Cheerful Curmudgeon

We just watched Around the Bend with Michael Caine, Christopher Walken and Josh Lucas. To say that it was way better than I expected would be a gross understatement. I  thoroughly enjoyed watching the family secrets slowly reveal, the characters slowly grow together, and the idiosyncrasies slowly resolve into sense.

There were moments when I chuckled at the thought of creating a situation like that for my kids. (Don’t worry, guys, I won’t really do it. Probably.) Mostly I left the film with a sense of gratitude for the closeness that we do have in my family. No, we aren’t the Brady Bunch but I think we do pretty darned well.

Joe Zemon with his sons

We do have our bits of estrangement in the family, though; my grandfather, Joe Zemon, being a case in point. Neither my father nor my uncle (the two dashing young men in the photo to the right) would say word one about him to me or to any of my four cousins, yet I’m named after him. Who was he really and, before dying young, what did he do with his life?

I do kind of wish there was still a way to take a road trip with my dad and sons. It’s too late to take my father along (moribund jokes aside) but I expect there will be more trips with the kids.

You’ll find Around the Bend on Netflix (both watch instantly and as a disc). Highly recommended.

I am so happy. Netflix will finally stream movies to the Sony Playstation PS3. We have a Roku player, too, but it will be more convenient to have all of our entertainment stuff in one box. And the PS3 ought to produce a better picture, too.

Internet TV—broadcasting live television over the internet instead of using radio broadcasts or the cable television infrastruction. Almost everybody has heard of it. Some people talk about it as the Next Big Thing in television. Many people figure that it will not happen for a long time for a wide range of business and technical reasons. Did you notice that a new player quietly entered the internet TV market this week?

Netflix posted New content to watch instantly on Wednesday,

Today we announced an agreement with Starz Play that adds around 1,000 choices that you can watch instantly today, and will add another 1,500 by the end of the year. Movies include “No Country for Old Men”, “Ratatouille,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Superbad,” and more. You can see all the newly available choices here.

If you click the “here” link, and look near the top, right corner, you will find “Live Starz TV Channel” quietly nestled in there. (Click on the images to see full-sized versions.)

Click the “Live Starz TV Channel” link and, without any fanfare, you are watching a live Starz movie channel.

How long until Netflix offers more of the Starz, Encore and MoviePlex channels? How quickly will HBO, Showtime and the rest want pieces of the action? We have always known that Netflix was positioning itself to deliver movies over the internet. Now we can see that its goal is to deliver all TV content, not just movies. Netflix already has a solid subscriber base and delivery infrastructure. It looks like we consumers will soon have a third alternative to cable and satellite providers.

Finally, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. Look for two disc sets to be available in September. Each set will contain both the 2004 digitally remastered version and the original theatrical versions of Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983).

I vividly remember sitting in the front row of the theater in 1977, watching this huge spaceship fly into the theater over my head… and keep coming… and keep coming….

Details at starwars.com

Words fail me. Go watch this video from inside a tornado. Inside Tornadoes Multimedia @ National Geographic Magazine

Google impresses the heck out of me. Obviously, it provides an awesome array of features, stuff that you can get from it. Underlying all of that stuff, however, is an incredible chunk of software that “understands” what you want. Google “knows” a lot about what is out there. When you type a query, Google matches what it thinks you want with what it has found. The result is way more than simple keyword searching. There is an immense amount of semantic processing going on behind the scenes.

For instance, I found a reference to Togo in the news yesterday. Being geographically challenged, I wanted to find out where Togo is. So I Googled for “where is togo?” The result:

Togo
Location: Western Africa, bordering the Bight of Benin, between Benin and Ghana
According to http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2144.html

Not only did Google understand my question and know where to find the answer, it knew how to find the specific phrase on the larger page and it displayed it nicely and with a nice attribution so that I could learn where to find more of this information in the future.

Think about it…. We read sci-fi about AI but here it is, having silently slipped into the mainstream of our lives. Google works so well because it responds intelligently to our queries.

While I’m on the subject, here are a few more nifty Google features:

• Try Googling “movie times” to see what’s playing in your neighborhood, what it is rated, how well liked it is, reviews, etc.
• Conversions. Try something like “25 miles in cm” to convert miles to centimeters.
• And David’s favorite: Go to the Google main page, enter “elgoog” (that’s Google, spelled backwards), and press “I’m feeling lucky.”

Now here’s a challenge for libraries and librarians: Find the service that you can provide above and beyond what Google’s AI does instantaneously and free. Then market the heck out of that niche.

I’m usually an “early adopter” but seem to be coming to the blogging world a bit on the late side. Better late than never, though.

WordPress was easy to install and that both impresses me and doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that Verio bothered to provide a vinstall for it on my VPS.

So I installed WP in a few minutes while watching the beginning of National Treasure with the family. Had I not been watching a movie, I could have been up ‘n’ blogging in five minutes, no sweat.

National Treasure is no treasure, by the way. I hope they don’t try to do a sequel. If you want to see something wonderful, watch Porco Rosso.