When Stealing Ohio Isn't Enough

Sunshine: Crap

I was one of the last people in line, and wound up in the front row of the theatre.

I was REALLY looking forward to this film. The reviews that I'd seen were pretty good, with comparisons to 2001 being made here and there.

So. I have now seen it.

In a word: crap. It was awful. A huge, HUGE disappointment. A script that runs amok without any sense. A cast of nobodies that could have walked right off of SCREAM 2 or I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. A preposterous plot, that gets worse as the thing progresses.

A space expedition to save the Earth and all life on it. Think about it. Who would you put aboard the spaceship?

Of course, why would you put ANYONE abord the ship is what I'm wondering -- 50 years from now, we're able to construct this insanely massive ship, but we then select a crew of pouting, selfish nincompoops with the good sense of Thelma and Louise.

What about science? What about reason? There certainly was none in evidence in this film. An utter travesty.

And the worst part: the very very end, when the credits come up, they play this horrible, screeching punk rock music that jars you right out of whatever contemplative mood you might have been in, and you realize you have been utterly, totally HAD by the filmmakers and the (Fox, natch) studio.

My advice to you this summer: Avoid SUNSHINE. Go see a re-run of EVENT HORIZON instead.

Trunk's Open

Not sure this driver realized it, but he pulled into the car-wash with his car's trunk open. Now, the worst part was not that tons of soapy water streamed into the trunk, but that when he pulled out seconds after I'd pulled up in the queue, noticed the car already in the wash, noticed the car's trunk open, and snapped the picture, he was starting to go through the air-dryer phase of the wash, and the hurricane force of the air-dry wind was strong enough to close his trunk! Then the driver pulled away! Prolly never knew that the trunk was open!

Who knows how long it will be before the driver next opens his car's trunk? What a mess it's gotta be inside.

Heart Covering The Who

Compare to, say, this:

Maybe it might be worth catching Heart next time they're in town....

Even more Eventful coverage on CNN

Here's the video itself:

And here's a related story published on the CNN site today.

National Review Cruise

Nettle: one of the first blogs

According to this Wall Street Journal article, blogging is ten years old. Well. no. It's almost ten years old.

So says the article.

Well, I started blogging on June 1st, 1997. The blog was called Nettle.

What a logo :-)

The blog lasted for about a month and a week. The last post was made on July 8th, 1997, and was about the Mars Pathfinder (geez, it seems so long ago, a different era).

At that point I mothballed the blog and it didn't reactivate until August 11, 2002. I'd already started Brianstorms in February 2002 -- why stop at one blog, I thought. Nettle kept going until January 2005 when its most recent post was made. Not sure if I'm going to make any more over there.

Just to be clear, I do not consider my blog to be the first blog. Not at all. I consider Newsreport to be the first blog. That's from 1973. Haven't heard of Newsreport? Well, that's a story for another time. . .

The SUV Meme

One conference panel featured Dawkins (creator of the concept of "memes" among many other accomplishments), Craig Venter, and Bill Joy (whose demeanor seems rather grim these days). For me this was one of the most interesting panels of the conference, just to hear what Dawkins, Venter, and Joy are up to these days.

Joy, who's now funding green technologies at Kleiner Perkins, remarked several times that one of the biggest problems he's facing is a reluctance, a lack of willingness, in the marketplace to adopt green technology faster.

When it came time for questions from the audience, I asked Joy and Dawkins what they thought of the "SUV Meme", the notion that sport-utility vehicles are safe, powerful, the best thing to buy, own, and drive. How do we kill this meme, I asked. They didn't have answers.

When the panel moderator asked the panelists who among them drove SUVs. The moderator raised his hand, and, reluctantly, a bit embarrassed, Venter (one of whose current projects is to design synthetic bacteria to create biofuels) raised his.

Arrogance

Deleting Emails on the iPhone

I'm generally loving the iPhone, like everyone else, but one thing that's driving me crazy is deleting emails. Lots and lots of emails.

I'm on the road right now and during the day I've been checking email via the iPhone. Works great.

Lots of spam, of course, and trying to DELETE stuff is a major pain. It seems like the only way to delete email is as follows:

First you have to go into "Edit" mode in your inbox, say, and then you have to touch the icon consisting of the little red circle with the minus sign in it, and then you have to, um, wait until the "Delete" button appears, and then touch that, and then wait, and then the message goes away.

Well, that is fine if you are deleting one or two. (And yes, you can also view the email contents and touch the trashcan icon while reading and the message deletes that way too, but it's SLOW to load the contents of each email and delete, so I don't go that route).

BUT if you are trying to delete, oh, dozens, or scores, or HUNDREDS of emails, this touch icon, then touch button, then wait, then touch icon, touch button, then wait, method, doesn't, shall we say, scale.

What's worse, I get so many incoming emails (and it's not all spam, despite my example screen shots here) that I find I cannot KEEP UP with the iPhone -- more mails are COMING IN than I can deal with. I cannot delete them fast enough!

So either I am missing some cool way to delete LOTS of messages or say, ideally, DELETE ALL or DELETE SELECTED (I sure miss that feature from my Treo!), or there isn't a way yet to do this on an iPhone.

Assuming there is no way to delete multiple emails yet, I hereby offer one suggestion to Apple:

You'd touch the minus icon, then when the Delete button appears, drag your finger down (or up) and "select" all the emails you wanna delete in one fell swoop. As you would drag, more "Delete" buttons would appear, and when you're done dragging, you would just touch any one of them and ALL the selected emails go bye-bye.

Whatdya say, Apple, could you implement that? Please?

Gravel's Pentagon Papers Story

It's great storytelling that will have you on the edge of your seat.

Here's the link:
http://www.allaboutvids.com/view_video.php?viewkey=d8176d665453cfb2e55f

iPhone + Facebook Platform

Wouldn't that be something: Thousands of developers building iPhone apps that millions of iPhone users could then select and install after browsing a huge new apps directory in iTunes. A meritocracy of coolness.

That giant sucking sound would be the vacuum created by FB developers flocking to build apps for the iPhone.