Sharp Tools

This is too cool not to 'me too' link

Tilt-shift photography is cool. Tilt-shift video is cooler. Tilt-shift video of a monster truck arena is just...well...awesome.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Quantum of Solace

Well, it's a Bond movie. That's what I can say for it. Also, Dame Judi is as awesome as ever. As for the rest of it...damn it, we need to get Q back. Pronto. The only things that come remotely close to being a Bond gadget in this film are the Aston Martin DBS we see only in the opening sequence, which is (as a friend noted leaving the film) "not so much bulletproof as bullet-absorbent" and a Sony-Ericsson cell phone with omniscient capabilities.

But that's it.

Honestly, if we wanted to see someone dealing damage and practicing escape & evade with a completely wooden face, we could just make another Bourne movie. Where's the snark? Where's the moments of trademark humor to lighten the fare? Where's Q? Where, in fact, is anything resembling a plot?

Not here.

Sigh.

And not even a trailer for Watchmen. We had to sit through the fucking awful shilling for both The Day the Earth Stood Still (WHY, GOD?!) and the Tom Cruise vehicle Valkyrie. To say I could care less about either would be a lie. Ah well, the new Star Trek trailer was good ;)

GNU - Gaffes Not Unity

I hate Microsoft as much as most IT people, I'd guess. More than many. But even I think that this (specifically the final paragraph) just makes you look like a febrile eleven-year-old rather than an organization whose software I'd like to trust my business' processes to.

Disturbed by Amazon and Scientology rumors

I don't know whether this is true, or what it means. But I'm going to be looking for Amazon to say something about how it is not censoring books based on input from a murdering cult. If they won't even address it, I'm going to have to consider taking my business elsewhere. I know I don't matter in the big picture, but I can't support businesses which acquiesce to pressure from Scientology.

I'm in the tank.

It's always a bad thing for a campaign when a phrase you use as an insult is gleefully picked up by the group you used it on and proudly adopted. Hello from the tank.

It's November 5, and Barack Hussein Obama was just elected the 44th President of the United States of America.

I made my way from Greenwich Village uptown to home in Inwood, and passed many crowds. There was shouting and whooping, there was drinking, and there was some necking going on too. I saw white people in Harlem celebrating and people of all colors everywhere in Manhattan generally having a good time.

In Kenya, there's a woman who can say that her grandson was just elected the President of the United States.

Today is a good day.

GO VOTE.

If you haven't yet, and are a United States citizen, GO VOTE. I don't care who you vote for. Let us all agree on that - no matter who we support, let us agree to encourage everyone to exercise their constitutional right to vote. DO IT.

I planned poorly. I waited until around 9:30 am, figuring to miss the 'pre-work' crowd, only to realize as I reached my polling place that my neighborhood is still heavily populated by retirees. All of whom seemed to have shown up just before me. To make matters worse, each machinewas allocated to a subdistrict, and my subdistrict was my co-op complex (as far as I could tell) - which has an even higher percentage of stay-at-home folks than the neighborhood.

Still, had some good conversations on line. Asked the Democratic Inspector on duty how old the polling machines were, and he said 'well, they were in use when I first voted, and I'm sixty-four, so you figure it out!' I remarked that they were in use for my first election, too, and gave me a comfortable feeling.