The 21-Word Review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Lots of math wrapped up in a baseball shell. What's not to like? (Unless you are my wife, who hated it.)

012012

Numerologists and number geeks are having kittens in the early 2000s, aren't they?

The 21-Word Review: Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Reads a bit like a doctoral thesis with tons of references to Dickens' work, history, and contemporaries. I loved it all.

The 21-Word Review: Daybreakers (Netflix on Demand)

These are real vampires - nasty, selfish, mean, and not a bit sparkly. Interesting concepts. I'd like to write a sequel.

The 21-Word Review: The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens (Netflix on Demand)

A movie this bad merely demonstrates that it can be quite difficult to make a watchable and interesting boy wizard movie.

The 21-Word Review: Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Seemed a bit more rushed than The Big Short, but maybe just because it's a bigger, scarier, uglier, more complex story.

The 21-Word Review: Dubliners by James Joyce

Reading this one on my own makes me long for the days of studying literature in class with an expert. Almost.

The 21-Word Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

No, I had not read it before. What is most remarkable to me is that the book is not longer remarkable.

The 21-Word Review: Labou (Netflix on Demand)

You can add "actor" to the list of jobs that shouldn't be given to Ray Nagin. Or anyone in this cast.

The 21-Word Review: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Netflix on Demand)

How have I gone so long without realizing that Elrond and Agent Smith are transvestites? This adds so many more layers!

Eleven

Where to be on this most auspicious of numerological days at this most auspicious of numerological times?

• The Republic of Guinea (11 degrees North by 11 degrees West)
• Eleven Nightclub, West Hollywood
• Eleven Rock and Roll Joint, San Diego
• New York, the Eleventh state to joint the union
• Mexico, the Eleventh most populous country in the world
• At home watching "The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens", a truly awful movie about a boy turning 11 on 11/11
• At home watching "Spinal Tap", a truly great movie where everything goes to 11
• The University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, number 11 on the Princeton Review list of Top Party Schools for 2011
• In Hartford, CT, the 11th cleanest city in the US according to Reader's Digest
• Listening to Shania Twain's Come on Over, the 11th best selling album of all time. Really.
• I suppose there's always

Evony Hitlist Generator

Mix an engineer with an on-line time burner based on numbers like Evony and you end up with all sorts of useful spreadsheets. This particular one generates a list of NPC targets automatically based on the location of your cities. (Well, you do have to input the NPC locations once, then it's automatic. I'm not going to give you my list of NPCs.) You can input the maximum distance from each city allowed, the number of heroes that you want to be used from each city, and the NPC level that you want to attack.

This is especially useful if you have a lot of farming to do from a lot of cities. Sure, static lists can work, but what if you have all of your heros in one city busy defending elsewhere and want to reassign their target NPCs? This spreadsheet makes it all automatic.

There is also a useful feature that tells you how close each of your cities are to a specific location. So when an ally asks if you can send help, you can quickly determine which of your cities is the closest.

This spreadsheet is written in Excel with Excel macros, so you can only use it if you have a copy of Excel. I can't help you if you're using another program. Perhaps someone else can.

Try it out and let me know what you think. I am working on a next version that will make it easier to input NPC locations ... and will map them all out, too, in a remarkably overcrowded Excel format.

(And for those of you with a real life that don't know what Evony is, just move along. Nothing to see here.)

The 21-Word Review: True Grit (DVD)

Yes, it was very well done. The dialog was inspired and original ... no, it wasn't. Watch this, then watch The Duke's.

The 21-Word Review: Chemistry for Everyone by Suzanne Lahl

All of the most brilliant scholars, writers, and wits of our age graduated from William G. Enloe High School in 1986.

The 21-Word Review: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmond Morris

I read this one last, and I regret it. Start here on the incredible journey, and be overwhelmed, inspired, and awed.

The 21-Word Review: Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

A brilliant writer tackles a complicated post-presidential subject. When he dies, you will weep along with America and the world.

The 21-Word Review: Pulp Fiction (Netflix on Demand)

I saw a clip of the redneck scene years ago and avoided this movie accordingly. I shouldn't have - it is brilliant.

The 21-Word Review: Bossypants by Tina Fey

I considered a balanced review, but decided that a glowing review may increase my chances of being on her show. Hilarious!

A Process for Everything

From: Loyal Subordinate
To: Me
Re: Re: Classified

Oops, sorry. Is there anything else that I am not supposed to know/say?
This is getting too difficult…

---

From: Me
To: Loyal Subordinate
Re: Re: Re: Classified

We’ve put together a list, but no one is allowed to see it.

---

From: Loyal Subordinate
To: Me
Re: Re: Re: Re: Classified

If you show me, you have to kill me?

---

From: Me
To: Loyal Subordinate
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Classified

The official process is that we have to form an assassination committee that is composed of 3 presidents, 5 vice presidents, and 12 directors. That committee then sends its recommendation to the assassination quality group which determines the correct procedure and files the appropriate paperwork and forms onto the shared drive. After a 3 week review process by our Japanese division’s Reduction of American Employees group, funding may or may not be provided for the appropriate weaponry.

It’s really not worth the effort.

---

From: Loyal Subordinate
To: Me
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Classified

Good to know we have a process for everything

The 21-Word Review: Hot Tub Time Machine (Netflix on Demand)

I did not think that it was possible for John Cusak to be in a movie that was truly horrid. Oops.

The 21-Word Review: The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey

A legal mystery surrounded by horrific details of codified evil. My German ancestors came in through New Orleans. Makes me wonder.

Broadband at the Beach

A colleague of mine and I were discussing our summer vacations recently. He had visited the northernmost section of Outer Banks of North Carolina with his entire family (children, their spouses, and grandchildren) and the family of a friend. That part of the coastline is not yet overbuilt with condominiums, and they were able to stay in a beach house, all of them in one place. It’s the kind of summer vacation that I grew up with, back when parts of Myrtle Beach still were dotted with little cottages.

I asked how they liked spending time together in such a remote area. He said that it had been a wonderful experience, and a great way to bring the family closer together. The only complaint he had was that the broadband connection was inadequate.

As he put it, “If the kids were watching a Netflix movie in one room, you really couldn’t do much else over the connection.”

At the risk of sounding like Dana Carvey’s SNL old man (“we had two cups and a string, you couldn’t hear anything, and we liked it!”), this is a truly amazing statement. There was barely enough bandwidth available to stream a HD-quality movie in real time to a remote location on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We have come a long way from the days of dial-up when no one would have even considered taking a modem on vacation, much less bringing along a broadband-connected device just for the kids’ entertainment.
And what’s depressing about his statement is that it is justified, as anyone who spends time comparing US broadband rates to worldwide rates can attest.

I grew up spending at least two weeks, and often much more, out of every year on the North and South Carolina coasts. My mother’s family is deeply intertwined into the North Carolina coast, so we visited them often. For our summer vacations, however, we went a bit further south to North Myrtle Beach for a two-week vacation. We stayed in a house right on the beach that had no washing machine, no dishwasher, air conditioning only in the bedrooms, and a tiny television with no cable connection. One year we brought the Atari 2600 with us and played it so much that I saw marching alien invaders when I closed my eyes at night, but generally there were no electronic distractions. I don’t know for sure that we even had a telephone, although we probably did.

As kids, we loved it. We would be on the beach soon after sunrise (sometimes before sunrise if we wanted to fish), come in off the beach at lunchtime and nap, read, or play board games during the hottest part of the day, then spend the rest of the day back out on the beach. I imagine it was less fun for my mother, who had to cook, clean, bring in water that didn’t taste like old oyster shells, go to the Laundromat to clean clothes, and wash dished by hand (with help from the kids, as we got a little older). In any case, we certainly didn’t think we were missing anything.
Today, when I take my kids to the beach we stay in a condominium with cable television in every bedroom and all of the amenities of home. And yes, I do take my laptop and connect it to the internet. How else to keep up with what’s going on at home, find a restaurant for dinner, or check the weather? But this is in a large condominium complex, where one might expect amenities like broadband. What’s amazing is that we now expect them in the little cottages, too.

As I said, my colleague’s frustration is probably justified. A live, on-demand, HD-quality movie takes between 5Mbps and 15Mbps, depending on a lot of technical issues. Netflix can probably work on slower connections with buffering and compression. In much of the industrialized world, those speeds are laughably slow. When I stay in hotels in Japan, my connection is 100Mbps. In Scandinavia, 100Mbps is table stakes. There is a move in Australia to build a network to 99% or residents that is capable of 1000Mbps.
There was an effort at the start of the Obama administration to bring more broadband to more of America. It has largely been a bust, except in specific small communities. The legislation effectively barred the larger carriers from participating, local legislation in some states kept the cities and counties from participating, and the complex rules meant that consultants and lawyers reaped the most benefits. It was a wasted opportunity.
So, why should we care? About 5 years ago, I participated in a Georgia-based group that was trying to promote broadband access in rural areas. The group consisted primarily of technologists from local telecommunications companies, and the general consensus was that we needed to get more connections into those obviously underserved communities. Finally, a gentleman with the state government stood up to address the group. He explained that his job for the last year had been to go into those communities and find out their telecommunications needs. What he found was that the majority of people did not believe that they needed internet connections and, in fact, most of them did not own computers and could not use broadband connections if they were offered. He explained that as long as such a situation existed in the rural areas, politicians would not understand the need for more infrastructure in those areas.

We were fighting about the need for 1000Mbps, when the real fight was over whether anything needed to be there at all. And that’s the problem that will continue to hurt US productivity and competence.

So long as the US continues on its current path of broadband deployment, so long as people continue to see broadband as an unnecessary expense, so long as customers accept low speed broadband without complaint, so long as government does not consider broadband as important as roads to the US infrastructure, things will continue to move forward at a glacial pace. Yes, there are other pressing issues that are higher priority, but if the US has a comprehensive plan for other vital infrastructure, we should have a comprehensive plan for broadband.

Otherwise, how are we going to get out streaming HD videos at our remote beach cottages?

The 21-Word Review: The King's Speech (DVD)

Yep. It is that good.

I did keep wanting Geoffry Rush to put on his pirate hat and say "Arrrr", though.

The 21-Word Review: Strange Days (Netflix on Demand)

A heck of a cast, an interesting story, and a grungy version of LA. Was I asleep when this came out?

The 21-Word Review: Flawed Dogs: The Novel by Berkeley Breathed

"Oh!" the dad says, "I have many old Bloom County books!" "Dad?" say the kids after reading Bloom County, "Who's Reagan?"