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- http://www.gnu.org/fry/
- Clinton Supporters: Are you really such sore losers that you're prepared to screw us all over for four years just because you lost?
- More Christian Tech Goodness: http://tinyurl.com/6c8587
- When I was a kid, I played some corny Biblical video games. Now this comes out: http://tinyurl.com/5mxczl Will it sell?
- From now on all LPGA players must pass an oral english test. Who cares if you speak english if you can swing a stick at a small white ball?
- I thought my blog looked a little weird and then I remembered that I had ad blocker turned on and my google ad was therefore missing.
- Foobar2000 the strangely named audio player with the neat features
- I'm annoyed that my Civ 4 BTS hasn't been auto-updating. Just had to download over 300 MB of patches just to play Fall from Heaven 2.
- @ASPwizer: Nothing wrong with you, Honda Elements are the cars that winners drive. q;o)
- Also, sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericsbinaryworld/sets/72157606917571613/
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Jul
24
Trudging through Lord of the Rings Part 4
Category: Books | 
5 Comments
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.
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Jul
19
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.
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Jun
28
A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings. Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter. I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system. In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien seems to understand how much Tom annoys the crap out of people.
“Tom Bombadil is not an important person — to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment.’ I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in The Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyse the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.”
“And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally).
Tolkien did go on to analyse the character’s role further:
“I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…
“It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war… the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.”[3]
Tolkien even seems to justify Tom Bombadil’s presence:
At any rate, what I like about the book over the movies in the last half to fourth of the book is that a few of the plot elements get explained a little more clearly. Sauron’s origins are explained a lot more clearly. Gandalf and others talk about how he came to power and why he’s just an “eye” now. Gollum is a lot more treacherous in the books. The characters know who he is and he menaces them a few times. I think this elevates his dangerous aura and prepares the reader for the fact that Smeagol has been following our protagonists. Finally, the elven queen Galadrial is given a much more cohesive treatment in the book. In the movie, from what I can remember, she just talks to Frodo in a dream. In the book, all of the characters leave the forest changed in some way because of her. Also, she gives everyone a special gift.
So, perhaps LoTR can be enjoyable….if you can get past Tom Bombadil…
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Jun
18
Trudging Through Lord of the Rings
Category: Books | 2 Comments
I’ve read time and again that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (which is actually not a trilogy, but one massive book published in 3 parts) has all kinds of allegorical content and contains a lot of stuff Peter Jackson had to leave out of the movies. Well, they’re certainly right about Mr Jackson leaving material out of the movie. I’m on page 160 (reading during my lunch breaks) and I’d have to say that roughly 90% of what I’ve read does not appear in any form in the movie. I’m about a little less than halfway through the first book (in the size they’ve printed) and the main characters JUST got to The Prancing Pony. I think this happens in the first 10 or so minutes in the movie. And what a great idea to cut all that chaff was!
I have absolutely no idea how the Lord of the Rings became such a revered book amongst the fantasy crowd. Tolkien appears not to have had an editor, or perhaps his editor was a pushover. If I were his editor I would certainly have made him remove the stupid chapter and a half about Tom Bombadil. This chapter does not further the story in any way and just leaves you with the same feeling as when you thought you’d be getting lucky to realize that your girl was only wearing the sexy panties because everything else is in the laundry basket. I kept reading thinking that Tom Bombadil would drop some bombs about some key part of the story or that the Black Riders would show up and tear his place apart and kill his wife. Oh, and the insufferable singing! It didn’t even make any sense! What’s with everyone speaking in the third person? Eric doesn’t like that.
And the hobbits are always breaking into song. One could be forgiven for thinking that Peter Jackson would have make Lord of the Rings the Musical. They sing songs about everything from travel, to hotels, to taking baths. And I’ve found out more about hobbit genealogy than I ever cared for.
Interestingly, the relationship between Frodo and Sam doesn’t seem to have the same sexual overtones that it does in the movie. And, I’m pretty sure Peter Jackson didn’t do that on purpose. It just came out so ridiculous that TBS had everyone almost literally rotfltao when they had a commercial for their broadcast of LoTR featuring clips of Frodo and Sam and the song “Secret Lovers”.
At any rate, this is mostly a rant about how slow-going this book is. Had it not had so many decades of reputation to rest upon, I would have probably returned the book to Borders and not even attempted to finish. Then again, I found the movies really boring, so perhaps the Lord of the Rings just isn’t for me. Ironically, I’m loving Terry Prachet’s Discworld series which is, partly, a parody of the Tolkien universe.
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Nov
20
Spiderman Predicts the future
Category: Books, science | Leave a Comment
It’s interesting how Science Fiction often predicts future technologies and trends. For example, this morning on CNN they were talking about a research group that is trying to switch on the gene in humans that would cause limbs to regrow. Apparently they haven’t seen what happens when you do that (I say tongue-in-cheek). Peter Parker’s favorite professor was trying to regrow his arm and his technique, which I believe involved splicing reptilian DNA, turned him into one of Spiderman’s fiercest foes, The Lizard.
While the comic book is an extreme possibility of this research created in the 1960s and for the purpose of drama, I think that it shows (along with the basic theme of the series) that blind belief in the powers of science can have dire consequences. This appears to have been a central theme of other Marvel stories as well, such as The Fantastic Four. I think it’s time for a little bit of 1950s-60s suspicion about the claims of science. After Vioxx and the other recent revelations that drug companies are shoving drugs through the FDA, we need to take a look and see whether we can find a balance. We don’t want to reject all new technology, but we need to stop what some think is the inevitable march of progress. More testing needs to be done on our meds and therapies before releasing them to the public.
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Jul
23
Children’s Book to teach them about DRM
Category: Books, DRM, Technology | 1 Comment
Paradigms are a battle of the mind that take place when we prepare our children with certain expectations about the world. Don’t let them grow up thinking there’s something right about Digital Restrictions Management! Have them read The Pig and the Box and let them learn about why software and culture need to be libre. (That’s free as in speech!)
Why is DRM so bad? This is why!
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Jul
20
My first published book of photography!
Category: Books, Me, Photography | Leave a Comment
Today I received my copy of the photography book I’ve published, Eric Mesa’s Top 40 flickr Images. It’s a great feeling to finally have the book published after having worked on it since April. There were a few false starts with the publishing process as I figured out how to make sure my final PDF could be printed on Lulu.com’s printers. But the journey is finally over and I was able to make the book available to the public today.
One of the interesting things about basing a book on my top rated photos on flickr is that they not only changed while I was writing the book, but even now they are radically different in some places while remaining the same in other places. It’s a snapshot, no pun intended, of where my work was at one particular point in time - April of 2006.
So why make a book of images freely available on the net? Well, there are two reasons. The first one is that Internet access is not yet ubiquitous and there’s a certain something about books that people still love. I know that I am a very technological guy, but I just don’t enjoy reading a book off my computer screen. I prefer good old paper and used to even print my college readings when they were given as PDFs. The second reason for the book, is that when I put my pictures on flickr, I usually don’t put any comments along with the picture because I want others to enjoy the picture through their own eyes, not the filter I have set up. I’m not a total purist, as I do give the pictures titles and thus a frame of reference. But beyond that, I don’t want to talk about what went on behind the picture or even the technical aspects if it happens to be a complicated one. In this book, I take each of the pictures and talk about how I got the inspiration for taking them, some of the technical difficulties, and sometimes the plain dumb luck involved.
I know it sounds a bit cliche, but I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
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Mar
14
The Hitch Hiker’s Guice to the Galaxy had such wonderful and amazing quotes in it that I was horribly dissapointed when the movie didn’t share more of these quotes. Here are two of my favorites, with more to follow.
The intro to the first book, which set the tone and got me very happy about the book to follow:
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughtly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the time the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean and more of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and tha tno one shoul dever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small face in rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going worng all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible stupid catastraphe occurre, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
And from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide, which is a book in the book for which it it named.
‘The Babel fish’, said The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, ‘is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then extretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious though frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
‘Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existance of God.
‘The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without fait I am nothing.”
‘”But,” says Man, “the Bable fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore by your your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
‘”Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
‘”Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.’
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Dec
15
Quickies
Category: Books, Internet, Linux | Leave a Comment
1) In this post, wget had created a directory structure, foiling my plans to do the md5sum check automatically. The correct way to do what I wanted to do was use the option -nd for no directories. If I had typed
wget -nd address
it would have just saved to my current directory and the code would have worked perfectly. It would have also worked the roundabout way that I showed.
2) If you like Neal Stephenson’s style of writing then you MUST read Catch-22! Catch-22 is the literary father of his style of writing so be sure to check it out! I just finished the book a couple of days ago and I loved it! It was a little confusing at first, but then I couldn’t put it down.
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May
1
Friday I went to go see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as you may recall. I was quite excited about seeing it as I had read one of the five books and watched the old BBC adaptation. The movie certainly started off very well with an entertaining opening sequence, but I was left quite dissapointed. Why? At first I couldn’t really articulate what it was about the movie that was lacking. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong with it, but then more and more things came to mind and I realized why I didn’t like it.
First of all, they got rid of a lot of entries from the Hitchhiker’s Guide. I consider the book to be, in a sense, the book’s main character. To leave out so many entries was akin to leaving out Arthur Dent, in my opinion. Additionally, to me it was the entries from the Guide that really made the book so fun for me. The story was pretty neat, but the hilarious entries were what I loved. Some of the entries I truly missed were (in summary):
-the entry about how the Babel fish disproves the existence of God
-the entry about the girl who had just figured out the key to happiness before the Earth was distroyed
-the entry about teenagers in the universe who would mess with Earth yokels as a prank
-the entry explaining the reasons for buying planets and why the earth-building planet had to be blown up
-the entry about Arthur screaming something which started an intergallactic war
and a few others.
While they would have added some length to the movie, it would have totalled to maybe an extra 15 minutes, if that! I was really dissapointed by that.
Also, perhaps it was just that we watched the movie in a crappy movie theatre, but I found it hard to sometimes hear what the characters were saying. This took away from the film since I had to be straining to hear what they were saying a majority of the time.
If I had to sum it up I would say that the book was overly complex - the genius of Douglas Adams and his cheeky