dumb.

And there were a number of logical flaws in the basic writing. I admit that the premise of the first movie was weak, an old SF cliche from way back, but on the whole I really enjoyed the original. The writing made sense within its own logic, it was consistent and the mayhem was original. The sequel, by contrast, was confused and derivitive, repetitive.

The two things that annoyed me the most, however, were (1) references to things that hadn't happened in the original, but in the video games, so non-gamers like myself were left hanging, and (2) the explicit "to be continued..." ending. If it says "to be continued next episode", it television, not movies. Even Star Wars draws to some kind of self-contained conclusion at the end of each episode, but this was just lame -- tune in next $30 to find out what is happening? And even then, not really know unless you've seen the intervening video games?

Bite me.

Shubenacadie Photos

Following our trip to Disneyland, we went out to Halifax for a conference. While there, we went out to Shubenacadie Wildlife Park, and I snapped a few wildlife pictures. I also got a couple of good shots of squirrels in Point Pleasant Park. Nothing exceptional, but I was impressed that my little pocket digital (a Minolta Dimage X) was able to get even half way decent shots (the originals are much crisper than seen here, since I obviously had to compress the images fairly severely for posting on the web) and am quite pleased we we doled out the money for it. Since the camera slides easily into my shirt pocket or Mary's clutch purse (it is 3.25" x 2.75" x .75"), it is always with us. The convenience, combined with the instant feedback and the elimination of film costs, means that we are takiing way more (and generally better) pictures than a year ago.

Disneyland Part I

We went to Disneyland this year for a number of reasons: At five, my daughter Tigana was old enough to fully enjoy it, young enough to still believe in the magic (though on the flight down, she turned to us and asked, "So the princesses that live in Disney, are they the real ones or only pretend ones?" Quick-thinking Mom forestalled the crisis by shouting, "Hey, what's that over there!" thus allowing us to dodge that bullet for the nonce); with another baby on the way, this was Tigana's last chance for a vacation as a single child; Mary needed something concrete to celebrate passing her Ph.D. comprehensive examinations. The actual timing of the trip kept changing in response to Mary's Ph.D. program constantly shifting the timing of her comprehensives; advice we were getting from informants on weather and crowd conditions at Disneyland; and the necessities of our day jobs. In the end, Mary booked our Disneyland trip immediately after her comps, and immediately before a conference in Halifax.

When I say, "immediately after comps" I mean that literally: After two 8 hour days of examinations, she got in a car and drove with us the seven hours to Edmonton (we booked our flights out of Edmonton so Mary's parents could look after our dogs while we were away), and having thus arrived in Edmonton after midnight, went immediately to bed so we could get up the next morning for a 7AM flight to Vancouver, and hence to California. Considering that Mary was exhausted from months of holding down a full time teaching position, writing papers for her Ph.D. courses, prepping for the comprehensive exams, and then actually writing the exams, all while suffering the myriad symptoms of first-trimester pregnancy, well, this may not have been the most auspicious beginning for our trip.

Indeed, a couple of weeks before we were scheduled to leave for California, Mary's leg gave out. Mary has chronic back pain, but the pregnancy began pushing on the sciatic nerve, crippling her left leg completely. Mary was in tears to think her trip ruined, but it must be said that this complication turned out to provide an unexpected benefit for Tigana and I. Turns out, if one is in a wheelchair, one's family uses a separate wheel chair entrance to the rides, which completely bypass the regular line-ups. We had planned our trip before school lets out in the States, so we arrived during low season when lineups were still only 45 minutes to an hour per ride, but I don't think we ever waited more than five minutes. (Some rides have special easy-to-board wheelchair cars, so we would have to wait for the ride to cycle through to that car, or wait while another wheelchair party ahead of us took their turn, but compared to the regular lineups, this was as nothing.) Thus, it was not uncommon for us to do five or six rides in an hour, compared to others completing only a single ride in the same period.

This was not entirely appreciated by Mary, who was, of course, still stuck in a stupid wheel chair for much of the trip and in considerable discomfort. Whenever Tigana and I would go into one of the kid's performances, for example, Mary would have to sit in the back of the theater while Tigana moved as close to the performers as possible. Mary became quite frustrated being parked in front of blank walls while Tigana and I went off to climb a jungle gym or poke around some exhibit. And we discovered that well meaning staff and tour guides would sometimes relocate Mary three or four times before pronouncing themselves satisfied she was not in the way, which sometimes left Mary feeling more like luggage than a person. Being pregnant, in pain and nauseous no doubt contributed to feelings of abandonment, so the wheel chair was definitely a mixed blessing from Mary's perspective.

But Tigana and I reveled in the absence of lineups, our ability to pile up our souvenirs and packages on Mary's lap, and even short cuts through customs and various airport lineups. Thus, Tigana's first experience of Disneyland was very different than most kids facing the typical four-hour line-ups.

And I must say that Mary and I enjoyed the trip much more than we had expected. Not only did we have the satisfaction of observing Tigana caught up in the magic of meeting her various princess idols, but many of the older rides turned out to be extremely nostalgic for us, and we even enjoyed the new rides. We were particularly impressed by Aladdin, a full-scale Broadway-style, live musical spectacular , complete with the Caves of Doom elephant, the city of Akkaba, an elephant processional, and a flying carpet that zooms out over the audience. I thought it one of the best theater productions I've seen in years, though only 43 minutes long, the perfect length to keep the attention of kids like Tigana. We had great front row seats, so one of the camels actually came close enough for Tigana to pet during the procession scene. Pretty cool!

Disneyland Trip Part II

(Apparently, the trip report was too long to put into one post, so I have split it into two parts here.)

The other aspect of the trip Mary and I particularly enjoyed was meeting up with Adrian Fischer, former buddy of mine and currently Director of Entertainment Operations at Disneyland. I remember 20 years ago asking Adrian what he wanted to be when he graduated, and he talked at length about his interest in being a theater producer, perhaps on Broadway, and then pausing and saying, "either that, or maybe running Disneyland." Well, 20 years later darned if he isn't indeed running all the theater at Disneyland. He oversees approximately 1500 productions a week, including the aforementioned Alladin.

Posing with Adrian Fischer, Director of Entertainment Operations, Disneyland, in his Long Beach, California home.

Talking to Adrian was amazing because within five minutes it was like old times again; and Mary and Tigana took an instant liking to him. Adrian was full of amazing anecdotes about his experiences as a producer and executive, which Mary (being a management professor) found as fascinating as I did; and since we introduced Adrian as "The Boss of Disneyland" to Tigana, he was pretty much guaranteed a place on her list of favorite people! I got to spend three evenings with Adrian, which I felt a bit guilty about because he was of course working during the week and had house guests on the weekend, but it was the first time we'd seen each other in person in nearly 15 years, so what the heck. I was surprised at how easily we found picking up the conversation from where we last left off, and how comfortable it felt; or to put it another way, just how much I had missed Adrian.

It was also great seeing Adrian's home. He has an astounding place, with the kind of furniture and décor one usually only sees in magazines. I was particularly impressed by some of the pieces that Adrian had designed himself. (I asked, "Where do you find a carpenter to do this kind of craftsmanship for you?" To which he made the obvious reply, "One of the guys from Dinsey in his off hours." Well, duh!) I often wonder what happened to that old gang of mine, and Adrian is certainly one of the success stories.

On the Cheap

We did the flights down on airline points, so airfare was essentially free. We had originally intended to stay for free with Adrian in Long Beach (his home includes a guest suite complete with separate entrance), but in the event, Mary's first trimester condition required frequent naps, so we needed to be within walking (wheelchair) distance of Disneyland, so we opted to stay in one of the three Disneyland hotels instead. We decided to splurge and go for concierge service which gives you free breakfast, videos, and so on, and had a great 14th floor view of California Adventure (the Disney theme park adjoining Disneyland.)

The view from our Paradise Pier Hotel Room

Fortunately Adrian was able to give us one of his employee vouchers so we paid about half what the room normally goes for. And Adrian was able to sign us in to Disneyland for free each day, so that was another huge savings! But we still managed to spend a bundle. I don't know how most families manage it, but I must say I thought Disneyland provided value for the money, and was a much better experience than I had expected.

Trip Photo Gallery

Middle of the night...

... I startled awake. I quickly replayed the last 30 seconds of short term memory to see what had awakened me. (The same mechanism that allows students to answer questions when teachers call on them mid-daydream. They may not have heard the question until their name was appended at the end, but with luck, they captured enough on tape that they can rewind, replay, and answer before it becomes too obvious they weren't paying attention.) All I could find, however, was a quiet "Robert" from my wife. But my startle response had included a loud (okay, screamed) "What? What is it? What's wrong?" so Mary was already answering that "There's something…could you check?"

So I check on Tigana, and she is sleeping soundly. The dogs have followed me out of the bedroom, and checked out the rest of the house, come back and report everything is fine. I return to the bedroom.

"Tigana's fine, and if there were anything wrong the dogs would be barking."

"You're right," said Mary, obviously much relieved. "Thanks."

"What did you hear?"

"I felt a presence."

We'd been through this before with our previous pregnancy. "It's probably just the baby," I said.

"You're right, I'm sure that's it."

And then I thought about it for a minute. Mary had been feeling the baby move for a couple of weeks already, so it wasn't just that the baby moved for the first time, like last time. And, when I reran the tape again, I thought that perhaps something did kind of brush past me there in the ether. So, as I climbed back into bed I raised the possibility, "What if this is the precise moment in the pregnancy where the baby becomes a person? What if you suddenly felt a presence because the baby had suddenly become one?"

"Interesting…" was the only response I got before Mary drifted off back to sleep. Well, 3AM is not the best time for a deep theological discussion. But, I can't help wondering.

Phone Booth (movie)

Saw Phone Booth last night. Recommend it if you're in the mood of a tense little thriller. Would make an interesting stage play. Has a certain something... Decent writing, I guess.

I'm off to Disneyland tomorrow. Then a conference in Halifax. Assuming Air Canada is still flying. So not likely to have any entries until late June.

Have a good summer.

Everything I Learned in Grade School is False

I have been noting for some years now that everything my grade 3 teacher taught us was wrong: For example, I clearly remember her laughing at me when I pointed out that the bump on Africa seemed to fit into the corner of South America and telling me that, "the continents don't move, silly!" Then along came plate techtonics. Or the time she explained atoms were the smallest things and laughing when I asked what they were made out of. She had apparently never heard of quarks, though she really should have been. And etc. But I must confess that as the list of things I was taught and have always believed true but now turn out to be wrong, grows longer, it is starting to bug me.

Here the latest brain hurting discovery: A team of researchers headed by Lene Hau has found a way to slow the speed of light to a complete stop, and then restart it. Previously, Lau and her colleagues reduced the speed of light to 38 miles per hour (the speed of suburban traffic) -- Nature 397: 594 (1999).

NASA-funded research at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., that literally stops light in its tracks, may someday lead to breakneck-speed computers that shelter enormous amounts of data from hackers. ..."This could open up a whole new way to use light, doing things we could only imagine before," Hau said. "Until now, many technologies have been limited by the speed at which light travels." The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second (670 million miles per hour). ... Hau's team accomplished "light magic" by laser-cooling a cigar-shaped cloud of sodium atoms to one-billionth of a degree above absolute zero, the point where scientists believe no further cooling can occur. Using a powerful electromagnet, the researchers suspended the cloud in an ultra-high vacuum chamber, until it formed a frigid, swamp-like goop of atoms.When they shot a light pulse into the cloud, it bogged down, slowed dramatically, eventually stopped, and turned off. The scientists later revived the light pulse and restored its normal speed by shooting an additional laser beam into the cloud.

As a long time science fiction reader, the news release immediately brought to mind the Bob Shaw "slow glass" stories, in which windows made of slow glass show scenes that were on the other side of them years before. See, for example, Light of Other Days.

And to think my elementary school teachers did not approve of SF. In the long run, SF has proved more often right than they were!

I wasn't sure how I felt about the "frozen light" news release, though, until I read Dennis Valdron's reaction:

Bugger this. Whatever happened to the good old days when the Universe was
not accelerating, there were only four fundamental forces and you damned
well knew where you stood with the speed of light. Goddamn kids, mucking
around with universal constants like the gain on their stereo system. Mark
my words, no good will come of this physics hooliganism!

Seems to about capture it for me!