I watched the pilot episode for the new Knight Rider series the other day... Actually, I should rephrase that. I tried to watch the pilot episode. But after about 15 minutes, I just couldn't continue. I cannot express in words just how bad it was. I have to admit, I actually liked the original Knight Rider... The theme was actually the ringtone on my cellphone for a while. But I'll be the first person to admit that it was a terrible show. It was just one of those good terrible shows. You know what I mean?

But this new show... Holy crap... It makes the old show look like one of the gems of television. I can't imagine how anyone could even begin to consider it a good show. What were the producers thinking? Oh, and I agree with the reviews I read after the fact that the show is basically just a 40 minute long Ford commercial. Everybody knows that the original KITT was a Trans Am, but that show was anything but a Pontiac commercial... But even in the 15 minutes I watched, there were so many completely intentional shots of the new KITT's Ford logo, or Mustang Cobra emblem... It was insulting. Oh well... One less thing for my DVR to concern itself with.

Sarah, Kate and I just watched Across the Universe. I was skeptical of the movie when I first heard about it since other Beatles-inspired movies in the past had been pretty bad and never saw it for that reason. But we finally decided to watch it and I have to say I'm reasonably impressed. It was a very well done movie, and while it did get a little... um... trippy after about the half way point, it was a good story, and it was shot beautifully. And I have to say that the actors all did a fantastic job, even if none of the leads had established careers. Also, Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite... Great.

Just tried out the new iTunes Movie Rental service to watch Live Free or Die Hard.  Not too shabby.

The download completely saturated my 10 Mbit cable connection, which meant the movie was ready to watch after only about 10 seconds, and was completely copied to my hard drive in about 25 minutes, so the movie played flawlessly the whole way through.

Quality was very nice.  As good as watching a DVD.  Scaled up to the resolution of my monitor, there was a bit of artifacting, but not any more than I would have expected.  Sound was also good, though I'm told it's only stereo.  I watched this one from my desk, so I only had stereo speakers anyway.

Not really going to comment on the film, though...  Kinda hokey...  And being a geek... well... the plot seems like it was written for the masses and not me.  Oh well.  It was worth my $4.

I think Apple might actually be on to something here...  Maybe this will turn around sales of the AppleTV.  Still not totally sure if I want one or not, but at the new lower price, it seems a bit more tempting.  Still probably going to hold out on it until I get an HDTV.

This week is finally over. Yay!

The last week at work was crazy. Our new guy is unbelievably clueless. And beyond clueless, he's completely socially inept, amazingly annoying, and incapable of following simple instructions. Oh, and he has absolutely no intuitive ability.

He's been working on a work request (ONE work request... only) for the past seven or eight days. Granted it probably wasn't the simplest thing to have him start with, but there's absolutely no reason for it to have taken a week to do. And beyond that, it's not even done now. The client started breathing down our backs about it (via several layers of indirection, but the effect is still the same), so our boss finally decided after he left today that it needs to be reassigned to someone else, and given the "quality" of work that's been done so far, it pretty much means that someone else is going to have to start it up from scratch. At least it should only be a few hours' work for them.

I'm really grateful right now that I'm on the Sunday - Thursday schedule and he's on Tuesday - Saturday. I actually feel bad for the people that are on with him, especially on Saturdays. I don't know how I would survive.

As much as I really don't wish bad things on others, I really hope he doesn't pan out. Given how he's been doing so far, I really don't think that any amount of time is going to make him fit in any better, and even if he does mature into a better employee, his personality really isn't compatible with our workplace. Even though we work in a very fast-paced environment, pretty much everyone there is a really laid back... geeks. There's really no other way to put it. The environment is definitely one of the best parts of the job. I enjoy the fact that I can go off on a tangent with my co-workers about impossible temporal anomalies that exist in The Terminator (see note).

Anyway, ignoring all of that, the week was still pretty hectic, and I'm very glad that it's finally over. Hopefully next week will be better.

On temporal anomalies: For the sake of argument, assume that time travel is possible, and the arguments "it's science-fiction" and "this violates the laws of quantum mechanics" are not valid. When considering the ordering of events, the most logical explanation I can come up with is that time travels linearly with the time traveler. When moving forward through time, time simply goes on around the time traveler, and when traveling backward, one can assume that the timeline that was ceases to exist and time starts over again at the point that the time traveler went to. With only one time traveler (or, one time machine), this is very easy to map. This pretty much maps to the way that time travel is explained by Doc in Back to the Future Part II.

So, by this definition, if Marty and Doc were to go to the abandoned mine the first time Marty went to 1955, they would not find a DeLorean there, because Doc hasn't buried it there yet, even though Doc buries it 70 years earlier. The DeLorean isn't there because in its normalized timeline*, the event of it being buried has not occurred yet.

*The DeLorean's normalized timeline:

1. 1982/3: Construction
2. 1983 - 1985: Conversion to time vehicle
3. 1955: Marty travels to 1955 for the first time.
4. 1985: Marty returns to 1985
5. 2015: Doc travels to 2015 by himself
6. 2020 - 2025: Doc, investigating the events of the collapse of Marty and Jennifer's family
7. 1985: Doc returns to pick up Marty
8. 2015: Doc and Marty prevent Marty Jr. from doing the thing with Griff
9. 1955: Biff gives the Almanac to himself
10. 2015: Biff returns to 2015, and dies
11. 1985: Doc and Marty return to 1985 (the f***ed up one)
12. 1955: Doc and Marty prevent Biff from getting the Almanac
13. 1885: Doc gets sent back to 1885
14. 1885(6?) - 1955: The DeLorean sits in the mine
15. 1955: Doc (young) and Marty retrieve the DeLorean from the mine
16. 1885: Marty saves Doc
17. 1985: Marty returns to 1985, and the DeLorean is destroyed (it is approximately 73 years old at this point)

So anyway, you can see that when Marty is in 1955 the first time (3), the car hasn't arrived at the mine yet (14).

Anyway, back to my point. In The Terminator, you can't unravel the timeline like this. John Connor's father, Kyle Reese, is sent back in time by John to meet his mother. THAT CAN'T HAPPEN. There can't be a starting point. In order for John to be alive, Kyle must have time traveled, but in order for Kyle to time travel, John must be alive. This is an unsolvable reverse time paradox, which can only lead to the conclusion that John Connor cannot exist.

Wow, that was a long side point.

Edit: I just realized I forgot about the DeLorean's very first trip, when Einstein moved forward exactly one minute. This is inconsequential, however, as it simply means that Einstein and the DeLorean don't exist for a minute.

Edit 2: I just realized that the timeline in BTTF Part II is screwed up... Based on my own logic, step 10 can't happen. Once Biff goes back in time, he changes the timeline. Biff can't return to the old timeline (which at this point no longer exists), he can only move forward in the timeline he just created. So assuming that he did kill himself during the trip, the DeLorean would be in "alternate" 2015, Doc (if he's even alive at this point) would probably still be in an institution and wouldn't know that he ever built the time machine, and Marty wouldn't know Doc. So unless someone accidentally discovered the DeLorean after Biff died and went back to 1955 to prevent Biff from getting the almanac, the timeline would be permanently altered. Damn paradoxes.

Oh...

I finally got some work done on my model railroad! I've been trying to work on it for weeks, but never seemed to have any free time. Yesterday, Yuri came over and we had lots of fun playing with my new power tools and hacking away at the lumber to make the first of two tables for the layout.

We would have finished the table yesterday, but we didn't plan on how many screws we'd need correctly, and ran out before attaching the legs. But the table frame is now complete (sans legs). I think it came out quite well. Now I need to finalize the design for the modules, and then I can go out and start buying and laying track! And that means I might have a moderately functional layout in only a few more weeks!

The table design is really just an open frame, as I'll be building a modular layout on top of it, and all the table needs to do is hold the modules up/in place. I'll also obviously need access to the bottom of the modules once they're installed to attach wiring and whatnot.

After stopping our work due to lack of screws, Sarah, Yuri, and I all went out to dinner, then out for some essential shopping, and back home to watch our newly acquired copy of The Prestige. Amazing movie, I must say, even having seen it before and knowing all of the secrets. Normally not the case with a movie of its genre, but damn. This is another movie that I'd recommend watching if you haven't.

Update: Here's a pic of the (currently legless) table!

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Last week, Sarah and I finally got around to renting Children of Men. We had originally intended to see the film in theaters, but didn't actually have time to until the week after it stopped being played anywhere near us. So... we waited for the DVD release and picked it up.

The film was absolutely fantastic. Interesting story, very thought provoking. I thought the acting was very good as well, even though there weren't any really big name actors in it, other than Michael Caine and Julianne Moore, though Moore's role was not a particularly big one. The main character was played by Clive Owen, who I don't think is a particularly well known character, but I happen to think that he's really freaking cool, particularly because of his role as the Driver in the eight short films made for BMW in 2001 and 2002, collectively known as The Hire. Personally, I think Owen was perfectly cast for this role.

If you haven't heard of the film, the basic premise is that in a few years from now, all of the women everywhere in the world become suddenly and inexplicably infertile. The movie is set about 18 years after that, and, in the interim, society has essentially fallen apart. It's a very dark view on our possible future, but does raise the very good question of what would happen, should something like that come to be. Definitely not something for everyone, but given the fact that you're actually reading my blog, I'm going to make the assumption that you, the reader, would very much enjoy it. If you've not seen this film, do your self a favor and rent it. It's well worth it.

While on the subject of the future, I wanted to write about another movie Sarah and I recently watched, Idiocracy, which gave a somewhat different prediction of things to come. The premise here is that through generations of inadvertent selective breeding, the human race devolved so much that the average person's IQ had dropped to only the mid-40s. Though I don't really see this as a particularly likely scenario for our species, the movie does make the interesting yet highly stereotypical point that in our "modern" society, the number of offspring a person has does seem to inversely correlate to their IQ, at least for the upper and lower extremes. At least if this does happen to occur, it won't happen for many generations, so we won't need to suffer through it ourselves.

Idiocracy was written and directed by Mike Judge, who also wrote Office Space, among other popular movies and television shows. Personally, I don't think that this was one of his better works, and, while the premise might be somewhat interesting, the movie overall is pretty dumb. I suppose that maybe it's just not the type of comedy that I appreciate. I wouldn't bother watching it unless you've got nothing better to do.

By the way, the title of this post is the only reference to Ren and Stimpy I'll ever make, other than possibly referring to Monopoly as Monotony.