I Watched Two Movies Recently

Which may not seem odd to many of you, but I generally don't watch movies in theaters or at home.  Most are about "human drama" which I don't need more of, action movies wore me out after Rocky and Diehard, and most sci-fi movies weren't faithful to the books or comic strips.  Especially the sci-fi.  Seriously, I'm old enough to have seen mostly bad sci movies when younger.

Most of my life, favorite sci fi comic books or real books have been made into truly dreadful movies.  Have you ever seen "Howard The Duck"?  A thoughtful mature social-satire comic was turned into a Grade D farce.  And the first Dune movie was little better. 

So I've been pleased the past decade or so as sci-fi and comic book characters have been turned into quality movies.  The second version of Dune was suberb, Siderman was very good, and the movie industry has done a decent job since.  They still mess up the characters badly (Lord of the Rings was most accurate).

But while Marvel comic characters have done reasonably well (being written toward college students), DC comic characters have generally not (Superman and Batman being exceptions).  So when I saw that Green Lantern was a movie on TV tonight, I cringed, but need something to watch while eating dinner.  Well, Green Lantern was probably one of the hokiest shallow undeveloped  characters DC comics ever created.  Really a magic ring lets you create anything you can imagine (no origin of the power or anything.  That's 1940s sci-fi stuff...

Imagine my surprise when I enjoyed the movie.  There was actually character development!  There was a theme.  There was even some philosophical discussion (the difference between fearlessness and courage for example).  I enjoyed it.

And there was a scene which I absolutely positively delighted in.  Green Lantern touched down on the balcony of his love interest (like in Superman).  She was amazed at his mystery and power (just like in Superman).  Then she looked at him, sniffed him, and identified him at once (unlike Superman).  I cracked up!  I don't know what writer got that scene in the movie, but I sure hope s/he got a raise and a bonus.  I flashed Two Thumbs Up and decided to watch the rest of the movie.   The rest was Ok, concluding with a reasonably good fight and a clever resolution based on information offerred earlier in the movie.

But I only watched Green Lantern because I had watched an anti-hero movie a few days ago.  Hancock.  If you haven't seen it, Hancock is the only superperson anywhere.  He is no hero.  He is lazy, irresponsible, drunk, stupid, carelessly destructive, and amnesiac.

In fact, he is only named "Hancock" because the hospital told him to put his "John Hancock" on the forms and he thought they knew that was his name (note to foreign readers - a "John Hancock" is a generic term for a signature because the real John Hancock wrote his name so LARGE on the Declaration Of Independence)

I would have thought about the amnesiac part earlier, but I assumed that some OTHER character would come along to straighten him out.  Well, actually I was right about that, but sure not in the way I expected.  There was no character to "straighten him out" by being stronger and wiser" (deus ex machia). 

Hancock goes through life stopping minor crimes by destroyed massive amounts of property just because that's the easiest way to do it, acting like an idiot physically and socially, and living a lonely boring life punctuated by violence.  The citizenry is thinking they might be better off without him but there is nothing they can do about him.  He is invulnerable and seemingly immortal.  He's sort of like the vigilante semi-crazed Batman with Superman powers, except that he doesn't seem to care about crime other than than that he gets to really beat up on the bad guys.

And then, oh so slowly, a past begins to emerge.  He begins to recognize that he is destructive.  The wife of his best friend turns out to be a superperson too.  Not different (ie, "feminine" powers),  to oppose Hancock; identical! 

After the obligatory fight scenes (equal to the last iota of energy) where they seem to destroy a large part of a city (after which it seemed to me that even Hancock looked around appalled), the truth starts to come out. 

Hancock first lived in ancient times, created by ancient deities.  Beings like him were created in pairs, male/female.  As they found each other, their powers waned so that after so many years they could live mortal lives and love, raise families, and finally die (often called the "mortals blessing" in mythology).  Hancock and Mary (the female superpower) were the last of the pairs. 

In a touching scene, she explains all his scars as examples of what happens when the two of them are close and their powers weaken.  Though nearly mortal, he fought off swordsmen in Sumeria (Persia?), saved her a few more times through history.  They always had to separate to regain their powers. 

But the last time they were together, he was injured so badly he was amnesiac, not eve remembering who he or Mary was.  She left him so he could survive, determined to stay away from him forever to keep him alive.

After getting in touch again (Hancock saves Mary's husband's life) the weakness begins again,  Hancock is shot in a minor robbery.  While stopping from (unexplained?) assassins from killing Hancock, Mary is mortally wounded.  Hancock (near death) manages to kill the assasins efficiently (throwing several out of high windows) and Mary's EKG flatlines.  Hancock understands what is happening and leaps out the high window himself to increase the distance between himself and Mary.

He survives the fall (barely) and so jumps further away, gaining strength as he gets further away.  Mary de-flatlines!  Her fingers twitch, she breathes again, she lives.  Her husband Ray (who understands everything by now) rushes to her side with the young daughter.  All is well in her world.

The resolution is basically that Hancock has learned responsibility, purpose, and control in line with his original created intent, and that Mary will have a temporary loving marriage with Ray.  That she and Hancock will have a new relationship in the future, and that Earth will have a superhero. 

I note (cautiously) that Hancock and Mary seem to have not had any children in the times they were together.  There might be an origin movie someday.

But it was sure a good movie.  And having watched only 2 movies in several years,  Those were good ones.

NOW I Remember...

why I stopped playing Civilization II years ago.  Its addictive.  I don't eat.  I don't sleep.  I just keep playing...

A few days ago, I got my old PC working again and played Civ II all night.  I mean like 12 hours.  And 12 hours does not complete a game.  I finished the next day in 8 hours.  OK, got THAT out of my sytem, right?  NO.  Started another game last night and played from 8 pm to 10 am.  I collapsed into bed from 10 am to 3 pm, got up, cleaned house and made dinner.  Played with the cats.  Watched science and polital talk on tv.

And the new game is sitting there calling to me...  How can I leave a game unfinished?

Drugs have nothing on Civ II for demanding attention!

The good news is that I lost 3 pounds by not bothering to eat.  LOL!  But I think the cat blog is going to suffer until I get tired of this game again...

A Day In The Life

I don't often bother to contact my local elected officials.  The few times I have done so in the past got me responses that either completely ignored my issue, or got it backwards and thanked me for supporting the vote I was complaining about.

But today I got interested in obtaining genetic testing.  I had thought about it for several years, so it wasn't exactly an impulsive decision.  My delay had been the cost a few years ago ($1,000) and limited results offerred. 

But when I drilled deeply into one of the provider's websites (and found the cost of $99 and the list of results very lengthy and detailed),  I decided to purchase this genome test.  Imagine my surprise when I was informed by the website that Maryland is the ONLY State that completely prohibits such "direct-to-consumer" transactions (New York State has a partial ban).

I decided to complain.  From what little I could find out about the original regulation, it was aimed at preventing people from being suckered by fly-by-night scammers and those who might sell your genetic information to insurance companies and employers.  But the professional companies doing this now seem to protect you from that. 

And even if that wasn't true, it doesn't matter to me anymore.  I'm retired and my federal health insurance has worked like ObamaCare for 30 years and it is WONDERFUL!  I can switch insurance companies every year (I don't) and pre-existing conditions don't matter.

But back to genome (genetic) testing...  Alone, Maryland will not allow me to just send a spit sample to a genome testing company and get results.  So I looked up all my elected representatives.  I emailed them all demanding they allow me the RIGHT to get my genetic results directly from a qualified lab the same way my fellow-citizens in OTHER States can.

I bet all the responses from the politicians are vague and promise agreement even when they say they support the law I am complaining about. 

But I'm still glad I spent a few hours contacting them.  Sure made ME feel better.

Blast From The Past

I got my old PC up and running in order to play Civilization 2 (aka Civ II), which I haven't played for about 10 years.  I knew I would be rusty at it, so I started he game at the lowest level. 

For those who are not familiar with the game, you and several players (human if online, computer bots if not) each start with  their own single barely historic settler and decide where on a random map to create a first city.  You slowly work up to modern times by learning weapons, governments, and knowledge advancements.  There are politics involved.  The goal is to be the one who launches a spaceship reaching Alpha Centuri.  It is wicked tricky and complicated.

I reached a point in my first new game where I was getting to build a spaceship.  And when I say "build" I mean you really had to construct your spaceship from parts you built/bought/stole in your own constructed cities or your opponents.  You needed some various precise combinations of "structural components", "propulsion units",  "habitation units",  "fuel",  and "energy".  Different combinations had different consequences.  Some made the spaceship fail.  Some caused the inhabitants to die.  Other combinations affected the likelihood that the ship would arrive, and others affected the years of the flight.

It is an AWESOME game!

I recalled that I had once worked out many of the best combinations of the spaceship parts, so I googled "civilization II spaceship formulas", figuring someone had posted them.

You won't BELIEVE what I got at the top of the list...

MY OWN LIST.  Still considered part of the Civ II bible after all these years...

In a site for info for Civ II players  by various categories (like how to defend a new city, when to use a spy, and when to break an alliance).  And THERE, in a page of its OWN, was a page titled "Optimum Spaceship Configurations"  by Cavebear.

I blushed...

But yup, that's me, Cavebear.  I even recognize my usual typos and unmatched parentheses.

I'm stunned. 

You don't expect to see anything you did a decade ago still meaningful, especially in a game.  It brought tears to my eyes...

I can't quite get a screenshot, but it is HERE. 

And I sure hope I get to use that decade-old info on the winning spaceship tonight.

Camera Troubles Fixed!

 On Sept 21st, I used a program called MacKeeper.  It cleans, defrags, and checks for viruses, but the main feature I was interested in was finding duplicate files, foreign language options, and leftover bits of deleted programs.  It found quite a lot of them.  Of course, it doesn't just go and delete them.  You have to check of a box for each file.  I examined the first dozen or so carefully and it seemed accurate, so I just started checking all the boxes of files it offerred and clicking submit.

Apparently, it moved seamlessly in my applications folder, and none of the names I saw at first seemed relevant to me (seeming like leftover bits of deleted programs) and I continued checking boxes and deleting them.  On one page, after I hit delete but before the screen cleared, I saw one was iPhoto (an Apple program for processing camera pictures).  I realized it was deleting programs and stopped.

Well, I went to my backup program, Time Machine, but I couldn't restore the program.  Actually, I couldn't get it to work at all on even small test files.  After messing around with that for a couple of days, I reread the instructions an discovered I was doing part of it exactly backwards.

So I restored iPhoto.  It was back in my applications folder, but I still couldn't upload pictures from the camera.  It worked for looking at old pictures and other functions, just wouldn't upload new ones, saying "camera not found".  I tried everything for another couple of days, until I noticed it was an old version of iPhoto.

So I went to the Apple store online to upgrade it.  Can't do that.  The old version was TOO old.  OK, I bought the new version.  That didn't work either!  I tried restoring the camera software.  That didn't solve the problem.  I went to the Canon site and downloaded the camera drivers and software.  That didn't solve the problem either.

I was (correctly) positive it wasn't the cameras.  Too unlikely both would good bad at the same time, and I had used a new cable AND tried different ports in the computer.

I gave up and got on live chat with Apple.  After 2 hours, the problem remained.  The technician said there were some more complicated things to try but I would have to call the Apple store in the morning because there were some things he could not access (it was late night).  So, I scheduled a call from Apple for 1 PM Thursday.  At 2 PM Thursday with no call, I went grocery shopping.  Naturally, I discovered they had called 5 minutes after I left.  They sent me an email saying I could reschedule online or just call a number.

I called the number Saturday and had a tech on the phone in 2 minutes.  We spent a merry 30 minutes searching various screens and programs until one said "camera device present", whereupon he said "Aha, you've lost a piece of your operating system"!  Somewhere apparently (a partition on the hard drive I surmise) hidden and protected, is a copy of the operating system.  It took a few minutes to navigate there, and then it said 50 minutes to restore, so the tech gave me a direct number to him in case it didn't work, and I hung up.

It worked!

I'll be a LOT more careful with MacKeeper in the future.  And I'm going to have to study Time Machine preferences/options because for some reason, the only application program it backed up since Jan 2012 was iTunes!

I Hate To Break The Bad News

Bad news, kitties...

Just think "cans of stinky goodness" and "thumbs"...

A Cautionary Tale of Sad Computer News

A long post, and I won't blame you for not reading it to the end.  But there are some lessons that may be worth reading...

No, I haven't gotten a diagnostic call from the computer repair shop I mentioned in the last post.  Instead, I messed up my own working Mac Mini computer.

Over the past few years, I have tried out several anti-virus/disk management programs for the Mac, and not been really happy with them.  Viruses aren't really a problem for Macs, but they are good about detecting viruses that could go on to infect PCs that I communicate with, so I want to keep the anti-virus protection up to date.  Mostly, I want the programs for hard drive management and they are S-L-O-W.   Several hours to read all the files looking for viruses, and a lot of one-at-a-time decisions about most programs.

I like Macs, but it seems there are a couple of weaknesses.  They don't "hold" your name/passwords to some websites as well as PCs do.  So when I actually have to shut down the computer, I have to sign in again.  A minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it does get tedious when you have several program updates the same night and have to restart the computer after each one.

That wouldn't be too bad, except that I play computer games that use adobe flash a lot.  For some reason, Macs accumulate some files than clog the system.  Even THAT's not too bad; on my older PC, I would simply crash in mid-game.  One the Mac, things afterwards slow down and it locks up while searching something on Firefox or writing a letter and I have to restart the computer (meaning all those sign-ins again afterwards).

So I found a program called MacKeeper that promised to do all that better and great hacking protection (and had good reviews).  And since I had just run into a person who I thought intended to do me ill (old story, I won't go into that now except to say never blow up at a former friend whose past malicious behavior shows they know a LOT about computers).

I used the program and it seemed to work well.  Fast scanning of all files, etc.  No problems with hack attempts.  A couple of nights ago, I noticed some additional features.  The were sub-routines to identify and delete unused apps, find and delete "leftovers" (orphaned files related to deleted programs),  etc.  It wouldn't just do it automatically, I had to check each file to be deleted.

After tediously checking boxes carefully for an hour, I got a bit casual and just started taking its advice.  You can guess that was a BAD move...  It was in the applications part of my directory, and just after I clicked OK for the latest batch, I saw Firefox was on the list.  It was too late to stop it!

I have to admit the program is thorough.  When I could control the computer again, I found I had deleted Firefox.  OK, no real problem, I have TWO backup systems.  One is an external drive called FreeAgent, the other is a built-in Mac backup called Time Machine.  Both save your hard drive initially and changes to it thereafter.

Well, FreeAgent had told me last week that it was full and I should delete some older backups, and I had just done that, saving backups from Jan of the previous several years and a quarterly one for this year.  I didn't examine The Time Machine (I find it a little confusing to use).

So I examined my computer dock (graphic sidebar of active applications) and Firefox was gone.  So was the Mac word and spreadsheet suite called iWorks.  So was the MS Office Word and Excel.  I have NO word-processing or spreadsheet programs, and the only browser I had was Safari  (which seems to fight me all the time).

After spending a good part of yesterday and this morning trying to find the lost programs in the two backups, I gave up.  I downloaded Firefox (at least its free), but there were no bookmarks.  I had about 13 years of some useful and unusual bookmarks saved.  Well, at least I knew that I had seen a boormarks.html file in the backup list.

Yeah, it was from 2008!  Both backup programs had faithfully saved one old bookmark file for 5 years.  I checked both backups programs "every way from Sunday" (as my Dad used to say) for 2 hours before I gave up.  There was just that old one.  So I imported it.  The first thing I did was open every single bookmark.  Most were no longer working and I deleted them.  Some were still working but were "repurposed" and I deleted them.  Some I could not imagine why I bookmarked them and I deleted THEM!

It didn't leave me with very many bookmarks, but at least I still had the organization of the folders (blogs, reference, hobbies, garden, pets, etc).  The first additions were my blogs.  And you know, it was hard to get those.  It was easy to SEE my blog, but it took some thought to find how to get to my dashboard (my blog has "blogspot" in the url, but the dashboard has "blogger").

I slowly used Safari to get the urls of some other sites (like cat blogosphere) and bookmark them into Firefox.

I've lost a lot of bookmarks, but I had too many old unused ones anyway.  Old ones I want, I can find again easily enough and bookmark them.  And my Feedly bloglist RSS is safe because I set it up as my home page on Safari (open up Safari, and there it is).

I had the Mac iWorks and MS Office word and spreadsheet programs downloaded rather than owning the reloadable CDs, so I think I would have to buy them again.  Fortunately, I don't need the MS suite programs with their advanced features anymore.  The simpler Mac Page and Numbers apps will work fine.  And it seems they are only about $20 each.  MS Office for Mac costs $140. (and I'd rather not have any MS crossover programs on the Mac for security purposes).  And I used to make CD backups of some programs, I might find them.

But not tonight!  I'm worn out and (as calm as I may seem), very angry and frustrated.

Those backup programs (as I understood them) were SUPPOSED to allow me to completely restore my hard drive in case of failure.  I HOPE it was just my fault in not setting them up properly, but my recollection is that I was pretty darn careful about doing it right.  But I'm going to really triple-check it when I dig into them both tomorrow!

If you have a backup system, I suggest you really examine it carefully.  Make sure that what you think is a saved program isn't just the sidebar graphic or the desktop shortcut.  Look at "properties" or "info" or whatever gives you file size amounting to MBs.  You may not actually have the actual program saved.

I got fooled because my older computers had a full-sized 2nd drive and when I copied the main drive to the 2nd drive it WAS a real copy of the whole drive, applications and all.  I was used to that.

It seems to me that, not matter how careful you try to be, a train wreck will occur on your computer every few years.  And something you assumed worked, won't work the way you think it will...

Computer Happiness

I dragged the old PC to a local PC repair shop.  I mainly want to use it to play Civilization2.  Its a 90's game.  My Mac is too modern to play even the old Mac versions and my attempts at downloading Mac-to-PC crossover platforms failed utterly.  So I brought my old PC in for cleaning and rebooting.  They said they could do that, though getting a Windows 98 reboot might take some research.

Fine.

But then I casually asked them if they could clean a Mac.  Not work on it, just clean it enough so that the evil Apple Store (who considers a little cigarette smoke a "toxic violation of OSHA working conditions") would repair one.  And I'm not defending smoking here, I hate it myself.  Lets not get into that.

But OMG, OMG, OMG, they will work on Macs too.  They even have "a Mac guy"!  So after I returned home to retreive the Civ2 CD I meant to bring at the start, I brought them the old $3,500 Mac Pro that has been a doorstop for some years.

They said "sure, we can clean and fix that".

THUD!  I'm not kidding.  "THUD!!!"

I think there are the old pictures of Skeeter and LC on that hard drive.  There are old letters to Mom and Dad.  There are old family pictures.  There are old games of Civ2.  There is stuff I don't even know is on there!

And when I pick up the old PC and the original Mac, I will bring them the previous Mac Mini to clean.  I'll sell the old (working) Mac Pro (minus the hard drive) and will add the newly working Mac Mini with a wireless connection (I hope) so that I can visit our cat friends away from the desktop.

Assuming they can really fix Macs.

You have to understand that the nearest Apple Store is almost an hour drive away, AND you need an appointment you dare not miss by a minute (or you stand in a long line), AND its in the middle of a BIG CONFUSING MALL so you have to carry a 20 pound Mac Pro around for an hour, etc...

Man, if these local guys will actually clean and work on Macs, they have a customer for LIFE!!!

But we'll see...

Strange, Sad People

I play online compute games a lot.  Not arcade-style games, just calm strategic kinds like Risk and Backgammon.  Still, sometimes you meet really angry people.  Sometimes you can tell they are adults, sometimes you can tell they are teens.  I try to be really careful around teens.

I'm not talking about chat rooms.  I stay far away from them.  But just in games, you can tell sometimes when someone is REALLY angry.  I feel sorry for those people, whether they are teens or adults.  On very rare ocassions, I offer to just talk.

It doesn't usually work out.  Angry people are hard to talk to.  Just tonight, I came across a backgammon player who almost immediately accused me of using a cheat program.  Right, my rating is in the lower 20% I would guess.  If I was using a cheat program, I would have to be about the most inept cheater of all time.  You START at 1500 and my rating is 1274.  Some high level cheating going on THERE, right?

After being informed that he was reporting me for cheating (I rolled doubles once and that really upset him - and never mind that he did several times himself).  And never mind that he won 2 of 3 games.  But then he mentioned "reporting me" several more times.

Everything about this player says he is a teen (unreasonableness, anger, and lashing out), and I really don't want to ruin the slight personal validation that some teen gets by winning a game if he is alone in a basement or bedroom struggling to get some feeling of success in his life.

But still, I'm kind of pissed off about it all.  I'm thinking a game site for those only 30 and older might be a good idea.

Mark

Good Gardening Days

Some days, you just cant seem to get any useful work done.  You vacuum and it just looks the same a day later.  There are always dishes and pots to clean.

But outside, the effort of work seems to last longer.  I spent some time watering the gardens the past several days.  I have a tripod I built (my own design) that lets me just set the hose spray on and let it run for 10 minutes at a spot.  Its easy to move to a new spot to water.

It takes 5 movements of the sprayer to do the flowerbeds, 3 to do the veggie gardens, and 3 to do the hosta bed.  Plus random local watering for the odd places too small to water largely.  Which usually means 120 minutes or 2 hours.

But September has actually had virtually no rain, so I gave each spot 20 minutes of watering instead of just 10 and spent the time waiting by weeding the watered flowerbeds.  I pulled out 3 wheelbarrow-loads of weeds.  Fortunately, them being deeply soaked, they came out with the roots.  There is something very satisfying about seein a weed pulled up with the roots still on!  Even if they survive, they are annual weeds and won't have time to grow again to produce seeds.  So THEY are GONE GONE GONE!

It was a very good 2 days.

Washington DC Pro Sports

Well, actually, the only two I really bother with are baseball and football.  My apologies to fans of other sports, but basketball is too much a contact sport these days, soccer is too boring to watch (and I even played it), hockey is unfathomable to me, tennis just doesn't seem to work as a team sport, and my interest in my alma mater (Univ of MD) is pretty much gone since they are moving to an out-of-area conference where they will be cellar-dwellers for a decade until they leave in shame.

And neither of the two I have followed are looking promising.  The Nationals are setting themselves on fire at the very end of the season, but it's too little too late.  Something like a 5% chance of them getting into the playoffs.  And with Atlanta coming to town next, that should pretty much end it. 

The Washington football team (with the team name I will not use) looks like it is setting up its fans for a seriously depressing season of falling behind at first and mounting a great comeback attempt that falls short each game.

So it looks like my evenings will be free of baseball until the World Series and the next 14 Sundays will be free for shopping at "guy-stores ".  Seriously, the best possible time to shop at a home project store is during a local NFL game!