This movie is in trouble. While watching The Hulk, two 20-something guys in the theater fell asleep and were snoring. When your core market for comic-based movies can’t stay awake thru the film…

Contrast with Bend It Like Beckham which was just great.

RCN offering home networking packages : Small Net Builder – I wonder how successful this will be. And what the margins on the business for RCN will be. My friends at pure networks have been thinking about software to automate all this work, I wonder if that is a viable business.

Oh yeah, read this recently too – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5). Some interesting developments for the series, but I thought the quest in this particular book was a little lame.

Another site recommended by prop builders for pneumatic gear – Surplus Center - Hydraulic Equip Electric Motors Engines Gear Reducers – apparently they have floor switch mats too. I’ve never posted this up here but a reminder – you really want to buy commercial grade pneumatic cylinders for your props. They aren’t that expensive. Some folks try to jury rig cylinders out of PVC or screen door closers, but these apparently have the bad habit of exploding and placing shards of plastic and metal into anyone around.

Hey irider is a cool browser alternative! i love the multipage open facility – really great for opening up huge swaths of my blogroll at once. And it seems pretty zippy.

Finished Gulag: A History last week. A little long but a great read. Made me think about all the material witnesses we are holding in this country and the prisoners at Guantanamo. We really need to hold ourselves to a higher standard, we need to either openly and fairly prosecute these people, or let them go.

The Next Step in the Spam Control War: Greylisting seems like a sound idea, and doesn’t seem like it would cause much pain for most users.

A nice little four bar linkage simulator – Halloween

So to say anything outrageous, I just need to find someone else who has said it and point to them – Wired News: Bloggers Gain Libel Protection – which means I can just do some anonymous post somewhere on some service and then point to it. I guess libel is effectively dead then for individuals…

Just finished A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to a Quantum Computer. I’d say just an average science book. It didn’t really help me understand quantum computing components or algorithms that much. And also spent too much time on explaining classical computer terminology (explaining a NAND gate and its role as a universal constructor, explaining a Turing machine, explaining NP complete, explaining public key crypto, etc). In the author’s defense I’d guess this is a very hard book to write, I don’t think it is easy to explain quantum effects to those not deeply versed in the subject.

National Do Not Call Registry – how long til we see a story that this database was cracked or leaked, and some telemarketer now has the absolute best list of numbers to call?

Here’s a good and very thorough plan for a nice halloween prop – The Grave Jumper

Just recovering from the flu, been off net for a while. Just saw this – Random Hacks: The Missing Future – what a great article about the opportunities in the software industry from the eyes of a younger person. This ought to terrify Microsoft – there was a time when they had the hearts and minds of all young developers, but that time has clearly passed. It is just not cool to tell your friends “Hey I got my MSCE certificate”, nor does it seem to present great economics to young people.

This little gadget from aaron is cool – Google AdSense (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog) – while google seems to think I am hard drive crazy, I liked the results for each of my category pages, they were pretty focused.

A great article in the print Economist 6/14 issue about the US auto industry and its impending demise. The article is behind the fee firewall, but some pithy highlights: The GM pension fund is underfunded by $19B, which is equal to the market cap of GM. GM has 2.5 pensioners for every active employee – and downsizing only makes the situation worse. They face declining domestic share. It just doesn’t look like there is a way for them to survive this. Ford is in little better shape. They both seem like bankruptcy candidates soon, which means the pensioners will get screwed. I hope the government doesn’t step in and try to save to corporate entities, I’d rather see our tax dollars go to protecting the pensioned workers and towards retraining the current workers, rather than protecting the corporate entities.