Bob Congdon

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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Fire breaks out at Salt Lake crematorium

This story about a fire at a Salt Lake crematorium involves the cremation of a six-hundred pound man. His "body fluids" were "too much for the oven" and caused a "grease fire". That's probably more than most of want to know about the cremation process. The kicker to the story is the last sentence:

The crematorium is back in business and the funeral director said they'll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn't harmed.

Wasn't harmed?

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Monday, November 13, 2006

Flags of Our Fathers

During the battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines raised a flag atop Mount Suribachi. It was taken down, and a second flag was raised. AP photographer Jack Rosenthal's photo of this second flag-raising is one of the most famous war photographs in U.S. history.

Clint Eastwood's film Flags of Our Fathers tells the stories of the six men who raised the flag, primarily the three flag raisers who survived Iwo Jima and were brought back to the U.S. to help raise funds for the war effort. The film is a mediation on heroism and celebrity. It alternates between grisly battle scenes and the three men traveling the War Bonds circuit performing mock flag raisings. I found some of the shifting timeline back and forth to be distracting but overall I was impressed.

Eastwood is making a companion film, Letters from Iwo Jima, which tells the story of the battle of Iwo Jima from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it. The film is scheduled for release in December in Japan and early next year in the United States.

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Sunday, November 12, 2006

The Prestige

I saw The Prestige recently. The story takes place in turn-of-the-century London and concerns two magicians, played by Christine Bale and Hugh Jackman, with a life-long rivalry primarily surrounding a trick called "The Transformed Man" in which the magician walks through a door on one side of the stage and reappears through a door on the other. They start out as friends but an accident early in the film turns them into fierce enemies and then bitter rivals.

The film is directed by Christopher Nolan best known for Batman Begins and Memento. It's a terrific dark story, told in a narrative that jumps around its time line. The cast is excellent, I was especially impressed by David Bowie in a small but important role as physicist Nikola Tesla. Highly recommended.

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Java on Vista

Java had some issues on Windows Vista which caused it to disable the "Aero Glass" desktop. The bugs have been fixed in recent Java SE 6 builds. The fixes have been backported to J2SE 1.5 as well. Read Chet Haase's blog post Java on Vista: Yes, it Works for details. One interesting tidbit in Chet's list is that in Java SE 6, the Windows look and feel was re-written to use the native platform rendering engine (UxTheme) to draw Swing widgets.

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Saturday, November 11, 2006

Lotus Expeditor

Lotus Expeditor: What an odd product name. I guarantee that it gets misspelled a lot — expiditor, expediter, expiditer. Maybe even "XP Dieter"? English has a few hundred thousand words and they picked this one?

And who writes the press release copy for IBM? For example:

Software applications that do not have a common language or structure make sharing data and information difficult, if not impossible. Lotus Expeditor helps enterprises address these constraints by giving developers the ability to create a personalized user experience that spans across desktop platforms and devices providing access to critical business applications and data anytime, anywhere.

With Lotus Expeditor users can create composite applications combining existing and new software assets within a service oriented architecture (SOA); add extensions to existing databases that allow mobile workers to access key financial or sales information from any mobile device; or augment existing applications using Eclipse or Web 2.0 technology to create a Voice-Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) plug-in for an instant messaging environment.

Ugh. It's technical writing put into a blender. Trying to parse this press release made my brain hurt.

Update: it looks like there's another software product called Expeditor.

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Wednesday, November 08, 2006

SkyMaul

SkyMaul is a funny parody of the SkyMall catalog that you usually find in the seat pocket on airlines. (Via Seth Godin)

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Monday, November 06, 2006

Pineapple Express

My son's soccer team played on Saturday afternoon in driving rain. Fortunately the grass on their field held up. The next field over was one giant mud puddle. In other parts of the country the game probably would have been postponed. In Seattle in November it rains. No big deal. But the rain out here is usually drizzle, this is especially heavy. It's part of a weather pattern called a Pineapple Express. Warm moist air travels up from Hawaii and is dumped on the Pacific Northwest. Aloha!

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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

On the Edge of Blade Runner

On the Edge of Blade Runner is a terrific documentary on the making of one of my favorite films. It's interesting to see how the film came together, what the cast thought of it, etc. I had no idea that Rutger Hauer wrote his character's final speech:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time...like tears...in rain. Time...to die.

Such a terrific film. By the way, Ridley Scott "settles" the Deckard /replicant question at the end. Or does he? He has a wry grin on his face after he says it. (Via MetaFilter)

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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Realistic Internet Simulator

The Realistic Internet Simulator is pretty silly but my son loves the "Kill The Popups!" chorus singing over Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie.

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Unsubscribing

I've had a Hotmail account for several years. It's my most "promiscuous" account; I don't worry about using it on web sites, surveys, software registration, etc. Nearly all of the spam gets filtered out but I still get junk email. Most of this email is legitimate: it's the result of registering software or getting added to some long-forgotten email list. I've just let it go but recently decided to see if I could get rid of the junk. So I started unsubscribing. Most such emails have an Unsubscribe link at the bottom. I clicked on a few dozen of these links. That was about a week ago. I was skeptical but it seems to be working. The amount of junk email has dropped way down. And there hasn't been any uptick on junk. Not sure about spam since I rarely look at my Bulk Mail folder.

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Monday, October 30, 2006

Happy Fun Ball

A while ago I mentioned the Happy Fun Ball SNL commercial parody. I just noticed that it's available on YouTube:

I'd forgotten that the bit wasn't particularly visual. Phil Hartman's voice really sells it.

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The Great British Venn Diagram

The difference between England, Great Britain, the British Isles and the United Kingdom is confusing, at least to me. The Great British Venn Diagram explains the distinctions:

The term constituent countries used in the explanation is interesting. It's not a legal term; the constituent only has meaning within the context of the larger entity. On a related note, I learned recently that it's preferable to use "country/region" rather than "country" in descriptions since the assesement of whether a region is a country or not can be politically contentious (e.g. "Taiwan").

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Friday, October 27, 2006

Fish Videos

Pete sent me this video about the joys of Fish Sticks. Now I've got the lyrics stuck in my head.

Fish sticks! Fish sticks! What a delicious treat!
Fish sticks! Fish sticks! They're very good to eat!

Which reminds me of the classic video Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes. (If you want to skip ahead to the song, it starts at 2:19).

fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads.
fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!

Barnes and Barnes are Art Barnes and Billy Mumy (remember Lost in Space?). The video stars Bill Paxton and Dr. Demento.

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

Sony Bravia Paint Ad

Sony has a new Bravia ad that uses paint rather than Bouncy Balls.

There's a "making of" video as well. The amount of planning and effort that went into the commercial is impressive. But I like the Bouncy Balls ad better. It's relaxing, has better music and I think it does a better job of expressing color. The new ad is messy and violent; the older ad invokes more pleasant emotions — although the coordinated color spectrum on the apartment building shown above is pretty darn cool.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Do you Google?

Have you ever used Google as a verb? If so, according to this post on the Official Google Blog, please stop. Unless, that is, you mention the Google website at the same time. As in, and I'm not making this up: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."

Since Google already appears as a verb in the Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English dictionaries, are Google's lawyers really going to be able to protect their trademark?

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Weird Al Yankovic On Japanese TV

This video of Weird Al Yankovic performing "Eat It" on Japanese TV is pretty funny.

He seems genuinely confused throughout, especially during the interview at the start. And then there's the bit at the end with the guy in the lobster suit. Priceless. (Via TV in Japan)

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