I've been meaning to look this exact quote up for some time. I consistently find it to be incredibly relevant in my life.

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."

    -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted at 12:00 AM

"Sometimes in Canada, it's so frickin' cold that you can't even pack snow into a ball. So if you want to make a snowman, you have to make it out of rocks."

... of course, that's not really why you'd make an Inukshuk, but it makes an amusing anecdote.

Posted at 12:00 AM

Ahhhh...

It's slow at work, and as Martha would say, it's a GOOD thing. This gives us time to cinch up all those dangling technical projects that we've been meaning to do for quite some time. Jeff started today at AFS, I think he'll fit in nicely.

This is weird. Morbid, but so damned whimsical it's almost hilarious. Personally, if I'm to have something quite so far-fetched happen to me, I'd rather it be that I won the lottery.

I've decided to wipe my Mac OS X web server in-progress, mostly because I got some bad software and bad advice from various websites. I'm starting fresh, using the precise instructions provided by O'Reilly's MacDev Center. This time I'll get it right.

Posted at 12:00 AM

Wow.

Yes, that's a good wow.

After sitting in a theatre for an hour and a half, watching nerds do battle with their toy lightsabers. I was rewarded, and rewarded well. This film is dark. It's darker than you ever imagined Star Wars to be in your nerdiest, wettest dreams. There are brilliant exchanges between Anakin and Palpatine, and between Obi-Wan and Anakin, which actually make you think about the nature of good and evil, and the nature of democracy.

As for action, there's no shortage of gorgeously choreographed fight scenes. The final duels between main characters are, in an overused word, epic. Most importantly, I feel confident saying that I want to see this film in theatres again, which is a lot more than I can say for Episode i or ii.

Now that I've kissed Lucas' ass, I must warn you. The dialogue in this movie ranges broadly. As I mentioned, there are some great conversations that really define the characters well, and then there are some hamfisted lines that will make you lurch uncomfortably in your seat while the rest of the audience chuckles. I really would like to know who wrote the bad dialogue so that I would kick them in the nads for spoiling what would otherwise be a Sci-Fi masterpiece. Episode iii absolutely redeems Lucas for Episode ii. The film ties up everything nicely, and is a satisfying end to a six-part legend that spans 28 years of movies. Thank you Star Wars. Thank you SO MUCH.

I'm going to go hold Chewbacca tenderly and cry now...

Posted at 12:00 AM

Okay. This is it. At 12:01 AM tonight (or technically, tomorrow night) I shall be sitting in Granville's Cineplex Odeon as the last chapter of the Star Wars saga in unveiled before my eyes. Iain convinced me to find a way to get the next day off work so that I could go. Others were convinced as well.

Tomorrow I shall stand before you as either one of two men. One shall be broken: a three-time nerd and sucker, faith utterly destroyed when he blindly dove head-first into the wading-pool that is our utterly shallow culture. The other shall be redeemed: a man whose life-long love of high Science-Fiction shall and shall have spanned from childhood, when he made robots out of Lego or Meccano through his life-long love of computing, and to his days as an old man enamored by the future present all around him.

To evoke another George Lucas moment, I feel as Dr. Indiana Jones did in the famous scene from The Last Crusade: standing before a great precipice, with only the promise that my faith shall prevent me from falling into a great abyss. "Indy, you must hurry!" shouts Marcus from the chamber behind me. So I clutch my hand to my heart, try to believe, and step forward into nothingness...

As Scott Kurtz says: I'll see you nerds tonight...

Posted at 12:00 AM

UPDATE: Har. Once again we see how I can use this website to manipulate world events. Today at E3, Blizzard Entertainment announced its acquisition of Swingin' Ape Studios, a game company with console development experience. So I guess that answers my question as to how Blizzard plans on getting Starcraft: Ghost done in time: brute force. An okay plan except for the fact that these people have to learn all the code for Ghost before they can actually do any real work. Good luck Blizzard.

Posted at 12:00 AM

Is Ghost toast?

That's the question I started asking myself this evening when I took a stroll around my corner of the internet and stopped by Blizzard's StarCraft: Ghost site. I realized that the last update on the site is now a full year old. Like many Blizzard games, Starcraft: Ghost has been in development for several years since its initial announcement. This is pretty standard fare for PC games. The problem is that while PCs generally get faster over time, consoles don't: they simply become obsolete.

Blizzard watchers could smell the trouble in June of last year when Nihilistic Software, Inc. announced it was no longer contributing to the development of Ghost. This meant that a company already knee-deep in developing it's own Massively-Multiplayer Online RPG, World of Warcraft (which now surely incurs plenty of maintenance labour), had to complete game development on three different console platforms. Blizzard hasn't even developed a game for one of the current-generation consoles, let alone all three at once.

With the launch of the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 about half a year away (with Nintendo's "Revolution" not far behind), Blizzard is a few months away from releasing a game for three obsolete gaming consoles. A big company like Blizzard can't cancel the game or pull support for one of the systems without losing a lot of face. Can they pull it off? If not, what are they gonna do? I'm anxious to find out. Stay tuned...

Posted at 12:00 AM

Still alive, really. Just busy and stressed and lonely. It's finally been agreed to take on an extra person at work. Those wheels are turning now, but it will take another week to have a warm body in the office, and another few weeks to train said body to move it's arms and legs in a useful manner (no offense, Jeff).

I bought myself a couple of black lights. The things are surprisingly cheap: only $15 each. They had them at Canadian Tire, that was the easy part. I had to search through Toys R Us, London Drugs, and four dollar stores before I could find some cheap glow-in-the-dark stars to stick to my ceiling (contrary to what Iain says, I don't think black lights are very useful without blacklight responsive stuffs). I find it very relaxing, though some people seem to harbor negative associations between black lights to small rooms coated with a thick layer of pot resin.

I've been pleasantly surprised lately watching the new Doctor Who series. I'm sure fans of the original (like Jeremy) are screaming heresy, but I find the series rather enjoyable on the whole. Its a nice departure from the now terribly stale world of Star Trek. Seeing the recent episode "Dalek" also hearkened me back to the days of watching Dr. Who with my parents on TV Ontario. There's also something wholly cathartic about watching a British made production on CBC. America, eat your heart out.

Posted at 12:00 AM

I've finally decided to start sharing some of my music online. I'm not saving the best for last, which is why I'm posting Slide first. This is a minimalist-style piece I wrote in 2003, in my last year at UBC. It's music that slowly evolves over time, the lines ever shifting against each other. I'm really happy for how it turned out, and I hope to write more like it someday.

I'll post some more things now and then when I feel motivated.

Posted at 12:00 AM