Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

Thanks to Slashdot I found a real diamond in the rough, the short film The Sith Apprentice. One of the various fan films that have been made around the Star Wars saga, this short film -- maybe 5 minutes long -- takes a humorous look at Star Wars, placing it in the midst of the current reality TV genre a la Donald Trump's "The Apprentice". I can't say that I ever have watched Trump's latest money-making scheme but the Sith take on it is just about the funniest thing I've seen in months.

These folks lampoon reality TV -- "The Apprentice" in particular -- while putting in enough inside jokes and references to satisfy even the most die-hard Shrek fan. Everything from Celtic dancing to inside references from The Princess Bride and Highlander are in there. They even worked in the "It's just a flesh wound!" line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Fan films have really taken off in the last few years thanks to the technology that enables low-cost digital filming and PC post-processing. There's a number of Star Trek fan films, including one really high-end one from Germany done strictly by kids and teenagers. "The Sith Apprentice" is one of 16 Star Wars fan films in the running for some special title -- I forget the specifics -- but it certainly has my vote.

Favorite quote: "I thought Pete Cushing would be here...", by the Christopher Lee impersonator (in character) acting rather nonplussed by the whole reality TV thing.

Favorite pratfall: Vader activates his blue lightsaber and, when prompted by the Emperor about it being the wrong color, he whacks it a couple of times and knocks it to green, purple, and then finally to red. Followed up with "I'm sorry, Master -- old habit."

I'm not feeling blue these days -- I'm feeling cranberry. I've had it up to here with cranberries lately, not because I'm still working on the turkey from last Thanksgiving but because I've been prone to getting urinary tract infections for the past couple of years. I never had a single one for the first 35 years of my life but the last two years have been murder. Two years ago this May I had some surgery done and I had a catheter due to being stuck in a hospital bed while recovering. Ever since then I've had a problem with UTIs. I can't definitively say that the catheter was the culprit, but the coincidence is amazing if coincidence is all it is.

So, back to cranberries. The acidity of them creates an environment that is not conducive to bacterial growth in the urinary tract. More simply put, cranberries kill bacteria. As a result, I've drunk an ocean of Ocean Spray and popped cranberry extract pills like they were M&M candies. I can actually intelligently discuss the pros and cons of Ocean Spray vs. Tropicana. I've also tried the various hybrid drinks that Ocean Spray has put on the market in an attempt to woo the cranberries-are-too-tart crowd. CranApple and CranGrape taste nice but do bupkus for a UTI. The cranberry tea that Ocean Spray introduced is just as nasty as it sounds...possibly worse, now that I think about it. Nope, it takes the hard stuff to keep the symptoms of a UTI at bay.

Incidentally, what are the symptoms, you ask? Well, I'm experiencing them right now and having a fine old time of it I might add. First, urinating burns. Bad. I don't know what it's like for a woman, but for a man it feels like passing razor blades. Second, the sensation that you need to go urinate is always there. Since the cranberry juice takes about 3 hours to make the symptoms subside (mostly) it means that the victim feels like he/she has to go right now the entire time and, during the 4-6 trips to the Little Programmer's Room over the span of those 3 hours, Symptom #1 is kicking ass and taking names. I handle pain well but have actually screamed during these times.

Unfortunately, cranberry juice is only a temporary cure for the symptoms. It can lead someone into thinking the problem is cured, but stop drinking it for about two days and just wait. It will eventually kill off the bacteria once and for all but it takes drinking a healthy amount every day for 1-2 weeks. What will kill it off quickly is antibiotics -- the symptoms subside and the bacteria die thanks to the medicine. Keflex is what always works for me. The problem is that sustained levels of antibiotics aren't healthy as it helps develop bacteria immune to the antibiotic being used. Also, taking them often isn't healthy for the same reason. So as a result, I'm often (and presently) awash in a sea of red liquid with my bladder acting as the new proving grounds for an army of little microscopic Imperial Stormtroopers shooting their tiny blaster rifles. I just downed about a quart of cranberry juice so hopefully it will only be the Stormtroopers; the Death Star already fired a couple of times tonight and I think that's quite enough.

Maybe some Matrixesque logic will assist me in dealing with this problem. Morpheus would tell me that the bacteria have to conform to rules and that's how I can always defeat them. The bald kid at the Oracle's apartment would tell me that there is no bacteria. The Oracle herself would tell me that something's holding me back from killing the bacteria and offer me a cookie. Agent Smith would tell me to conform and simply accept the bacteria. So if I blend all of this together, I can always defeat the bacteria by breaking the rules but I'm not ready to do this yet; however, the bacteria don't exist anyway so I should just accept their nonexistence. All in all, I think the only thing I'd get out of all of that mess was the cookie, but of course it wouldn't exist, either...

The building where I work is one of those nondescript '60s-era blocks with a lot of brick and concrete and some funky panels under all of the windows. No, not turquoise, thankfully, but not much better -- it's some unknown substrate with little white pebbles glued to it that keep falling off over time, giving the building this impromptu perimeter of white gravel. Nethken Hall simply happens to be one of the downright ugliest buildings on the campus. Students liken the inside to a men's shower room with the drains pulled out and showerheads unscrewed, and I'm not entirely certain I disagree with them. For that matter, it seems that there was a surplus of cinder blocks available at the time of construction; the entire inside of the building is cinder blocks with the lower half of every hallway covered in those little 1" squares like, well, what you see in men's shower rooms. I think that the only flammable thing in the building are the wooden desks.

We've had workmen hovering around the building for the past several months replacing all of the windows. Why, you ask? Because all of the first-floor windows leak when it rains. I'm talking leaking to the point that some professors have everything in their offices up on wooden blocks so the water can't creep in. That's right, a bunch of first-floor offices leak to the point that the water is all over the floor, which is nasty when some of the rooms are carpeted. Well, these guys have been replacing all of the windows with more modern-looking non-opening ones. This isn't too cool since the switching from A/C to heat and vice-versa happens once each year. Why? Apparently, this is some complicated process comparable to putting a satellite in orbit. When "the switch" occurs, NASA has a shuttle on the pad for emergency launch, the national guard is on alert, the president is on board the Looking Glass plane, and various officials are stuffed into VIP bunkers. The folks in Nethken Hall just go on with classes and are thankful for now having A/C or heat (whichever we didn't have) and not being blown up in the process. Since "the switch" is such a big deal, we often have to make use of open windows to let in a little good air and let out the bad. Now that the windows are sealed, all of our classes in March will have students in them who are dry roasted, a bit like peanuts. Likewise, all of our classes in October/November will have students who are learning Morse code by the chattering of their teeth. Too bad that the money for the renovations didn't include a real climate control system.

It did, however, include money for replacing the gravel panels with concrete ones and for giving the rest of the outside a good water blasting. My oh my, did that make the building look better. It's like 40 years of hard living just got stripped off of the little monster. Oh, it's still a two-story ogre of a building, but at least it's had a bath and is now accessorized well.

Now if they could just pretty up the shower room/fallout bunker interior we'd all be set...

Researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York state think that they've created a miniature black hole in their collider by slamming gold atoms together at near-light speeds. They were working on creating a fireball -- which they succeeded in doing -- but the fireball has characteristics of a black hole. The BBC has an article that goes over the experiment and explains that the black hole isn't the beginning of the end for the good ole' earth. The fireball/black hole dissapated after 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th (1.0 x 10^-23) of a second.

So I wonder if they're creating a bubble universe? Time on the other side of the black hole doesn't necessarily work at the same rate as here, so a billionth of a second here could be trillions of years there. Nobody's ever considered the ethical dilemma of experimentally creating universes with the possibility of living beings therein. Since this is just an off-the-wall hypothesis, I don't even know if physicists are thinking along these lines. If they do, however, I predict that it will make the issue of when a fetus is a living being trivial in comparison.

Still, as someone who was fascinated with holes in the universe since a kid, I think this is cool science. It's also apparently an unanticipated effect, so it just goes to show how experimental science can be even more interesting than theoretical.

No, it's not the latest technique employed by the music industry to separate you from more of your money; it's a basic algorithm design technique employed in a number of popular algorithms, including Kruskal's, Prim's, Dijkstra's, multiprocessor scheduling, rational knapsack, and Huffman codes. Why do I mention this? I recently interviewed for a faculty position and was asked to give a 75 minute in-class lecture on the Greedy Method. For this occasion I created a Powerpoint presentation, not because I'm part of the point-and-click lecturing brigade (I'm not), but because with the search committee observing me I wanted something more formal and less prone to user (umm, my) error. At any rate, I provided it to the students in the class and I figured, as someone academic, I'd post it here (slides [requires Powerpoint]; slideshow [may not require Powerpoint]) in case anyone else wanted to learn about it. I must have spent 3-4 hours making this presentation, a fair amount of that in getting the animation to work right.

I've gotta say that I like Powerpoint more now that I've seen it as a lecturing aid, but I still don't like the idea of a lecture as a lecture. I hate the idea of talking to a group of people, opting instead to force them to come out of their shells and interact with me directly. Powerpoint reinforces the whole teacher-student barrier, which is something I've gone to great lengths to break down over the last eight years of teaching. Perhaps there is some middle ground, because it's nice to be able to provide students with Powerpoint slides but at the same time it's also nice to be able to just get up there and ad-lib, which is what I usually do. Teaching without a safety net isn't for the prideful or those scared of making mistakes but it gets better results with the students; that is, if you can laugh at yourself from time to time when you go rambling off into the unknown for extended soliloquies of nonsense. Those who need the net tend to be the most active proponents of Powerpoint.

There are certainly other folks who use Powerpoint who don' t need it. It does, after all, make it utterly simple to teach a course over and over. But therein lies the other problem -- the couse is taught the exact same way, over and over. It's easy to become entrenched in a particular way of describing something, and the monotony of saying it the same way over and over just makes students realize how completely bored the instructor is up there. Ad-libbing keeps it fresh, or at least it has for me. I've taught Introduction to Computer Programming about 12 or so times and each time I do it a bit differently. I cover the same material in the same order, but my descriptions vary from class to class and the code examples we create in the classes are always different.

So I like the idea of Powerpoint but the implementation of it can lead to certain pitfalls. If they can be avoided, I might try relying more on it in the future since I can give students more than just source code from the lectures. The academic side of me is envisioning yet another Grand Experiment, which is somewhat disturbing given some of my past Grand Experiments, but this one might be more benign than the others...

There's an article on MP3Newswire.net about the high cost of music downloads and the money grab by the music industry to up the cost of downloads. This fellow is right on the money, pun intended, when he says that the costs should be lowered and not raised. The music industry isn't even supplying us with CDs or vinyl anymore, just their permission to download a digital file. As a result, the cost of manufacturing and distribution is nonexistent. Even with the percentage taken by Apple, Real, and the others, we should be able to get albums for cheaper than $9.99, which is the going price at the iTunes store for most of them. Give the article a read...

Much like my waistline, the federal deficit, and the current trade deficit with Japan, my website has finally expanded some more. I've had some photos stored in my digital camera now for, well, forever it seems, and today I decided to plaster them onto a couple of web pages. I've had a couple of photos of a few recently graduated students of mine and put them up on a page in the hopes that more of my former students will e-mail photos for me to have. I also have been tinkering with my digital camera -- it having a user interface approaching the complexity of the 1040 tax return form -- and have posted a few images of stuff I've taken. It's a stream-of-consciousness thing with no rhyme or reason, but it's a way of seeing some of the stuff around where I live. My current favorite of the few I've uploaded is the lovers' spat. I'll upload more stuff as I take more photos.

Tonight Julie wanted to see the horror film on AMC, Exorcist II: The Heretic. What a monumentally bad movie. IMDB gives it something like a 3.5 out of 10 and indicates that Richard Burton was drunk through most of the shooting, thus his ability to maintain a straight face. I was going to let it slide and not comment on it here until I saw the scene with James Earl Jones. He was dressed in a locust outfit and spat a cherry tomato at Richard Burton while he just stood there, dumbfounded. Well, I guess I'd just stand there, too. You've gotta watch out for those folks who spit fresh produce at you. One day it's a cherry tomato, the next it might be a kiwi or a rapid-fire stream of blueberries. Geesh.

John Lee Hooker's famous song is the cornerstone of the music found in The Blues Brothers, and unfortunately it isn't on the soundtrack CD. I managed to wrangle one up from the cheap rack at Amazon.com for $7 and it showed up today. A great CD. Aretha sings "Think", Jake and Elwood do "Somebody to Love", and thank goodness the show-stealing Cab Calloway number is on there. But I want my "Boom Boom Boom Boom", dammit. Ripped the CD to AAC-encoded MP4s and have it on the iPod already.

Chicago blues is really different from what I'm used to, but it's really entertaining once you get used to the whole brass ensemble backing up the guitar/drum combo. I hear that Memphis blues is even more that way, but I don't know for a fact. Most of my listening these days has been electric blues -- most people equate that to Stevie Ray Vaughn, B. B. King, and Clapton, but I've been digging a bit deeper thanks to RealRhapsody and have come up with some real diamonds in the rough. I've discovered Albert Collins, Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Otis Rush. B. B. King has a really smooth sound, but if you take Stevie Ray and amplify him you get these guys. Collins is really turning out to be my favorite.

I spent the first two decades of my life wallowing in the crap -- there's no other word for it -- that was on the teenie-bopper radio stations where I grew up, oblivious to anything other than the '80s trash that was infesting the airwaves. I occasionally have flashbacks to Culture Club and Men without Hats, leaving me screaming and clawing my eyes like a former LSD user. People dog hair metal as being the worst of '80s music -- ha! Try listening to that Eurotrash from Tears for Fears or The Smiths for 15 minutes without poking your eardrums out with a pencil. The early-to-mid '80s was a time when any idiot with a British accent and the ability to play a keyboard got a record deal. Thank goodness it's over -- not that rap, grunge, and post-grunge whatever-it-is-now is any better. Crap is crap.

Thank goodness music appreciation in college opened my eyes to other kinds of music -- it was responsible for my on-again-off-again interest in classical music, but classical was never really satisfying for some reason. It's too intellectual and devoid of heart. It was in graduate school -- when I heard Stevie Ray Vaughn for the first time -- that I found something that hit a nerve. I made the natural progression to King and Clapton and have been branching out ever since. I'm eyeballing a Muddy Waters CD for next month's mad money expenditure and Hooker has a best-of CD out that is on the wish list. So I might get "Boom Boom Boom Boom" after all...

Ever since the days of Batman and The Lion King I've gotten more and more used to the marketing of products in our popular entertainment. Over the years things have gotten more and more shameless, like with the Sprint PCS store in MIB 2 or the sole remaining restaurant in Los Angeles being Taco Bell in Demolition Man, but we've now hit a new low with fast-food tie-ins. Now, Everquest II has a Pizza Hut tie-in where you can type /pizza and order from Pizza Hut while playing the game. Now you don't even need to separately launch the web browser and enter the URL -- EQII does it all for you and, of course, sends you to Pizza Hut. I wonder how much of a kickback they get for that little gem.

It's nothing new -- all of the popular search engines have "affiliated" customers who get sponsored links slapped on search page results. Giving another company a leg-up and getting a percentage in return is as old as business. It's just a lot more blatant and offensive these days. Whoops, guess I just blew my chance at working for Google.

And while I'm on the subject, Pizza Hut has good pizza but it's like a darned salt lick. I eat Pizza Hut and immediately start drinking liquid by the quart. I feel like a sponge in search of a swimming pool to drain dry. I know all pizza is salty by nature, but it's like Pizza Hut owns Morton Salt. Either that or they own stock in utilities that provide water to various municipalities. Instead of supreme, super supreme, and the like they should name their specialty pizzas after various deserts -- the Mojave, the Sahara, etc. "I'll have a large Mojave with the Death Valley dipping sauce, please." At least it's a reminder of what we're in for...