We just saw The Happening, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan. Let me state up front that I really like his previous movies. The excellence of The Sixth Sense goes without saying but I loved Signs and The Village also and certainly enjoyed Unbreakable and Lady in the Water. Hence it pains me to say that his newest film is really not very good. Coming from any lesser filmmaker it would be so-so; coming from him it’s a major disappointment.

I’m not going to say much about the plot since I personally hate it when someone spoils the plot of a movie for me. I suppose, though, that this review is something of a spoiler in itself. What I’ll say is this: it has a (mostly) very good, strange, suspense-laden build-up, and then it utterly fails to deliver. In retrospect it comes off as a few interesting ideas and some resulting odd situations thrown together in the framework of two plots competing for supremacy, and the competition ends in a draw. read more

One of the best things about music videos in the 80s (and probably other decades, but the 80s was when I was paying attention to music videos) was that some of them made no sense whatsoever. To wit:

New Order was one of my favorites at the time. Man, they were good.

Here’s a nice example of the woeful state of affairs that the spammers of the world have created for us. Last night, Tracie’s email to her aunt started bouncing. Her aunt uses MSN Live Hotmail Whatever. The error message says that Tracie’s email is being rejected because either my domain has been blocked, or my IP (which is dynamically allocated, of course) has been blocked, or something. It’s kind of vague on the exact reason.

Now, just for the record: I’m not a spammer. I hate spam. This site doesn’t have any sort of mailing list and I don’t harvest any sort of information about who visits it. (Now and then I become curious and look at my server logs, but I’m looking only at information like total number of visits, not information about individual visitors.) To the best of my knowledge, none of my machines are being used as spam relays. My home machines are locked down tight as well as being behind a firewall, and I know from experience that my domain host comes down hard on any account that they even think might be compromised. read more

It’s One Of Those Days, it seems. Nothing actually disastrous has happened, just stuff like having to go to the hardware store to exchange something that didn’t fit after the first trip and then going again to get something forgotten during the second trip–all on a day on which I’d planned to work and not go anywhere. Then there’s been some ongoing drama with the paper business that I won’t go into. Tracie’s been dealing with a migraine that finally seems to be giving up after a couple of days. Oh, and the power went out for six hours yesterday. Anybody who says that power outtages are times for old-fashioned family fun is crazy. Power outtages in a house with two businesses, six computers, and an electronic music studio are a royal PITA and no fun at all. read more

Here’s a nifty video of someone messing with blobs of water in the microgravity of the ISS:

I was quite pleased to stumble across this video. I’ve always thought that if I were given the opportunity to float around in a zero-gravity environment, one of the things I’d want to do is play with blobs of water. The other things I’d want to do include seeing whether I could propel myself with my own breath, various basic-physics experiments like throwing things to propel mysel in the opposite direction or changing my angular velocity by pulling my arms in after giving myself a spin, and not throwing up. read more

In my inbox this morning I found a message with the subject line “New News From DHL”. The message started with the following paragraph, which I am copying & pasting without alteration:

Good News!
DHL announced the restructuring plans for its U.S. network. This restructuring addresses changing market conditions as well as positions DHL well for future growth in the U.S. We are eliminating and investing smartly to have a highly reliable, functional network and to maintain a significant presence in the U.S. read more