Terminator Salvation not the definitive film it was intended or touted to be.

I was not very impressed with Terminator Salvation. It was a realistic and action-packed action/war film, and quite entertaining, but it was not the film I was expecting. Especially after the fiasco of the original ending leaked on the internet, and the subsequent re-working of the film ending, I was expecting the end-all-be-all of Terminator films. Not so much. There are really only two reasons I do not appreciate the film much: Christian Bale is not a good John Connor, and the film abandons the sci-fi themes critical to the Terminator ethos.

I like Christian Bale a lot. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both the shit, in no small part due to Bale’s excellent serious portrayal of Wayne/Batman. In Salvation he cranks up the gravitas to the point of overacting, and to the point that his character is not very compelling or charismatic. He’s disquietingly fanatic , more jihadist than savior of humanity. Sure, terrorist or prophet is a matter of perspective, but I thought we were supposed to sympathize and identify with Connor. I didn’t.

 

There was no heroism in the character to inspire me like John Connor is supposed to do. In fact, every character that surrounded Bale outshined him as a heroic and sympathetic character. Anton Yelchin was great as Kyle Reese (though he’s a bit young I would have much preferred him as Connor), and Worthington’s Marcus was awesome. Even Moon Bloodgood’s Blair, though extraneous and peripheral, was a more interesting character than Bale’s Connor.

The character was dour and driven by a deep hatred of the machines, exceeding that of the people around him, casting him as the point-man in a grueling was of attrition against the machines. Yet much of what we know about John Connor from the other films and The Sarah Connor Chronicles portrays him as a much more pragmatic warrior. He understands that the machines are not people, or a culture ideologically pitted against humanity. They are programmed tools, and unlike humans they can simply be reprogrammed for alternate purposes. John Connor did this when he used and sent back T-800s in T2 and T3, as well as the unknown Cameron model in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and obviously trusts the reprogrammed machines as much or more than humans to give them such critical missions and put them in close proximity to sensitive assets such as his younger self. Yet Bale’s Connor is not this pragmatic strategist we’ve come to know as John Connor, he’s just a machine-hating ideologue. One cannot even argue this is a portrayal of the young Connor before he really comes into his own as the leader of the resistance, because lore from T2, T3, and Chronicles suggests Connor already understands the machines better than anyone else long before Judgment Day even occurs, so the hate-filled warrior played by Bale just doesn’t make sense. John Connor is a cooler and more intricate character than what McG and Bale make him.

The other reason I have problems with Salvation is because it veered off on a sci-fi tangent that is not really what Terminator mythology is about. I’ll keep it vague so I won’t give away any spoilers. The thrust of Salvation’s sci-fi theme is the identity crisis of Marcus Wright, the machine that thinks he’s a human. (This should have been a spoiler, but inexplicably the producers decided to use this as the trailer hook to bring audiences in rather than as the shocking reveal it could have been.) Is he a person? Is he a machine? Can he fight his programming? Are any of his decision really his own? Hello, Battlestar Galactica anyone? This has already been done exquisitely, in exacting detail, and much, much better in the BG saga. Salvation’s attempt was a very poor (and even wrong) gloss over the concept.

The entire attempt, poor as it was, was completely misguided anyway. Terminator is about the psychological schism between humans and machines. Machines are not, in any way, human, but their effectiveness in masquerading as humans makes them very creepy. The greatest scenes from the franchise hinge on this disparity between the machines’ human appearance and their non-human actions. Like when the “good” Shwartzeneggar T-800 in T2 tries to murder the guys that jump him before John Connor stops him, and Connor can’t explain why the Terminator shouldn’t kill (“You just can’t, okay?”). Like when the same Terminator realizes it must be destroyed and explains to Connor that it’s ok because it’s not human (“I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do”). Like how Cameron constantly seeks explanations for human actions that don’t make machine-sense, and then eerily mimics the actions even though she clearly still doesn’t understand the reasoning. The Marcus Wright character gives us none of this. He behaves just like a human, he thinks just like a human, he actually believes he is human. He has a Terminator body, but there is nothing Terminator about him. What’s interesting about the Marcus character is his humanity, not his Terminator-ity. He would have been equally entertaining as a mere human character with super strength and resilience, and that makes him an uninteresting Terminator and a useless addition to the Terminator mythos.

Terminator Salvation was a decent film with great action, horror, and effects, but I was dissatisfied because it never delivered the Terminator goodness I was craving and expecting, and it did nothing to advance the Terminator mythology.

Dial2Do is the free version of what Jott should be.

I beta’d Jott, and it was cool. Then they went commercial and now charge $10/month for their voice transcription service. It’s cool and all, but not $10/month cool. Luckily around the same time Google Voice launched out of the GrandCentral acquisition, and now Google provides me with voicemail to text transcription free of charge (and even with better accuracy, imo).

Of course what’s cool about Jott that I missed was the ability to understand my voice and turn that into activities. I could send emails, post to blogs, update Twitter, etc. all simply by calling Jott and telling it what to do and what I wanted my message to be, and for the most part is would transcribe and email/post faithfully. Now I never became reliant upon Jott, so when they went commercial I did without it. However, I miss it.

I was discussing Google Voice and commercialization, and a friend (thanks Matz) recommend Dial2Do. I’ve just barely checked it out yet, but it’s more than an alternative, it’s a Jott killer.

Dial2Do does everything it’s pay service competitor does, and more, with a better and more intuitive clean interface. One thing that did always bugged me about Jott was that it kind of hard to navigate and find my stuff. Not very hard, but just non-obvious enough that it required effort. No one wants to spend effort checking messages (why my mobile voicemails tend to go unchecked for days at a time, because it’s a pain). Dial2Do alleviates this with a very simple uncluttered interface that gives me instant access to all my stuff.

Save for perhaps some expert features (Jott has launched new Voicemail and Salesforce paid services as well), Dial2Do does the same stuff, but with better transcription accuracy, and for friggin’ free. Yay and thank you Dial2Do!

A host of services are supported by Dial2Do. Twitter and calendar (Google Calendar integration!) are of course necessary and awesome, but Evernote was unexpected and welcome. Blogger, Kwiry, PingFm, PingMe, Remember The Milk, Tumblr, and Xpenser are all cool services to integrate with Dial2Do as well, and there’s many more. You can also listen to several sites’ rss feeds, including the beloved TechCrunch and Lifehacker.

I’m going to be trying to use Dial2Do often, and I think anyone interested in making their mobile more useful tool ought to give it a whirl too.

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This is the standard Dial2Do screen. Every service I use is immediately available and all message counts clearly labeled.

The contacts screen is perfectly intuitive, as it should be.

A very clear enumeration of your added services, and exactly what to say to activate them. On Jott one just said the name of whatever service it was, but it often failed to understand and couldn’t differentiate between similar names.

New Love for Rye, and the Logical Conclusion of the Sazerac

My whisk(e)y quest has now led me to rye. It’s a bourbony whiskey, but strong and sharp because of the predominant rye grain component instead of bourdon’s milder and sweeter corn base (not to mention it’s typically higher 46% ABV). I take things slow, and after 3 years of scotch and then bourbon devotion feel I have pretty well finalized my tastes in those, so now it’s to rye.

My first foray was with the well-reviewed Old Potrero, an old fashioned 100% rye whiskey, which I tried at the fantastic English-style brewery and scotch bar Pint’s Pub in Denver. Didn’t like it much, but I think it was just too much of a rye for a first taste. I just now got a bottle of Sazerac Rye, and this was just what I was looking for. Had it straight, over ice, and bastardized an Old Fashioned with it, and it was great all around. Inevitably, research of the brand led directly to the cocktail of the eponymous whiskey, the Sazerac.

As with most good whiskey cocktails, there’s little more to it than great whiskey. It bears quite a bit of resemblance to the Old Fashioned, and it’s an equally old but traditional New Orleans drink with slight ingredient changes and procedural and serving differences. Here’s the best classic recipe I found, on a Creole & Cajun cooking and culture site Gumbopages:

• 1/2 teaspoon absinthe, or Herbsaint (a New Orleans brand of anise liqueur)
• 1 teaspoon of simple syrup (or 1 sugar cube or 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar)
• 4 dashes Peychaud's bitters
• 1 small dash, a scant drop, of Angostura bitters (extremely optional; some feel it helps open the flavors, but traditionalists may leave it out).
• 2 ounces rye whiskey.
• Strip of lemon peel

The traditional method: Pack a 3-1/2 ounce Old Fashioned (rocks) glass with ice. In another Old Fashioned glass, moisten the sugar cube with just enough water to saturate it, then crush. Blend with the whiskey and bitters. Add a few cubes of ice and stir to chill. Discard the ice from the first glass and pour in the Herbsaint. Coat the inside of the entire glass, pouring out the excess. Strain the whiskey into the Herbsaint coated glass. Twist the lemon peel over the glass so that the lemon oil cascades into the drink, then rub the peel over the rim of the glass; do not put the twist in the drink. Or, as Stanley Clisby Arthur says, "Do not commit the sacrilege of dropping the peel into the drink."

Reading this recipe I realized I had most (or similar) ingredients on hand, so I mixed myself up one. I’ve used both Peychaud’s and Angostura bitters, but found the Peychaud’s too mild for my Manhattan and Old Fashioned tastes, so I stock Angostura. Since it’s stronger I used just 3 dashes total Angostura in stead of the 4 (+1 optional Angostura) Peychaud’s.

The recipe calls for Herbsaint pastis, but this is a local substitute that found it’s way into the recipe when the original Absinthe ingredient was banned in 1912. I happened to have some Lucid Absinthe on hand, so I figure I was a step ahead than the prohibition-era recipe.

I went through the twist of lemon with the Old Fashioned, and I just found that I get a lot less effort, mess, and better flavor from Fee Brother’s Orange Bitters. I probably should try with lemon instead of orange, but for whatever reason the few places that carry Fee Brother’s at all only stock the orange. (I’ll probably just someday buy a full range of their bitters online, because I would certainly like to try the mint bitters in my mojitos and juleps, and maybe their classic bitters will turn out to be better than Angostura.)

The last step is the sweetener, and I absolutely recommend not only using simple syrup instead of sugar, but making your own. One can of course just buy it (and I did, once), but it is so easy to make, so widely useful in cocktail mixing, and so stupidly expensive to buy that it’s worth it even to a lazy guy like me to do-it-yourself. Straightforward recipe from Epicurious:

• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water

Preparation

Stir sugar and water in heavy large saucepan over medium heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat and boil 3 minutes. Cool syrup, then cover and chill until cold, about 2 hours. (Will keep up to a month in the refrigerator.)

Again, lazy as I am, I didn’t coat the glass with the Absinthe, I just put several drops directly into a shaker and gently shook the whole thing. Despite dire warnings against shaking such fine cocktails, the only downsides are 1) it melts the ice faster, resulting in more dilution of the ingredients, and 2) furious shaking mixes air into the liquid making it cloudy with bubbles and frothy. So, add less ice for less dilution, and shake very gently just to move the ice around and mix the ingredients a bit until chilly. Shakers are too convenient to eschew on general principle.

My first Sazerac was very good, just a bit too sweet and with too much Absinthe, because as one might suspect of me I also do not measure out ingredients, I eyeball everything. It starts as laziness, but as I become more familiar with the drinks and find just the right balance for my tastes I’m able to keep the proportions very consistent without measuring. I like to gain this skill because it’s certainly easier than pulling out jiggers and measuring spoons every time I want to mix a drink, plus I’ve always found it more professional to know a recipe “by feel” than to simply follow steps.

With the second I erred a little in the opposite direction and it was too dry. Of course one can always add but not subtract, so I did and got it too a very pleasant and perfect balance. Damn good, and a fine additional to my personal repertoire of fine cocktails which is now:

• Old Fashioned
• Manhattan
• Mint Julep
• Mojito
• Martini
• …and Sazerac

Next cocktail of interest: Hemingway’s Mistress.

Comcast 50Mbps broadband is a 500hp engine with a 3-cup gas tank.

Comcast has some aggressive plans for its "superfast" wideband connectivity in 2009. The cable giant hopes to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to 65 percent of its reach before the end of this year, which amounts to some 30 million homes and businesses. –ars technica

Great news, I've been looking forward to Comcast's higher speed rollout for a year now. However, counter-intuitively, even the $150/month premium subscribers still get saddled with the 250GB/month download limit. Here's some math:

250GB/month × 1000MB/GB × 8Mb/MB = 2,000,000Mb(megabits)/month

At 50Mbps (megabits/second) the 2 million Mb limit is exhausted in 2,000,000/50 = 40,000sec =

approximately 11 hours.

So with your fancy new Comcast 50Mbps fat pipe, if you actually use your bandwidth you will reach the 250GB limit after only 11 hours of maximizing the line. Start a bunch of HD video downloads in the evening, and by the time you wake the next morning Comcast is already drafting a letter telling you to cease all internet use for the rest of the month.

If you are a continuous downloader who always has something transferring, as I am, to keep under the cap your need to keep your bandwidth under:

2,000,000Mb(megabits)/month ÷ 30 days ÷ 24 hours ÷ 60 min ÷ 60 sec =

0.77Mbps.

This is 1.5% of the 50Mbps bandwidth. In 2000 I had 1Mbps broadband from AT&T (later bought by Comcast), which means 9 years ago I had a higher per month bandwidth allowance than I do today.

To address the metaphor in the title, a powerful 500hp BMW 5-Series averages 15mpg. If the potential of this vehicle were limited like Comcast hogties it’s broadband, it would sport only 1.5% of a standard 12-gallon gas tank, which is 12 gallons × .015 = .18 gallons =

2.88 cups.

Even if we generously grant the BMW it’s average 15mpg at top speed, .18 gallons is about a fifth of a gallon, so the car can burn in all it’s 500hp ferocity for a stunning 3 miles before it’s empty.

Comcast’s response, that “less than 1% (currently it’s about one tenth of 1%) of Comcast customers today use an excessive amount of data. Excessive users consume so much data that the usage could negatively impact the online service for other customers,” is the same as saying only 1% of BMW drivers drive top speed and that their excessive fuel consumption could negatively impact fuel availability for moderate users, so the tiny gas tanks are employed to cripple full use of the car’s capabilities and ensure everyone only uses the monster machines in moderation as if they were  Volvo station wagons helmed by soccer moms . Sounds more retarded now, doesn’t it?

Comcast’s bandwidth cap limits their highest tier customers to a ridiculously small 1.5% of the service’s potential, and higher speeds in the future just become uselessly frustrating way of hitting the brick wall faster. I do love the broadband quality, but I’m broaching the “abusive” user class as it is with 6Mbps. It would take some serious restraint to keep under the limit if I had 50Mbps at my disposal, and as a premium customer at $150 a month I ought not to have to worry about it either.

360Desktop Solves My Media Center Control Issues

I’ve been having a few challenges with my multi-monitor HTPC setup. Control via iPod Touch with Mobile Airmouse is fantastic, and Vista Media Center is pretty slick. However, my problem is that occasionally I want to do a little more than just launch and navigate Media Center on my tv. The simplest example is web browsing. Firefox defaults to my computer monitor, where I use it 99% of the time. If I launch it via iPod remote while watching tv, it still of course displays on the monitor, not the tv. There is no simple way for me to get Firefox over to the tv while viewing the tv only. I can move my mouse over to the monitor, but since I can’t see the monitor I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

What I need is a “clone” mode where each display is a window to full control of all the PC’s features. I use only one display at a time, so everything can be on the same single desktop rather than an extended one. There is in fact a standard Windows clone mode where each display shows exactly the same single desktop, which would be the perfect solution except that clone mode forces each display to the same resolution. My monitor (1280x1024) and tv (1280x720) are not, and I do not want them to be, the same resolution. Scratch that.

I have read about several multi-monitor utilities, most notably the famed UltraMon, freeware taskbar extender Multimon, and open source DisplayFusion. I have not tried any because from the feature descriptions they do not seem to address my particular issue. They are geared toward the more typical multi-monitor setup where all screens are in front of the user and one is seeking to maximize the potential of spreading one’s computing tasks over a multiple display area. None address my one computer, two monitors, two rooms scenario (though I don’t believe this is an uncommon setup). Even with these applications the individual monitors act independently as their own encapsulated regions with their own functions, rather than a single space duplicated on two displays.

360Desktop is a very cool application I tried a while ago, but abandoned because I didn’t have much use for it and my old machine didn’t run it very well. It’s a twist on virtual desktops, but instead of replacing one complete screen with another, it stitches the virtual areas together into a seamless scrolling panorama. I never liked it as a virtual desktop solution because I preferred the instant complete screen swap rather than the prettier and more dramatic, but also more cumbersome and manual, panorama scrolling.

However 360Desktop’s design has a simple feature that makes it a pretty good solution to my problem. Instead of creating virtual desktops tailored to individual displays and their settings, 360Desktop creates a large virtual space and maps both displays, at their own resolutions, onto that space. All my apps can run wherever I want them and I can slide the virtual space side to side to move the view back and forth from monitor to tv. Now I can watch Media Center on the tv, and if I need to browse the web I can launch Firefox on the monitor and slide the tv display over to Firefox, and then slide it back to Media Center when I’m done.

I’m still not sold on 360Desktop as the most efficient control of virtual space, but so far it seems to be the only app that solves my issues.