I am now done with the entire story of the hobbits.  Overall, I have enjoyed the books more than the movie.  Here’s what I have to say about The Return of the King:

I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie.  I mean, the movie does a good job of showing the despair of the city Minis Tirith, but the book really shows it much better.  I found myself at times forgetting that I already knew the ending and that most of the characters would be fine.  Speaking of already knowing the story, I kept waiting for the part where Gollum tricks Frodo into thinking that The Fat Hobbit has eaten the bread.  It’s not in the books - they added that for the movie.

In “The Scouring of the Shire”, which was left out of the movie, I felt it was a huge allegory about the failures of communism as implemented by Russia and other countries.  (As opposed to communism the theory which should be an awesome world)  Lotho and Sharkey have instituted a policy where they confiscate the goods from the Hobbits and claim this is so that they can be shared amongst all.  Yet the only people who end up getting the goods are Lotho, Sharkey, and their cronies.  Similarly, during the “Golden Age” of communism, the state would collect everything for redistribution, but only the Party Members got access to the high quality goods.

I wonder if it was a very barely concealed hint that the Elves and their companions went to Heaven as they went to a place called Haven and then they were able to live forever.

Other than Tom Bombadil, the only thing that I didn’t like over the course of the series was the way the author dealt with the story temporally.  Instead of going from character to character in each paragraph or chapter, as most authors do, he would go an entire ridiculously large amount of chapters with one set of characters and then go back and start again with other characters.  Although he provided some hints, this made it really hard for me to see when things were happening.  For example, when Frodo was being bitten by Shelob, what was happening with the battle in Gondor and so forth.  Perhaps that’s just the way books were written back then.

Finally, I found it a bit confusing that everyone had a ton of names.  For example Strider, Elfstone, Aragon, and something of the Dunedain are all the same person.  Gandolf is often called Mithrandyl (or something like that) and it makes it a bit harder to keep track of what’s going on.

In the end, I’m glad I read it and spent the money on it.

  

Wrote this over the course of a few days as a creative exercise.

—-

“¡Carajo Coño!”  he muttered under his breath as he ran.  His wife had just started to get into the mood when the call had come in.  It was on the mobile that he never turned off, not even during moments of planned intimacy.  He’d had no choice but to answer and, despite her threats of finding electromechanical means of satisfaction, he was forced to bolt out the door.  “¡Coño!” he wagered to utter a little louder, he had left so quickly he only had the small pistol that was always in his right pocket.  He hoped it wouldn’t matter.

His augmented vision system displayed adverts for each of the venues he passed.  It was distracting to now see a translucent pizza and now an ethereal hamburger, but he dared not switch it out of “strolling mode.”  Such things were reported to the servers.  Ostensibly they told the public it was in order to learn your daily patterns in order to better serve you.  In reality, it was monitored by the authorities as a sign that it was important for someone not to be distracted by the extra stimulus.  Such a character was probably up to no good.

At MLK JR BLVD he turned to the right and passed by an abandoned bookstore.  Apparently the proprietors had forgotten to turn off the ad servers as he now was reading an advertisement for an old book called “Snow Crash”.  The advert, however, was not an ordinary ad.  It performed a calculation on the hash of the vision system and identified the owner.

He ran a few more blocks and slowed to a walk.  He was nearly downtown and surveillance would be a lot higher.  Pushing a button on his belt activated the program which had been downloaded to his system.  A ghostly transparent man appeared in front of his vision.  A symbol indicated he should don his ear piece.  He put them in and activated the video and idly walked into a department store.    The video gave him directions to where the needles were stored as well as directions to the target.  It then launched another program to write over the bits 100 times with random data.

Luckily the needles were just another block down so, leisurely, he exited the store and started walking to the proper location.  He tried to keep his mind clear, but a though kept creeping back into it.  It was a question he had long ago exiled to the dark recesses of his grey matter.  Now it was back, but remaining at the periphery of his consciousness.  Thus he continually felt uneasy, but couldn’t put his finger on it just yet.

He entered the building containing the needles.  That’s all it was to him as he tired to focus on his mission without alerting the authorities.  To everyone else it was a clothing store.  He grabbed a pair of pants and made for the dressing room.  Once there, he removed his pants and his keys fell out of his pocket.  He bent over to grab them and palmed a small box.  Just like a magician, the item was hidden in plain sight; one of the most watched areas - a department store dressing room.  No one would ever suspect a group to be so brazen and, therefore, it was perfect.

He tried on the pants to keep up the pretense.  Then he slipped his own back on and went to re-rack the pants.  There, in the corner of the store, he opened the package.  Inside were two tiny needles and a tiny gun.  He loaded the needles into the gun and verified the safety was on.  The last thing he wanted was to shoot himself accidentally.  After all, the syringes were full of extremely dangerous nanorobots.  He pocketed the gun and started on his way towards his target.

The nanobots had been manufactured by the government as a biological weapon.  Only a few knew of its existence, even fewer knew how it worked.  An enraged scientists had given some of it to the group in the hopes they would expose it.  It is highly doubted the scientist though it would come to light in this manner.

The sight of a police woman made his heart jump.  Being caught with this stuff would certainly get him sent away to a prison on a tropical island from which he would never be seen again.  All he knew about the contents of the needles was that the bots would essentially puree you from the inside out.

He arrived at the theatre.  Purchasing a ticket, he entered and made his way to his box seat.  He was handed a playbill as he entered the auditorium.  The play was an updated revival of “Our American Cousin.”  Instead of an American and a British family, it was about an urban an a rural family.  He spotted his target in an adjacent box.  All he had to do now was wait until the play was in full force with everyone’s attention forward.  For now he busied himself looking at the playbill as he was sure his face would betray him.

After what seemed to be enough time to watch the entire history of the Earth at 1:1 speed, the play finally started.  It was hilarious and, in the midst of one of especially funny joke, the thoughts which had tip-toed at the edge of his mind now entered at full force.  All at once he was consumed with immense doubt.  Was it moral to kill this man in order to prevent a war which would kill hundreds of thousands on both sides?  He was not God to be deciding whether to end the lives of others.  Faltering, his resolve began to melt away.

Then, just as quickly, his nerves were steeled again as he thought of how millions had died from greedy and careless actions taken by his government.  He activated the sights on his augmented vision.  The next round of thunderous applause and laughter completely muted the sound of the pistol firing.  The needle made its mark and delivered its payload.  The it then fell to the ground and dissolved.

He got up and made his way calmly to the restrooms.  He had about five minutes until intermission so he figured he would have the restroom to himself.  His vision system informed him that the windows faced an alleyway and he would be able to escape detection via that route.  Within three minutes he had pried the window open and jumped out.  He made his way back to his apartment; walking at first to avoid suspicion.

About halfway there he found a public vaporizer.  They took in garbage and produced electricity.  He dumped in the pistol and remaining needle.  Then he walked the rest of the way back home.

She had fallen asleep watching an old animated film.  He knew she had been bluffing.  He threw his clothes in the laundry basket and got into bed.  She stirred and muttered something incomprehensible.

The following morning he woke to her calling him to watch the news.  He called out to her to turn up the volume as he’d be there in a minute.  “It is a sad, sad day as the President appears to have died of a heart attack.  However, I will be sworn in as president today,” the vice president said.  He figured that was a good thing as it was well-known that the Vice President was vehemently against war and had taken the unprecedented step of speaking out against the President while they were both still in office.  Surprisingly the VP had decided to rule the death as having been a heart attack.  He wondered whether the VP had been in on the job or simply was trying to protect the classified biological weapon.  Oh well, it was over.  The thousands were safe…for now.

  

Today I consider whether or not TV Stations as a distinct programming lineup have become obsolete.  More or less since the beginning of commercial television there have been TV Stations to tune in to.  (eg ABC, HBO, TNT)  These stations create and broadcast original programming or buy the rights to broadcast programming created by others so that I can pick it up on my television.  Every year they decide which television shows will play throughout the day for the next year.  This show should play on Thursday at 2000 because that’s when such and such an age group will be watching.  That show should be on at Monday at 2100 because otherwise it might have to compete with a show from another network.  Some shows have nearly literally lived and died based on the timeslot they were shown in.  Sometimes shows are moved around to follow other shows to benefit from the inertia of the viewers of the previous show to carry this one until it either proves itself or fails.

I think that, due to recent technological innovations, this model is wholly obsolete.  Take, for example, the concept of one show competing against another one based on being on the same time slot.  Nowadays, thanks to digital video recorders such as TiVo or MythTV, viewers no longer have to make such choices.  Depending upon how many tuners they have in their DVR they can record one show and watch the other or record both shows and watch a third.  In fact, the idea of having to be at a certain place at a certain time to experience a TV show is quickly becoming antiquated.  Why should I have to route my schedule around my entertainment?  If I wish to watch a certain show at 1400 instead of 2100, that should be my right.  And if I wish to watch it on my iPod or Nokia n8xx or my laptop while I commute, that should also be my right.  After all, as long as I watch the show, what should the timeslot or location matter?

Additionally, other than HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, none of the TV stations have a true identity anymore.  Even Music Television mostly just shows reality TV nowadays.  So the idea of a TV station is also obsolete.  With my MythTV I don’t know if I recorded show X from ABC, FOX, or USA.  It really doesn’t matter. What I think will eventually happen is that production companies will become more well known than the TV stations.  I’ll know that I like David Kelley dramas, not that it plays on FOX.

I think the Cable companies (and FiOS) should instead make EVERYTHING available on demand.  Every TV show should be available to watch whenever I want to watch it and I shouldn’t need a DVR at home to record it.  It should just be available.  Here’s how I envision it working:  TV Studio X comes out with a TV Show and say they will make shows available on demand weekly.  So every week a new show will appear on your cable network’s on demand infrastructure for you to watch whenever you want.  So what the cable network would probably want to do in order to make economic sense of this is to have the episode and episode n-1 available in case you want to catch up.  If you want to save up more programs because you’re going through a busy spell, you can rent a box from the cable network that allows you to save shows onto the hard drive.  This clears up the cable network from having to tie up their servers with all this content.  If they really want to provide an awesome experience for the user, they can also make it so that you can download P2P any episodes that anyone else has on their set top box.

All the technology for that already exists today.  We could be TV Station agnostic and be able to watch shows whenever we want.  What about commercials?  Perhaps that, you argue is a reason for having TV Stations instead of my model.  However, it should be trivial for the cable network to download the latest commercials along with your program and display them at the appropriate time.  Therefore, the program you want to watch comes as 3 files and the set top box makes a playlist of program part 1, commercial, part 2, commercial, part 3.  Or the TV Studios could just move towards advertising during the show.  They already do that somewhat - just increase it.  It’s pretty easy - you can make it so that on the program’s website (or maybe through the set top box) you can look at all of the products in the show and where to buy them.  The studio gets a cut of the sale if I click on the suit one of the characters was wearing and then buy it.  The advertisers should love it because now they’ll have a tangible connection between what’s being advertised and who’s buying.  And it shouldn’t be too hard for them to advertise this way since most commercials are practically short films nowadays.

So I think there’s certainly a large possibility that TV Stations are obsolete.  The only thing keeping them around is corporate inertia.

  

A lot of websites have funny page-not-found (404) and maintenance pages. I got a good chuckle out of Plurk’s maintenance page.

[caption id="attachment_1387" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Plurk Maintenance Page"][/caption]   

I finished up The Two Towers a week or so ago and I have to say that “Trudging” no longer describes my experience (for the most part). While I preferred the first movie to the first book, I mostly feel exactly the opposite about the second book/movie. The only annoying thing was that we didn’t get to Frodo and Samwise until page 208 of a 352 page book. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the movie goes back and forth a lot more instead of doing like the book and telling each person’s day and then backing up to tell the next person’s day (if the party has been separated).

I also really liked the descriptions during the war.  I feel like I got a lot more about the history behind certain events and definitely got more insight into what the characters were thinking.

Finally, Gollum comes off as way more treacherous and smart in the book.  In the movie he seems to be tricky, yes, but not quite as smart.

So overall, I’m now very glad I’ve chosen to read the books and I’m about 1/4 of the way through The Return of the King.

  

There’s been a lot of news for the past 3-6 months about the new FISA bill and how it provides immunity for the telecommunications companies.  A lot of people including the Electronic Frontier Foundation are opposed to this provision of the bill (if not bill in its entirety) because they say the telcos have acted illegally by assisting the Executive Branch with their warrentless wiretapping of phone calls.  The reason they argue this is illegal is that the original FISA bill, as written in the 1970s (and ammended throughout the years) requires a warrant for all wiretapping of US Persons.  That includes foreigners who are physically in the United States.   As the New York Times revealed in 2005, the Bush Administration started acting against this law in 2001 because of opinions written by some radicals in the Justice Department (such as Yoo).

Now, normally I’m against most of what this administration has done.  They’ve been unnecessarily sneaky with a lot of things that have caused an erosion of the trust of our citizens in the Government.  For example, they’ve been sliding the reason for attacking Iraq around until they find one that’s palatable and sticks.  If they just would have been honest from the beginning - that they just wanted Saddam out of the way - perhaps they could have just drummed up enough support for that.  And, if they couldn’t, well we’re a democracy (or like to pretend we are) so they shouldn’t be able to do it.

However, I think the telcos need immunity and here’s why.  Let’s say I’m the CEO of a telecommunications company that rhymes with Horizon and some guys from the US Justice Department show up in my office.  They say, “We need you to wiretap phone calls in the USA to stop terrorists.  We could have stopped 11 Sept if we only had been able to do this.”

I say, “One Moment Please.”  And I check with my lawyers.  Then I respond with, “They say you need a FISA warrant and for us to cooperate with you would be illegal.”

Then the Justice Department guys say, “Look, this is legal.  We have this letter here that says it’s legal.  Anyway, we’re the government and we promise not to arrest you over this.  If something happens, we’ve got your back.  After all, it’s legal - see”

Now what can I say?  If the US Government itself has told me that this program is legal, who am I to argue?  After all, who is in charge of police and arresting people?  The US Government.  So they tell me this is legal, then it’s legal.  So it’s unfair if I cooperate with them, thinking they’ve cleared it with whomever (like Congress), for my company to get sued.  How was I to know they didn’t do things correctly?  It was underground spy stuff, I can’t exactly call around and check to make sure that it really is illegal.

So I think the telcos are just victims in the Government’s deception.  They shouldn’t be punished for that.  Otherwise, what’s going to happen the next time those Justice Department guys show up asking for [legitimate] favors?  I’ll just want to CMA and I’ll say, “No thanks.  Why don’t you go ask that telephone company with the Death Star Logo.”

  

This year has been an incredibly racist year from people being afraid to vote for Barack Obama because they believe he’s a secret Muslim (so? Any American-born person should be allowed to run for president) to people who say he’s too black or not black enough. Now this old guy claims that Obama’s an Oreo and it’s unfair for him to reap the rewards of the Civil Rights battles of the previous generations.

I think this is outrageous. It’s bad enough that children in lower income areas accuse their classmates who are doing well of “acting white”, but now to hear this guy saying the same thing is just beyond words. We need to be proud of the fact that Obama might be the first mulatto president and not criticize him for acting white. After all, would anyone vote for a ghetto president? I think not….

  

Welcome to my new series where I wonder if some concepts and technologies are now obsolete thanks to our new paradigms and technologies.  Today’s topic - evangelism.

Short term readers of my blog will think I only write about Linux and technology.  Long term readers will know that I’m a Christian.  I was brought up  (what the media refers to as) an evangelical.  Specifically, I was brought up as a Baptist.  My entire church life though high school involved being told how we had to spread the Word of God.  Indeed, if you believe in the divinity of Jesus and the infallibility of The Bible, it even says in the Gospels that Jesus commanded his followers to spread the “Good News”.  And so they became the first missionaries.

I think, however, that evangelism is now obsolete.  Why?  The point of evangelism is not simply to “spread” the Word of God because that is an easy task on its own.  After all, how hard is it to spread information?  But the real point is to create converts to The One True Religion.  (All caps for satirical reasons)  What I’d like to know are the true numbers behind how many people have ever been converted to Christianity because someone came and told them about Jesus.  Everyone I know (myself included) finds this annoying.  It goes against all we know about human psychology.  If someone comes out of the blue and tells you that you’re completely wrong on some topic are you going to a) change to their point of view or b) become defensive.

But even if we move away from the conversion aspect for just a moment, there’s the fact that technology has made the need to Spread The Word by sending people all over the world an obsolete act.  Except for the few people who exist in the middle of nowhere, like the Amazon, everyone has access to the Internet.  Anyone, anywhere, who has a true curiosity about Jesus the Christ can just google Him.  Sure, there’ll be some websites full of garbage, but there should also be sites out there that tell the Christian point of view.  Churches and other organizations can band together and create an omnibus website and then buy up tons of ad space on Google and get people direct to that site if they want to know about Jesus and Christianity.

Back to conversion.  I’m willing to bet that an overwhelming majority of conversions to Christianity come from someone who decides to find out what this Jesus-guy is all about and then asks someone they think might know about it.

So, I think that instead of sending missionaries all over the world, there should just be one Christian website that tell people everything they need to know about Jesus and the Christian faith.  It can have text, videos, explanations of the Bible in many different languages.  Then there can be a link to someone they can email about God.  And if they want to know even more, there can be a skype number.  Finally, if they truly desire a human being, there can be a link to request a missionary’s presence.  I think a requested missionary would find things a lot better than one who just came barging in.  I think this properly leverages technology and efficiency and is a recognition that there really isn’t a person out there who hasn’t heard of Jesus or can’t ask around or look on the net to find out about Him.  Beyond that, all you can do is wait for people to be ready.  I’m a firm believer that a coerced conversion is a sham and does more hard to the cause than good.