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Laralee and I watched “Matrix Revolutions” last night (I know, it came out in theaters six months ago but we didn’t bother). It was a fairly entertaining movie; like the newest installments of the “Star Wars” series, it relied more on special effects than a plot, but was still fun.

Anyway, my biggest comment about the movie is that the leader of the human defenses, Commander Locke, has got to be one of the biggest military morons of all time. Faced with an attack of unprecedented magnitude– one that will likely destroy all of humanity– he elected to send out all of the warships he had in order to keep the enemy at bay.

Interestingly, all of the Bad Guy machines are vulnerable to a weapon called an EMP, which generates a powerful electromagnetic pulse which fries electronic components and turns the machines into scrap metal. (Why it doesn’t have an effect on the humans’ electronics technology is left to the magic of Hollywood.)

Now, each warship has an EMP weapon aboard… making them very handy against the bad guys. But Commander Locke, in his infinite inanity, neglected to keep even a single EMP back at home base. Thus, when the ships all blow up in a confusing calamity, he’s left without anything but some big machine guns to stop the invading army.

Come on, commander! Why not keep an EMP or two laying around, so if the ships bite the bullet you won’t go down with them? (Of course, our heroes show up in a barely-running ship and manage to beat off the bad guys with their EMP… what a shocker.)

Laralee and I laughed pretty hard at that one.

“Thou shalt receiveth what thou payeth for.”

Ahh, the old adage that you get what you pay for… in this case, I paid about a buck for a hundred blank CD-R’s. The first one I burned had all sorts of bad sectors and whatnot, making the data on it pretty useless.

So now I wonder– what do I do with a hundred (well, ninety-nine) CD’s that I’m afraid to use for important data because they might corrupt it? I’m thinking perhaps I can make some music CD’s, which are much more error-resistant…

Back in my youth, I played role-playing games like Star Frontiers and Dungeons and Dragons. Whenever you had a character in those games, the character had “attributes” that specified his or her skills in various areas. The higher the number, the more skilled the character was. A score of 18 was pretty much godlike. A particularly handy person might have things like:

Intelligence : 15
Dexterity : 14
Charisma : 16
Constitution : 14

Lately I’ve been dealing with some people who would have attributes like this:

Intelligence : 14
Initiative : 2
Adaptability : 3

Really smart, but completely lacking in initiative and adaptability. They were unable to take a situation that wasn’t quite what they expected and do anything at all with it, which meant I had to pick up the slack. Whee.

So I was thinking how nice it would be if, when you had to work with someone, you exchanged your attribute scores. That would help manage expectations (to use corporate jargon) and let other people know what they might expect. If you have no initiative, fine, but that would’ve been nice to know before you completely dropped the ball on that project…

On today’s episode of How Stuff Works, I let the kids tear apart a couple of old broken hard drives I’ve been keeping in my Computer Junk Closet for way too long. They thought it was a great adventure, and they took to the task with relish. For a solid half-hour, they worked with the screwdrivers to unscrew everything they could find, and then I helped them open up the drives (one required some pretty serious leverage to pry open the case).

It’s fun to let them experiment on stuff like this. Originally I was just going to do it with Alex, sort of as a Guy Thing, but then Kyra wanted to be a part of it and when Zack saw what was going on he grabbed a screwdriver and dove into the action.

Ahh, the joys of How Stuff Works! Now I need to find some other broken-down electronics somewhere in the clutter…

The new toy.

I’m reading Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air”, which is a first-hand account of a disastrous trip to Mount Everest. The book is very well-written, and certainly educational as it explains everything from the layout of the mountain to the religious habits of the indigent Sherpas.

But one message it conveys unmistakably– at least to me– is this: never, ever, under any circumstances go and climb Everest.

Krakauer’s descriptions of what high altitude does to the human body are sobering. Everything from persistent headaches to lungs filling with bloody fluid, from cracked skin that won’t heal to the inability to sleep for lack of oxygen, sends a clear message that people just aren’t meant to function at the same altitude that commercial airplanes fly.

Nonetheless, it’s good reading. I assured Laralee that I wouldn’t be aspiring to trek to Nepal any time soon.

In answer to a “contest” (okay, actually it was a dare) from my friend Bech, I did a little image processing work tonight– like I had nothing better to do or something– and came up with some classy shots involving my friend Derek.

Here’s a particularly good one, showing him as a boy-band cutie (he’s second from left, if you can’t discern my masterful image handiwork).

Whoa, here’s someone who must be a lot of fun on dates.

You know Zack’s tired when he falls asleep in the dining room chair…

… during dinner.

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s book “Crytonomicon”, which is widely considered a classic piece of fiction. I bought it for precisely that reason, and although I don’t think it was an absolutely fantastic book, it was– in a word– interesting.

It’s probably one of the longest single books I’ve ever read. It masses almost 1,200 pages of rather small type, and when I first picked it up I was daunted by that. (A book that long had better be worth the time to read it!)

Something sort of unusual happened while I was reading it: when I started, I was fairly unimpressed with it. I often told Laralee, “This is supposed to be a classic, but so far it’s pretty confusing / boring / slow”. As I continued to read, the various story lines started to come together, and by page 800 or so I was finally beginning to see the Big Picture of the plot.

Around page 1,000 things were a little more riveting, and by the last page I was satisfied that although it wasn’t spectacular, it had been worthwhile. I suppose in a way it was like the movie “The Sixth Sense”, which Laralee and I repeatedly thought we should stop watching… but we gritted our teeth and got to the end, which made us really glad we’d stuck with it. I suppose sometimes the ending can be worth the arduous journey.