Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Mon
Jul
31
2006

Goofy 2 cmts

From the IMDb page listing goofs for Back to the Future Part III comes this marvelous entry:

bq. *Incorrectly regarded as goofs:* The complex logic, and conflicting theories, of time travel have resulted in a great many potential plot holes, especially when the movie is viewed in the context of the whole trilogy. But time travel movies are like that.

I find it highly amusing (and a bit disturbing) that people on the IMDb message boards are still to this day debating the logical inconsistancies of the Back to the Future time travel storylines. I could not possibly think of going into that movie as a “serious” treatment of time travel. I mean, they have hoverboards and ads for _Jaws 17_ and Michael J. Fox plays his own daughter. Not hallmarks of a “serious” time travel movie.

Sun
Jul
30
2006

Bush submits new terror detainee bill – Yahoo! News 0 cmts

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration. Freedom is slavery. Yay!

Fri
Jul
28
2006

Cheyenne Mountain is being closed down 0 cmts

Cheyenne Mountain is being closed down? How sad. Maybe they’re afraid of the WOPR.

Roger Ebert’s 1986 review of SpaceCamp pulls no punches 0 cmts

Roger Ebert’s 1986 review of SpaceCamp pulls no punches. Nothing he says is wrong.

Are nut allergies taking over the planet? By Emily Bazelon 0 cmts

“[I]t would be a lot easier to accommodate allergies graciously if I felt like I could tell the rationally neurotic parent with the extremely allergic kid from the crazy neurotic parent with the slightly allergic one. And I can’t.”

Email Note 0 cmts

For various and sundry reasons that are boring and not worth blogging about, I’m without my computer for the next week or two, and, along with it, all of my email. If you’ve sent me anything deserving of reply and I haven’t gotten to it, please resend it, because I don’t have access to any of my last five years of mail.

Anil Dash on marriage and commitment 0 cmts

Last year, Anil Dash got married: “The defining trait of marriage in these contexts is that the commitment comes first. It doesn’t occur to most people to get upset that they don’t get to choose their siblings; You just love your brother or sister, or you try to, and you fight sometimes and you disagree, and then you get over it, and that’s what family is about. And in some ways, marriage can be like that, too. There’s a liberation in knowing you don’t have an easy out: You know you’re going to make it work, and you’re not going to give up.”

Tue
Jul
25
2006

Whatever happened to baseball cards? 0 cmts

Whatever happened to baseball cards?

Mon
Jul
24
2006

Movie time 4 cmts

Sitting home, feeling crappy, can’t really blame me for blowing a hundred bucks on a dozen DVDs from Amazon’s summer sale. All movies I remember fondly from my childhood. I’ve often wondered if I was actually supposed to have been born in the 70s (and that’s why I missed the dot-com boom), and my love of these early-eighties movies perhaps bears that out. Or maybe it was just that the little video rental store in Lake Arrowhead that we frequented had an odd selection.

The spoils:
* The Last Starfighter (1984)
* Explorers (1985)
* Ghostbusters 1&2 (1989)
* WarGames (1986)
* Space Camp (1986)
* D.A.R.Y.L. (1985)
* Clue (1985)

The rest of the things I got were newer, and include The Bourne Identity, Gattaca, Starship Troopers, and Minority Report. Like I said, I was sick, so I can’t be blamed for what I might do. And this is my last chance to spend a bit before I’m saddled with a mortgage. ;)

Sun
Jul
23
2006

On competence 0 cmts

Zingermans DeliFrom the article on Zingerman’s Family of Businesses referenced in the previous entry:

bq. There’s a concept taught in ZingTrain’s seminars concerning the mastery of a skill. When you know absolutely nothing about a skill, you are unconsciously incompetent — that is, you don’t know what you don’t know. As you learn more, you become consciously incompetent: you know what you don’t know. With training and practice you can become consciously competent, while total mastery makes you unconsciously competent, meaning that you use the skill so effortlessly that you’re not even aware you’re doing it.

Makes sense to me. Easy to apply to life. At Berkman I started off unconsciously incompetent, over a bit of time I realized how much I needed to learn about systems administration (conciously incomptent), and lately I’ve reached conscious competence — I have a fairly good idea of how to do things and know which weaknesses I still need to address. If I continue down this path I might eventually reach unconcious competence, but I’m not there yet by a ways.

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I'm Danny Silverman, a guy in Cambridge, MA with an interest in law, culture, media, and using technology to bring people together even as we work ever harder to push ourselves apart.

My day job is maintaining computer systems. I like exploring the outdoors. I catch and throw flying discs for sport. My cat is fuzzy.

To contact me: zeno@ this site.

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