Ever seen one of those ‘powers of 10′ demos where they start from earth orbit and zoom down to a couple at a picnic? Check out this one for an even grander sense of scale. Mind, you need a web browser with Java to see it. Tres cool.

I finished watching this last night while exercising. I give it three stars. It’s a well acted, well directed and reasonably entertaining film that’s based on a true story about a teenager who runs away from home when his parents split up in the early 1960’s. He becomes the most notorious check kiter in the history of the country, racking up something north of $4 million in bad checks. Leonardo Dicaprio plays the kid and Tom Hanks plays the good hearted but bumbling FBI agent trying to catch him. The movie is a little on the dry side and I thought they pushed the ‘it’s all because of the tragedy of his parents splitting up’ angle a little too hard, but all in all I enjoyed it.

I find it interesting that Hanks chose to play the role of the FBI agent in this movie. He plays it very low key and there’s not much for him to work with. Because of this I would have expected a less prestigious actor in the role. He does a credible job, it’s just like…his talents are wasted here.

Folks have been emailing and IM’ing me so I should post about this. This is what I know:

Nothing is writ in stone yet, so take everything I know with that in mind.

I have been assured my position is ok, Kevin has as well.

The rumors are that the majority of cuts are coming out of the CIS staff, and that they are meeting today with HR. Since none of our staff has been summoned to an HR meeting we are all feeling much more confident that we will still have jobs at the end of February.

Longer term things are murkier - the senior staff of the college has decided to hire a CIO to run all aspects of IT on campus, and the word is they will merge our staff into the existing CIS infrastructure at that point. The implications for me that could come out of this are unknown at this point. I would figure on it taking them at least 6 months to get a new candidate hired and acclimated to the environment here. I remain concerned about this but there’s nothing I can do and I have some time to worry about it.

So, that’s it. The condensed version is, it’s looking like I survived the layoffs though there are potentially issues in the future that could be a problem.

Sounds incredible doesn’t it? I was as surprised as anyone. I was looking into better ways to read ebooks on my laptop and stumbled across Virtualrotoscope for win32. It turns out that reading speed and comprehension is increased by reducing distractions, which include among other things the other words surrounding the one you’re trying to read. Virtualrotoscope flashes words at you extremely quickly, one word at a time. I know it doesn’t sound like it should work very well, but try it, you’ll be amazed. I’ve discoverd I can blow through a novel in only a few hours using this tool.

So…you ever play Tunnels and Trolls when you were young? Ok, I admit it, I’m probably the only likely to read this who has. It was a simple and fun DnD-like game we used to play at Pat Leighton’s house now and then. Some enterprising fellow has put a bunch of the old adventures online so you can relive those moments of past glory. Or pretend you were me at 14. Or something

The bad karma continues to haunt me. Word came down from the college’s president today that we will have layoffs by the end of february, somewhere around 25-30 people. I think that’s roughly 8% of the college’s full time staff, so thats a big layoff. I have no idea yet if I will be affected, but statistics and the rumor mill indicate I will - apparantly the hardest hit will be the IT staff, which means me or my co-workers.

I’m not freaked yet - my boss likes me a lot and as far as I can tell I am generally very well regarded by the people I work for besides him, plus I have some level of seniority at this point compared to many folks, so for now I am cautiously optimistic. My biggest fear is they just decide to gut the web publishing side of things, which there is some sentiment for, and I become a casuality of that.

More as soon as I know. I’m going to go off to Belize in February and come back to no job! sheesh.

I mention this in the post below and I realized I’ve never really brought it up here. In a sentence: DC++ is the best thing since Hotline first emerged 5 or 6 years ago. It’s file sharing software along the lines of, say, napster. It’s got some rough edges, but it works better than any other currently available package. You can find anything your heart desires - movies, games, music, obscure novels, pictures of your dear aunt minnie’s rose gardens. Whatever! Except maybe that last one. Anyway, the catch is, you have to share too. It does a better job than any software to date of making sure that if you want to get stuff, you have to share your stuff too. This leads to more universally available stuff.

I can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve been running it pretty much constantly since it came out. Check it out, it’s available for all the major OS’s.

This is what I absolutely love about the internet. I’m browsing through a computer game newsgroup tonight and one of the threads turns to books, specifically fantasy novels. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been on a fantasy kick for over a year now, re-reading some of my old favorites from my youth and disovering some new ones (most notably George R.R. Martin, China Mieville and Steven Erikson). Anyway, a number of authors are discussed. I mosey over to my instance of dc++, which is running, and do a search on a number of the authors mentioned. Within 5 minutes I’ve downloaded about 12-15 different novels to look over.

For those of you who would accuse me of theft - I will end up buying the novels that interest me. While I have a much greater tolerance for reading in front of the computer than most anyone I know, I still can’t manage to read through novels that way. I’ve tried
(oh, and right off the bat, Robin Hobb looks promising, it reminds me of George R.R. Martin already)

Narc is the best movie I’ve seen in at least a year. Compelling, gritty, complex, thought provoking…it’s almost perfect. This is not a movie for the faint of heart though, and it’s not a casual experience - you need to pay close attention and you should prepare yourself for violence in its worst forms and an absolutely devestating ending . It’s so damned rare for hollywood to put out a movie like this - it’s a throwback to the 70’s, a movie the challenges you to think about what you’re watching instead of just overwhelming you with visual effects.

The plot follows a detective who has lost his place on the force due to a bust gone bad who is coaxed back into work to help solve a cop killing. Things turn out to be more complex then they seem and clues to the case end up involving his partner on the case, played by Ray Liotta who does an awesome job.

Don’t miss this movie, it’s that good. But don’t watch it with your girlfriend either

I am borrowing a DVD drive from work to play around with. So far it’s ok, sort of a pain in the ass though. Writing 4.7 gigs of data to a disc takes a long time is the unfortunate bottom line. But what if there was something better, like for example credit-card sized 5 gig hard drives that sold for $15? It seems too good to be true, but they’re supposed to ship in the second half of this year so we’ll see. The technology certainly seems promising.

Man, those auctions went over extremely well, I had hoped to get $90-$100 out of them and managed to score almost $170, so color me a happy camper. They went well enough that I’m going to put more online this week. I’m about as broke as I can manage to get, between medical bills, xmas and the recently dead hard drive I have had to lay out a ton of cash. I’m in recoup mode, even going to sell off some of the board game collection, only the ones that are of lesser interest to me though, not the avalon hill stuff.

Brief and to the point on this one - it pretty much sucked. Check out reviews on the IMDB site, but take it from me, aside from excessive gore (assuming thats even your thing, it’s not mine) and a scantily clad Milla Jovovich, this movie has nothing going for it. The plot follows the adventures of a team of commandos sent in to investigate what went wrong at the top secret research labs of a mega-corporation. Turns out evil brain sucking zombies is what’s gone wrong, along with a possibly evil supercomputer and genetically mutated killer zombie bunnies (I kid you not). Actually now the movie sounds like more fun than it is. I guess it would be ok for a ‘oh look what’s on HBO tonight’ kinda thing, but I wouldn’t waste time renting it.

Check out The Elder Geek. There’s a great collection of tips, walkthroughs, and explanation on all things windows there. This site was very helpful as I tried to recover from hard drive death this weekend.

I think I mentioned last week that the hard drive started to fail on my primary desktop at home. I bought a new drive from my favorite online vendor and spent the weekend getting everything up and running again. Things went fairly smoothly with a few exceptions:

• I discovered that my machine cannot boot to its DVD drive. This took hours to figure out, the machine was failing to boot to the windows xp install cd. Ultimately I pulled the cd rom from my linux box and got it booting that way.
• I cannot seem to get Firewire working reliably. The DVD burner constantly disconnects from the machine, seemingly at random, which among other things causes burning of DVDs to fail. I’m still digging into this one. So far I know it is a known issue pre-service pak 1, but I already have that installed so thats not it.

Other than that, and the fact that I basically have no software installed yet, (oh, and the fact that it took pretty much all weekend) things went ok.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike Windows? Would that there was something better.

What is Quorn? Now I know. I’d read a bit about it here and there, and now I’ve finally had a chance to sample some. It’s not bad, tastes a bit like chicken thats been cooked too long, at least in the form I bought it, which was ‘reasonable copy of roast chicken.’

Quorn, for those not in the know, is yet another in an endless line of ‘Textured Vegetable Proteins.’ I’ve been eating quite a lot of them lately. For the most part they are at best just ok, and most of them suck. Most people have encountered them in the form of veggie burgers like Boca Burgers (which are actuallly very tasty).

Anyway Quorn is a product out of the UK and is marketed as the perfect TVP. I don’t know if it’s all that but I thought it was good enough that I’ll buy it again. They carry it at my local health food store. It turns out it’s mostly made out of mushrooms. It’s high protein, very low fat and cholestoral, and a good amount of fibre. On paper anyway it’s great for you. If you’re feeling adventurous, give it a shot, your heart will thank you later

I keep forgetting to post this. Have you bought a CD from a music retailer between 1995 and 2000? If so the RIAA owes you up to $20. They lost a lawsuit over price fixing and as part of the settlement they have to pay back the consumers they swindled. If too many people sign up we get no money and it goes to charity, but supposedly almost no one is signing up so far. So Go sign up!. Worst case you get some spam from the RIAA, best case they send you a check for $20.

Check This out Straight out of Stephenson’s Snow Crash (a most excellent book btw, as is everything by Stephenson). I signed up for a beta account. It just amazes me to see the stuff I was reading about in sci fi 10 years ago turning into reality. This may turn out to be the year of the mass market acceptance of virtual reality as a place to be, between this and The Sims.

Man it has just not been my day for the last 24 hours. First Lisa and I broke up, which though not entirely unexpected was still a downer. Then While I am sitting in my office ruminating on the end of yet another relationship my boot volume on my desktop pc starts making the click of death. It’s on its way out, meaning I will need to reinstall windows and all its components. There goes this weekend plus several days. Then I get in the car this morning and the Saturn makes some very ominous ‘your brakes are failing’ noises when I stop at the first traffic light. I had a hint this was coming from when I drove down to NY a few weeks ago but at the time I chalked it up to ice on the brake pads. So much for that theory. This is going to be a very expensive couple of months for me.

Well, it’s official. Lisa and I broke up last night. This is a bummer. Not a major bummer, there were some issues between Lisa and I that were giving me cause for concern about the long-term viability of our relationship, but still a bummer. She was a decent person and fun to be around, I will definitely miss her, and Samantha as well.

Well, not really. I bought The Cartoon History of the Universe on a whim when I was ordering christmas presents, figuring it would be a guilty pleasure, but as it turns out it’s a great, often amusing ‘clif notes’ version of world history through the time of Alexander the Great. There are two other volumes as well. I can’t recommend these highly enough - if you’re feeling a little rusty on the basic history they taught you back in high school this is a wonderful and entertaining way to give yourself a refresher.