fine whine

I remembered something else that was somewhat notable for 2007: it marked the first time I'd ever eaten guacamole*.

* For the curious, 2006 was the year of the cantaloupe.

I didn't post as much this year. Notable things about which I wrote nothing:

• Both of my grandfathers died in December. I still haven't figured out what I want to say about that.
• I failed once again to complete a 50,000 word novel in November. But I came up with a much better idea for next year's.
• Natalya turned 1 year old in October, meaning we could finally officially stop worrying about SIDS. Not that I ever did anyway.
• I left the fashion industry in September. I also read the complete Harry Potter series (for the first time) in under four weeks. These two events are not at all related.
• In August (I think) the guy housesitting for my neighbor across the street passed away in her house, and was not found for a week. I was one of the few people on the street who had ever even met the guy, and I didn't even know his name until he was already gone. In cleaning up her house, my neighbor gave me a nice desk ending the four years I'd used my computer with it and me both on the floor.
• I can't really remember much of anything from July. So ends the monthly portion of this wrap-up.*
• The two hundred or so photos I've posted on flickr aren't even a fraction of the over seven gigabytes of JPGs I've created this year.
• I survived watching 61 movies from India, most of which could be considered "Bollywood". Two I watched without any subtitles at all.
• The entire year passed without me attempting to access the internet with my mobile phone, despite it being capable of doing so.

More ideas may occur to me - I just didn't want to let December pass without any posts at all. Happy new year.

* The only other month-based item of note is in January, wherein I visited Chicago the weekend of B-Fest but was unable to attend it because I was in Illinois for less than a total of 24 hours. Eating dinner in the Signature Room of the John Hancock Tower was superb. Being back at my desk eighteen hours later was not.

I've been meaning to post this for several weeks now*, but I had some trouble getting back into this kind of Flash animation. Basically Natalya did something small and simple that I thought was, well, pretty cool.

It wasn't so much what she did, as the apparent thought process and (very short) time it took to do so. I think we're beginning to see the early flickers of some sort of intelligence brewing.

Enough about intelligence though. Check out my cheesy animation. There's no sound, so don't worry when you don't hear anything. Hit the big green button to play it.

* I'd like to think that now I'll get around to posting the stuff that I meant to post after this, soon. At least, I don't have this as an excuse anymore. I'm backdating this about a week just because it really shouldn't have taken me this long to make a simple animation like this.

I shot this footage yesterday. If the player below isn't working, click this link to see it. It's not long - around eleven seconds.

For over three years the front page of my website has been relatively unchanged (take a look), and to be honest, it looked more like 2002 than 2004.

Until today. Today I finally switched over to a new design, and completely new underlying programming, that I began working on back in March. I'd intended it to be an April 1st prank (the working title was 417), a past-the-trend Web2.0 redesign, but April 1st came and went and I was nowhere near being able to flip the switch.

Well, now I've flipped it.

It's still not 100% complete - I really wanted to build my own photo gallery, and intend to do so still, but the two boxes of thumbnails on the front page are actually the result of a fair amount of coding, and more than a few tools for fetching the images from Flickr and showing them. A complete list of the tools I used and am using is beyond the scope of this post, but the number of them that I tried and didn't use would be four or five times as long.

I still have a long way to go with bringing all of the old stuff to match the new, but given what I'd done with those pages sometime between 2004 and now it won't really be that big of a deal to update them all together.

One thing I'd really like to highlight, though, is the code directory. Right now there's only one page there, the monkeymaker, but I think that my fellow Columbus residents* may find it to be useful. Launching that has been something I've meant to do for quite some time, but I never got around to writing up that post.

For that matter I'd been meaning to do the rest of these updates back in August when I discovered that my web hosting had changed, breaking almost all of what I'd coded, down to how I'd referenced filenames. I made enough of a nuisance with the hosting company to get some of what I needed fixed (Not bad considering how little money they'll ever make from me), but the rest of the broken stuff I needed to fix by hand.

It's been an interesting challenge - there are a lot of things that just don't work right, but coding around them has been almost fun, and certainly educational.

It's a never ending learning process, though - and if you happen to find something I still need to fix, or have any suggestions, please feel free to contact me. Thanks in advance if you do.

* At least the ones that use both Firefox and the local library with some regularity.

Today I finished watching the fiftieth Indian* movie I've seen. It was called Tarzaan: the wonder car (imdb) and there's a very good chance you'll never watch it, so I'll tell you what it's about. Anybody not wanting the story spoiled should skip past the blockquotes below.

It's about a kid who likes cars - designing them, driving them, fixing them and putting them together. We see in the beginning scenes that his father designed cars too, creating one so advanced that the mere royalties from selling the design should have set him and his family for life. The story takes a sad turn almost immediately as the designer is cheated, and then killed, by the corrupt partners of a major car-maker who intend to bury the innovative design forever. Nothing stays buried forever, though, and we find that our protagonist discovers the car his father was killed driving, and decides to rebuild it. He's got a few factors in his favor - he's got the determination that comes from being teased by the popular kids, a girlfriend who supports him whole-heartedly, a job as a mechanic with a boss who's willing to pay him to work on his pet projects on company time, and he's a mechanical wizard.

After a long montage he's almost finished with the rebuilt car, which looks nothing at all like it did before. The only piece he couldn't find or fix was the fuel pump, but overnight the existing one supernaturally fixes itself... spooky. The next day he drives it to school and it becomes the object of envy for all the students, especially the ones who bullied him. Later that night, while he sleeps, the car, apparently driving itself, tracks them down, and beats them up in a pretty humiliating fashion. They of course do not know that he's not at the wheel, and begin treating him considerably better from then on (after recuperating from their injuries, of course).

Faring less well are the partners who killed his dad - one by one they are hunted down by the car which can not only drive itself, but also can completely repair itself too. The last one turns out to be the father of our protagonist's fiancee, and the climactic battle on land and sea (the car can fly, submerge in water, and float) reveals the driving force to be the spirit of his father. He walks off into the light, and the car never drives itself again.

The father, it should be mentioned, christened his car "Tarzan" as a child, and the name stuck over the years as he hung a figurine of Tarzan (from Disney's animated version, oddly enough) from the rear view mirror.

Some might call it a rip-off of Christine, or perhaps The Wraith, but it's those things and so much more. It could well be the strangest Bollywood movie I've seen so far, but it's by far not the worst. Now that I've seen a good number of them, I think I can pretty well say that.

By now you may be wondering why I've done this. Early this year I happened to watch a horrible Hindi movie entitled Dhund (imdb), though the title "The Fog" figured prominently on the cover. I'd not found many promising movies to borrow from the library that day, and happened to stumble across this one in the foreign languages section.

It was the worst movie I'd watched in a long time, no matter what the language. I was surprised that fog only figured into a scene and a song (I'd heard Bollywood movies included songs and dance, sometimes jarringly, throughout the film) and the plot was much closer to any of the I (still) know what you did last summer films. Except that it was much, much worse.

As a connoisseur of bad films, though, I saw some potential and began to do some research. Namely I talked to any Indian people I could find about the films they liked. The consensus was unanimous - it was an awful movie. I then watched one better - Dus - and started off on a long list of other, much better, Bollywood and Hindi movies.

So now I've seen fifty of them, including one I watched without any subtitles (borrowed VCD), and another that had been dubbed into German (pirate download). Now that one may be a contender for the worst one I'd seen, more conceptually than anything, as it was a remake (in name only) of Fight club, I kid you not.

But that's enough for now. I've got both versions of Don to watch - that's at least six hours of film. Maybe I'll write about them too.

* It's probably safe to call them 'Bollywood' movies, though I might argue against that on one or two.