A couple of weeks back, I stumbled upon a transcript of a conversation between Roger Ebert and Werner Herzog.

To this point, I've read several of Ebert's reviews on Herzog's work (several of his movies are on my to-watch list).

But after reading this transcript, I'm more fascinated by the man and what he's trying to accomplish through film. 

I think what really intrigues me about Herzog is the great extent he is willing to sacrifice himself to create imagery that no other filmmaker today is willing to attempt; his drive and purpose are not monetary.

"It was disgusting actually because at that time 20th Century Fox was interested to produce a film and we had a very brief conversation of about five sentences because it was clear their position was, “You have to do it with a miniature boat.” From there on it was clear no one in the industry would ever support something like that. It was really risky, and I knew, at that moment, I was alone with it."

Ebert makes a very interesting observation about Herzog in his review of The White Diamond:

"In 'La Soufriere,' a 1977 documentary released on DVD last month, he journeys to an island evacuated because of an impending volcanic eruption, to ask the only man who stayed behind why he did not leave. What he is really asking, what he is always asking, is why he had to go there to ask the question."

I finished watching Spellbound this past weekend with the wife.

It's quite amazing watching some of these kids, as young as 9, prepare for the Scripps Natiaonal Spelling Bee with such intensity and focus.

However, I'm mixed on the significance of memorizing large numbers of words.  On one hand, it does excercise the capacity of the still maturing brain, it does help kids understand the process of memorizing information, it does help develop a strong work ethic.  On the other hand, I don't know if it has any intellectual value.  To memorize formulas for physics is one thing.  To understand the formulas is a different story. 

Despite all that spekticism, I really liked the point that Rajesh Kadakia, one of the speller's father makes:

"I'll be the first to admit that it's hard.  But what is valuable in life that is easy to achieve?"

But in any case, perhaps the more important aspect of the film that I took away from my viewing is what America symbolizes to the rest of the world.  Now don't get the wrong idea, I'm not some chest thumping, flag waving, patriot.  In fact, I'm probably middle of the road in what I think of this country as a whole (or at least where we are currently), but I was really re-awakened to the fact that America is land of dreams by two segments in the film (it's one of those things that you probably think about once in a while, but when you hear it again, you're reaction is always along the lines of "Wow, that's soooo true", even though you've come to the same conclusion at some previous point in time).

As the spellers are introduced to us, one by one, we are also introduced to the different cultural backgrounds of each family.  It's truly amazing to see how the parents, family, and teachers in each vignette run the gamut of skin color, attitudes towards education, and their approach to supporting their kids.

Perhaps the best soundbites to come out of these subjects is from Mr. Kadakia.

"I'm so indebeted...to this country, which will accept a stranger [to] come in and give them this opportunity.  America is just great."

A little later, as Rajesh is showing us around his second home, he says:

"There is no way that you can fail in this country.  That is one guarantee in this country: if you work hard, you will make it.  And that's not existent in the rest of the world."

This struck me again the other night as I was talking to my wife about how badass my mom is when I think about it.  When we first moved here from Taiwan, she was a single mother, taking care of two kids, attending grad school full time, and working part-time to pay for it!  We used to live in a tiny little 1 bedroom apartment and literally posessed only junk (my mom loved garage sales).  Thinking back, it's truly amazing how determined my mother is.  You would never be able to tell by the packaging (my mom is a somewhat tiny woman), but my mother is just exploding with determination to do whatever she sets her mind to.

I'm tempted to think that this is a largely immigrant way of thinking.  Of her second trip to the spelling bee after being eliminated in an early round the previous year, one of the young spellers, Nupur Lala, says:

"You don't get any second chances in India the way you do in America."

It's true.  And I think that most people take this for granted.  The immigrant mind feeds off of this second chance in life and utilizes it to excel.  Perhaps Angela Arenivar's story (the first speller we are introduced to) symbolizes this more so than any of the other spellers in the documentary (her father being an illegal Mexican immigrant who doesn't speak English).

At this point, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this but there was one other statement that caught my attention:

"I'm always thrilled to see any child come in who is from India because I know they are gonna have a good work ethic and the are gonna be good students."

Being the spouse of a teacher, I can tell you that this is a general attitude (be it good or bad) that teachers have towards Asian students in general.  My wife expects Asian kids to do well without the goading and prodding that most kids require; she's excited when she sees an Asian name on her class list in the summer.  Now, being Asian myself, and having met Asians of all walks, I can tell you that there are stupid Asians as well (maybe I'm one of them ), and I consistently point this out to people who make the point to me that Asians are statistically smarter than other races.

Seeing as how I can't seem to string my thoughts together today, I think I'll just end this post here.  It is the immigrant working class, driven by The American Dream, that has built America to what it is today.  As we move forward, we need to keep sight of this ideal and realize that The American Dream is not a right owed to any of us, but a privilege for which we must continually strive to attain.

If nothing else, this movie serves as a reminder that our situations are never as dire as we think them to be. America is truly the land of opportunity, be it financial or academic; however, one must always be prepared to work hard to achieve success.

Sidenote: If you search around the web, you can find various tid-bits about the spellers.  Some of them even have blogs. It's intersting to see their perspective and find out how the film affected their lives.

A couple of weeks back, my machine at home started to crash randomly when I was playing Battlefield 1942 (Desert Combat, of course). It was quite annoying since I thought it might have been a software issue and ended up rebuilding the machine only to find that the same funk was persisting.

It turns out that one of my twin, 512MB Corsair XMS memory modules was bad. Really bad. When I ran Memtest86 against the RAM, I consistently ended up with metric ass-loads of errors in the 512MB+ range. Battlefield 1942, being the memory hog that it is, would crash the whole system after ~1-5 minutes of play.

In any case, I started looking around for new memory to replace the module. As I was looking, I noticed that Corsair offers a lifetime warranty on their products! Awesome! So I navigated to their site only to be confounded by the stupid-as-Jessica-Simpson method of obtaining an RMA number.

In any case, after trudging through the process, I got an email on Tuesday (I think I sent it out on Saturday of Labor Day weekend) confirming my RMA.

I packed up the memory and sent it out via UPS Ground the next day. Meanwhile, I'd been playing Battlefield 1942 with only 512MB of RAM...oh the horror! It was laaaaaaag city.

So today, I finally got my replacement modules. To my surprise, they were new modules (I was half expecting refurb?). Not only that, they sent back double the amount of RAM that I sent them. Yup. I got back a full gig of RAM. Oh wait, it gets better! It was DDR400! I only sent them DDR333.

Needless to say, I am a happy customer. Not that I've been using other brands of memory in the last few years (I've put together/upgraded ~6 computers? Used Corsair each time). The only downside is that they sent back registered memory. Unfortunately, my Asus P4S533 doesn't support registered memory. Doh! You'd figure they'd look this stuff up first. Luckily, I have another machine that is currently using a 512MB stick that matches the one I have at home and this machine supports registered memory.

So, all-in-all, a good experience! Corsair gets a 9/10 on this one. -3 points for sending me incompatible memory. +2 points for sending me double my original amount.

(Random) It has a similar consonance to The Constant Gardner.

Anyways, after watching Mr. Iwata's keynote speech, I'm more convinced than ever that Nintendo is going in the right direction and is going to change the way we, as a society, view gaming.

The key point that Mr. Iwata makes is that the human-machine interface for consoles, the controller, has never been fully accepted.  In fact, non-gamers probably find them daunting and quite alien.  Truth be told, one of the most tedious parts of starting any new game is learning the control scheme.  Memorizing button combos and what not has never been a strength of mine, even after years of gaming.

Mr. Iwata states that while even your grandmother would pick up a remote control to interact with a television, many parents that grew up before the video game generation are turned off to the games before even playing them because they're intimidated and/or confused by the interface. 

Making games more complex and more difficult (the route that Microsoft and Sony are taking), simply alienates more users by making the barrier of entry more difficult to surmount.  A big part of that barrier is the modern controller and the fact that as games become more complex, the only way to add new control schemes is to add new buttons or utilize more combinations of buttons.  Neither of those options is optimal nor are they intuitive/easy to use.

On the other hand, as I was explaining to my wife how utterly badass it would be to play Katamari Damacy with this new controller, even she was getting excited about it (and she's as anti-gamer as they come).

Mr. Iwata emphasizes an important point that I find myself agreeing with more and more: games today fail to stimulate me.  You can only go so far with graphics and immersion before it becomes the same-old, same-old.  We can clearly see how this has failed the movie industry as CG is so common nowadays, that even the definition of what is visually inconceivable is radically different from what it was only a decade ago (or even half a decade ago for that matter); at some bifurcation point, people just don't care about how pretty or how realistic it looks.  Badass CG just doesn't cut it nowadays.  The studios that "get it" smartly allot small budgets to promising stories while the others throw big money to create a grand visual experience (some studios are just dumb and continue to build stupid rehashes).  The latter works increasingly rarely nowadays.

I only own four games for the PlayStation 2: Dance Dance Revolution, Metal Gear Solid 3 (I wrote a nice Amazon.com review for it), Katamari Damacy, and We (Love) Katamari.  Part of the problem is the time commitment.  As I've grown up, I find myself with an ever increasing number of primary responsibilities and gaming is becoming a hobby that I enjoy when I have free time.  As such, I don't want to invest a huge amount of time playing long games (MGS3 being an exception).  As great as Resident Evil 4 is, I still haven't finished it, months after I purchased it.  The other part is that there aren't games that I want to play.  I mean, how different can MGS4 be from MGS3?  What new gaming experiences can I expect?  None.
 
That's the most disappointing part of this: game developers have resigned themselves to rehashing proven formulas rather than innovate and create new expriences.  As we will see with the introduction of Atlas and WPF/E, innovation in the UI can change the way we build and think about software.  Similarly, Nintendo has proven, with the success of the DS, that changing the way we interact with game devices can spur innovation in developing new gaming experiences.  Most importantly, and Mr. Iwata repeatedly emphasizes this, Nintendo is aiming to generalize the definition of a "gamer" by making the human-machine interface intuitive to everyone.

Without question, of all of the next-gen consoles that are coming out, the only one that I'm even remotely excited about is the Nintendo Revolution.  And perhaps more importantly, even my wife is excited to try it out.

I think I've finally figured out why I'm somewhat disappointed with my experience at Immedient (and many of my previous jobs as well).

One of the main culprits has to be the lack of intellectual peers.  By this I mean people who not only have similar intellectual interests, but people that get excited by the same technology related news that I get excited about.

In the last few days, I've been absolutely bouncing off the walls with excitement about the new technologies that are forthcoming from Microsoft.  To be honest, only 1-2 people that I deal with on a daily basis even seem to care.  I'm excited the same way a kid is when he gets a new toy; I just want to dive in, play with it, explore it, and find out what it does.  I want to push all the buttons, spin all the wheels, and I start playing imagination games in my head (trying to figure out use cases for the new technologies and where I could have applied them in previous projects and how they can be used to improve future development).

It's difficult to contain myself and it's just somewhat disheartening to me that no one in my day-to-day interactions seems to have the same level of enthusiasm that I do (my 50+ year old coworker, Igor, comes the closest, but he doesn't count because he's a technology skeptic and a database guy).

Kent Brown, a former employee here at Immedient, was probably the closest I've ever had to someone that was just really inquisitive about new technologies and open to exploration.  Unfortunately for me, he resigned a few months ago and I think for me, the atmoshpere here has really changed because of that;  I no longer feel that there are any really high level .Net developers here.  There are plenty of system architects and product experts (SharePoint, SQL Server, Reporting Services, etc.), but I don't feel that there are any UI and/or .Net experts here that I can relate to.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do (as Igor would say, trying to figure out what my goals are), but I'm very, very far from that point yet.  My gut feeling is that I'd be happiest working in software development (as opposed to consulting), but at the same time, I haven't really been able to find those opportunities around here and, for some reason, I just don't think I'm to snuff to make it with a company like Microsoft.  In addition, I'm somewhat egotistical at times and I think that harms me in terms of being able to communicate with other developers (which is absolutely crucial in an environment where one man can't possibly be responsible for all of the development, which I typically am).  I feel like I can probably only work with developers which I feel are unquestionably more capable than I am.

I'm working on that last part, though.  But I'm still quite lost.  I'd like to do a computer science master or maybe even a Phd, but I'm just not sure I'd like the abstract nature of that type of work (I like to build things and make tools, you see) and I simply don't have the funds to do that at the moment.

As I've moved around with several companies in the last 24 months, I've been asked, more and more, why I'm unable/unwilling to stay at one position for any length of time.  At the root, a job is just like an inter-personal relationship.  Until you figure out what you really want from a relationship, you'll never be happy in the relationship.  Similarly, until you can figure out what you want to get out of your professional life, you can't really decide what direction you should take.  I think one important facet of that is not to have conflicting goals (I'm working on this one, too).  I want to make a lot of money up front, but I also want to do "useless" work with cool technologies which may make money at some point.  Whereas I've been lucky on the inter-personal relationship side of it (I've known my wife for 7+ years now), I'm just having really crummy luck with my professional life.  My thinking is rarely aligned with those of the business people which I work for.  I'd rather fiddle around with a cool piece of technology than work on the boring stuff that I'm resigned to do on a day-to-day basis.  Blah!  To be honest, that was one of the key reasons I decided to join Immedient, but I feel like that that scenario is further from the truth with each day.  I've done one project in the last 9 months where I really had fun.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm a very realistic person and I can accept that there will always be a balance between crap and the fun stuff, no matter where one is employed.  But I guess what I'm looking for is a place where there's more fun stuff to work on and less routine.

Conclusion?  I'm lost like a little puppy in a big city :( hoping that someone takes me to a happy home.  I know, it's not a good position to be in; I feel like I should be in command of the chariot, but instead, I'm just letting the reins go and hoping that I win the race.  It's a terrible feeling to have, but one that I'm working on resolving (or at least I keep telling myself that).  I'm really quite envious of my friends, family, and co-workers who've really got their lives and goals figured out; just wish some of it would rub off on me :)

It's been a while since I've been this giddy in one day. 

But I can't help it.  I don't even feel like working on any of the stuff that I'm supposed to be working on. 

A video posted at channel9 demonstrates what Microsoft has been craftily hiding with "Sparkle". 

Wow.

It's really hard to describe my internal feeling at the moment; it's a childish giddy-ness.  I started jumping around, trying to tell people about how awesome this really is and the implications it has for software development.  No longer are we constrained to plain-Jane UIs!

In addition, it's also incredibly impressive that they've basically integrated a 2D design environment, a 3D design environment, and animation tool, and VisualStudio in one.  It's quite a task to surmount and I'm really, really juiced about getting my hand on this.

Engadget has a purported sneak peak at the Nintendo Revolution controller.

This is perhaps the most important point:

"The controller part acts like a mouse as you move it around in 3D space."

I've recently been talking with Igor, one of my co-workers, about the human-machine interface and this was one of the points that he made.  He wasn't really that impressed with the Windows Vista UI improvements since it really doesn't change the way we interact with the programs.

As the discussion continued, I started forming a mental picture in my head of what it would be like if we interacted with our programs in a 3D manner.  Imagine that each application is a room floating in space.  If you want to use an application, you summon the room and walk into it (my mental picture is of a room moving towards a person while the person is also moving towards the room).  Inside the room, the interfaces are the surfaces of the objects in the room.  If you need to use two applications at once, you kinda wave your hand and a wall opens up into another room which serves as the context of the second application.  So for example, a user using Excel might have a different spreadsheet on each wall (it may not be a four-sided room).  Now the user wants to load a graph into a Word document.  The user would "extrude" the wall and kinda create another room which would be the context for Word.  The graph would be a painting or a wall poster which I could just move into the Word "room" and put it on a wall where I have a document loaded.

Then it hit me.  It's not that it's impossible to do this now.  We can easily create highly detailed 3D worlds and render them on mid-high end PCs (Doom III, Halo, Battlefield 2), it's that the primary human-machine interface, the mouse and keyboard, were not designed to interact with a 3D world. 

I mentioned this to Igor and he said "Yah, that's exactly the problem" (or something along that line) and started to move his hand around as if he were controlling a mouse in 3D space instead of a 2D plane.  It's a catch-22 situation since no one will make a fully 3D interface until there is a proper interface and no one will waste time developing this interface unless there is some application for it.

So, to me at least, this controller could really be "revolutionary".  The first mouse came into existence in 1964 and has remained pretty much the same since.  Yeah, it may be wireless and use lasers now, but the mouse is a limiting factor in the ways we design our software interfaces because it only understands 2D space.

After reading more about the controller at IGN, I've come to the conclusion that this is totally badass.  I mean, think about having two of these controllers in a fighting game (DoA, Soul Caliber, etc.).  One controller would be used for attacking.  You can slash, jab, and punch by moving the controller in 3D space.  With the second controller, you control the viewport; if you move the controller forward very quickly, you dash in that direction.  Move it to the right, and you turn.  Hold down a button on the controller and move it to the right, and you strafe.  The possibilities are mind-numbing and if Nintendo can pull this off (get lots of 3rd party developer support), it would truly revolutionize the way we interface with our machines.

Every once in a while, I'll put my resume up on Dice.com just to see what types of offers come my way.  I'm beginning to think I might be a masochist. Perhaps the thing that peeves me the most is when recruiters/headhunters call me and kind of nonchalantly ask my graduation year.

Yes, I'm 24.  But I've been doing web work since I was 18.  At 20, I was better than a lot of the guys I've worked with in the last few years who've been doing development "professionally" for 5+ years (I use that term loosely).  At 22, my knowledge of XML, ASP, and SQL were strong enough that a sizeable engineering company would hire me as a consultant to do the work that their internal developers couldn't do.

"So when exactly did you graduate?".  I despise this question.  It's a ludicrous question to ask, of course.  I've been doing the same type of work (and getting paid) since I was in college.  So what's the difference between the for-money work I did the day before I graduated and all the work I've done since I've graduated?  Nothing.  Not only that, in fact, the work that I did for my high level computer science classes?  Leaps and bounds above the typical work that most developers do in their careers.

What annoys me even more is that most of these recruiters have no idea about the technologies they're dealing with in their requirements.  I constantly have to explain that DTS is not much more than T-SQL + VBScript, how VB.Net and C# are pretty much identical, and JavaScript is not the same thing as Java.  Not only that, many don't seem to be able to read.  I get calls, not automated emails, about positions in California.  I could swear that I wrote it clearly in my resume (the HTML version posted on dice) that I'm only interested in positions in metro NY area and NJ.

Oy.  It makes the whole exprience so frustrating.

I had enough of it today when Renee called and started asking me to doctor my resume.  I've never hung up on any recruiter (I've been hung up on a few times).  I just couldn't handle it any more.

Took me a while to figure out how I wanted to set up my site.  After dabbling in a little home made CMS and evaluating several other open source CMS/portal solutions, I finally decided on dasBlog.

So far so good.  Setup is a breeze, just copy the files to your webserver and make some minor changes to your configuration XML files and you're all set to go.  Templating is also very flexible, however, there is no UI for doing it at the moment (no UI to select a macro and insert into an HTML template).  Currently, everything has to be done by hand in a text editor, which is sure to turn certain people off to this application.

On the downside, the list of available macros is somewhat limited beyond the standard blog/item macros.  Not only that, the list is poorly documented.  I can't seem to find a complete and up-to-date list of macros.

Well, in any case, I still have lots of work to do in terms of skinning and working on the CSS files.  All of the links at the top are dead for the moment, but I plan on filling them in (eventually).