Blessed by the Potato

We just watched the Steve Carell movie “Dan in Real Life“. I had to make Wayfare watch it since even though I had it, she didn’t want to waste the time to watch it since it looked so bad from the previews. I don’t know who put the previews together, but the movie is nothing like they suggested. It’s actually quite well written, and very heartfelt and warm and fuzzy and sweet. They did a very good job of showing a family interacting together in a big get-together and building up the “love at first sight” relationship with the main character. Moreover, Steve Carell didn’t suck. I don’t typically like him as an actor since in so many roles he comes off a such a complete dufus that you have to wonder if he’s from outer space (though oddly enough I end up really liking what he’s in: the office is funny, despite his over-the-top stupid manager; the 40 year old virgin relied on him being a bit of a freak, and had a good supporting cast, in addition to hitting a little too close to home to not like it), but in Dan In Real Life he actually came across as likeable, normal guy. In fact, I nearly lost it in the talent show scene (damn you Wayfare, I know you’re pumping me full of estrogen while I sleep and it’s fucking with my emotions! I don’t usually get emotionally involved in movies!!) where he’s all opening up for the first time after his wife died and torn between singing backup for his brother and singing directly to the girl he likes…

While I liked it as a romantic comedy that was very down to earth, Wayfare seemed particularly drawn to the huge happy family getaway fantasy. “Oh, I want that!” she’d exclaim as they got together for charades, or played football on the lawn. So of course now that means that if we know you in real life, you’re going to get sucked into charades, football, pancakes, and possibly a talent show sometime in the near future. Possibly on PEI, since that seems to be the sort of magical place where this sort of thing could actually happen.

There were three separate accidents on the 401 during my drive back to London last week. The worst one happened in Guelph, which is out of the usual coverage range of 680 News, so when they reported on it (even though it was just a brief “hey, you’re fucked eh!”) I knew it was going to be bad and after sitting in stop and go barely crawling traffic for over 20 minutes I pulled off into the rest stop as soon as I could see it (with only a little bit of driving by the jam on the shoulder… hey, I had to pee!). I decided to kill some time there and let the accident get itself cleaned up, and listened to the radio in my car for a bit to try to get an update (though I could plainly see that the traffic was still just crawling by the rest stop). Eventually they said that the accident was near the “highway 8” overpass, which didn’t actually help me any. While I know many of the major interchanges and landmarks on this route that I travel essentially every week (twice every other week, that is), I had no idea where exactly highway 8 crossed the 401, or how far from where I was that accident then was. I knew that there were a number of decently high-speed highways/rural roads that I could have taken to detour around the accident, but not specifically which ones.

Fortunately, there was a map in the rest stop and I found the information I wanted. The side roads get a little complex around Guelph and Cambridge, so it would have required memorizing quite a few turns, so I decided to just wait it out in the comfort of the rest stop rather than try to navigate around based on a memorized (or hand-drawn) map.

In the end, the traffic started clearing up within another 10 minutes or so and I was back on my way, but the experience made me realize for the first time that a GPS mapping device might be handy. Of course, I don’t want a GPS device since I don’t want to have to remember another thing to take with me, or another charger for another thing, and because even on sale they’re fairly expensive.

Part of why they’re expensive though is that they have a GPS locator in them. It’s been a long, long time since I was ever so lost I didn’t have a clue where I was, so I don’t really think I need a GPS locator; I just need a good set of maps. So far, I’ve had a lot of good success with Mapquest and/or Google maps, printing off maps for anywhere I’m going in advance. But for situations where I unexpectedly get stuck, maps might be handy. And, since I almost always take my laptop with me on long trips, some mapping software seemed better than a giant map book.

Enter Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007. I just finished installing it on my laptop, and it has maps. Maps of Ontario, maps of Quebec, and maps of PEI. I’m set. At full-price for this year’s version (with optional GPS transponder so you can have your laptop bark out voice-guided navigation just like other GPS nav systems) it’s a little pricey for that, but at bargain-bin cheap-as-free for last year’s version, I’m pretty happy just to get maps on my laptop. Some of the other features I haven’t looked at yet include a list of “points of interest” such as parks, gas stations, and hotels (which must already be slipping out of date). What I would really like to see is a list of 24-hour drug stores and drive-throughs, but I doubt that kind of information is in it. Another neat feature which I haven’t tested myself at all yet is the ability to plan a trip, include your vehicle’s fuel capacity and estimated mileage, and it will add refueling stops to the route plan. Not much of a selling point for me since my car has a bigger bladder than I do, but maybe that turns your crank.

Dear Bell;

Please stop highlighting this box on my bill. I’m typically a pretty careful guy when it comes to managing my finances, and for over a year with this new bill layout I’ve managed to find the right box for my payment and have sent in the right amount by the proper time. But every time, I look to that right-most highlighted box first, and then have to catch myself. Last month I don’t know if I was in a rush or tired or what, but for some reason I didn’t, and ended up sending in a payment that was short by the amount of the taxes. The late fees (10 cents) were pretty reasonable for being short by about $6, so I’m not complaining about that. But please, just stop shading that subtotal box. It’s not where people’s attention should be directed, so it shouldn’t be highlighted equal to the amount due. It will even save on ink!

For that matter, how about following typical layout conventions for people who read left-to-right and put the final sum on the right, with the smaller line items on the left? Better yet, how about going back to the old bills which were one or two pages, depending on how many calls I made, as compared to the three taken up by the new bill?

I never read Stephen King’s The Mist, so I managed to be pretty well surprised by the movie. For starters, I went into it thinking that “the Mist” was that mist that turned people inside-out like the Simpsons mocked in one of their Treehouse of Terror episodes. Not to spoil anything, but it’s not. Aside from seeing it pop up in the list of movies at IMDB, I hadn’t really heard about this movie — no advertising for it managed to penetrate my consciousness, if there was any.

Spoiler warning!

It’s a pretty decent B-list horror movie. There are monstrous space aliens to boldly fight (or run shrieking from) and a slow die-off of the characters trapped in their less-than-safe haven. There are gross-out sequences (such as the soldier who gets put up in a web and finds alien spiderlings spewing forth out of his body), blood, and action… but it’s not a typical monster movie. The movie is really a psychological thriller about the desperation these shut-in survivors face as they ponder the prospect of never being rescued, of never returning to normalcy, and of course, being eaten or otherwise horribly killed.

Some of the characters are a little cardboard cutout-ish. The next-door neighbour started off with a very workable personality and some hinted-at old issues with the main character. Then, he started to come together with the main character in their common struggle to recover from the storm damage and the story seemed to be leading us towards a nice arc where they become reluctant friends… until the Mist comes and brings with it the tentacled space aliens. The neighbour refuses to believe that there are space aliens out in the Mist, even refusing to play along with the games of the people who want him to come back to the loading dock to see the severed purple tentacle. Even after some more people see it and are convinced, he refuses to believe, thinking the town people are playing a joke on him. To be fair, it was a little suspicious of the main character to approach him alone first, thinking that since he was a well-spoken out-of-town lawyer, that he’d be able to best break the news to the rest of the people shut into the store.

Spoiler warning! Seriously, I’m about to talk about the end now!

It was interesting to watch as the crazy biblical lady brought so many under her spell and started to preach about the end of days and the need for human sacrifice. On some days I have a fair bit of faith in humanity; on others I can be pretty cynical. I didn’t really doubt that she could form her own little cult there in the grocery store after a couple of days of being isolated within an alien haze and scared absolutely shitless while people were dying. However, I was astonished at the number of people willing to follow her down the path of human sacrifice (the soldier? yeah, ok, there was bit of a reason underlying that… but the movie started to go beyond believability when so many people were reaching to sacrifice a child), and that no one tried to counter her craziness with something from the bible about god no longer demanding human sacrifices or something like that.

The most power and most fucked-up part came right at the end. After escaping the madness of the grocery store crowd and driving until they ran out of gas and never finding an end to the mist or alien devastation, the group of mostly-rational people lead by the main character fell into despair and decided to end it all quickly by the gun, rather than wait around to be eaten by some tentacled nasty (or worse). However, the gun doesn’t have enough bullets for everyone, so the main character volunteers to pull the trigger on all the others, and then walk out to his own less pleasant end. He shoots them all, including his own son, and leaves the safety of the SUV… only to shortly thereafter find that the low rumbling taken for the humming approach of one of the larger aliens was actually a tank plowing through — humanity had triumphed, rescue was here, and he was saved. The weight of it all hit him, and he fell to his knees wailing.

That was a very powerful moment, however I think it was more from the sympathy of the situation than from the performance seen on screen. It was a decent portrayal or suicidal despair, I suppose, but I don’t think Thomas Jane will be winning any awards for it. Compare that with George Clooney in Michael Clayton. I actually didn’t like the movie Michael Clayton very much at all, and if I were to rewatch one or the other, I’d probably go see the Mist again. However, there’s a minute right at the end where George Clooney hops in a cab and you see this look on his face. This holy fuck look, this I can’t believe I just did that and I’m totally crashing off my adrenaline rush right now expression. That look right at the end almost makes watching the rest of the movie worthwhile (almost). I didn’t get that same resonance at the end from the Mist, although the situation itself was so powerful.

One minor detail that threw the ending off for me was when the tank came rolling through, it came from the same direction as the land rover full of survivors. That SUV wasn’t moving very fast through the Mist (with visibility at maybe a couple of feet), but the tank would have had to be moving even slower if it was stopping occasionally to engage the aliens or add to its large convoy of rescued civilians. So the survivors really should have passed the military on their journey before they ran out of gas. Of course, it’s possible that they ran right by the rescuers in the Mist without ever knowing it, like two ships passing in the night; it’s also possible that they waited in the SUV after running out of gas for more than the few minutes it looks like it took for them to decide to end it. The Mist, which engulfed the town at supernatural speeds, also cleared very quickly as the convoy moved through, so it’s also possible that the Mist was retreating along with the moving SUV, allowing the military to move quickly with clear visibility to catch up to them… but I think it would have been better for my suspension of disbelief if the tanks simply rolled out of the Mist from another direction.

I’m a lot late to the party to be talking about Guitar Hero: anyone reading this has likely already played it long before I got my hands on it. I didn’t really see the appeal and all the hype, largely because I’m not in the slightest bit musical, but also because buying a plastic guitar controller seemed very gimicky. And since I didn’t really see myself needing a guitar controller for any other game, it also made the effective cost of Guitar Hero much more than any other game I could pick for a console.

Recently, my parents bought a PS3 to serve as a blu-ray player for their TV (coincidentally, much the same reason we got the PS2 back in the day — the price of the game console is not all that disparate from the price of a simple player). My sister got Guitar Hero 3 for it (the only game she has for the console), and I got a chance to play it a few weeks ago. It’s actually really fun, even though I suck incredibly at it. Musical talent is not really necessary: rhythm is important to beat in time with the music, but otherwise it’s a colour-matching game. There is a correlation between the frets you have to hit and the actual notes, but you don’t have to actually have any special knowledge or appreciation for the music to plow through it. We were having so much fun rocking out with it the first day that I ran out and bought a second controller, for a system that my sister has and that I don’t have regular access to! (actually, I bough a second bundle since the damnable craptivision didn’t see fit to sell a stand-alone guitar for the PS3. I would offer my spare GH3 disc for sale, but of course no one could possibly get a stand alone guitar for the PS3 to actually need it… though I suppose there might be a rare soul out there who scratched their disc beyond all readability…)

However, I first played the game over at Netbug’s house on his 360 (actually the same weekend that my sister brought home the PS3 version). The weird thing is that I actually did better that first time I tried it (managing to make it all the way through a few songs on the first try on easy) than I did on the PS3. With a lot of practice and painful failures and repetition, I was able to get about halfway through the game on easy, at which point I tried to give my pinky finger a workout by starting again on medium. I couldn’t even get past the backyard stage. Oddly enough, my fretting finger work looked to be perfect, but I just couldn’t strum properly, particularly for some of the fast notes: I just couldn’t physically move the damned strum bar fast enough to hit consecutive notes, and some “holds” stopped randomly even though I didn’t move my fingers. Slowly, this was revealed to be a bit of a pattern: some of my brother’s friends who mastered expert on other systems couldn’t hit notes on medium with the PS3. The timing was just simply “off” for the strumming.

Searching around online there are numerous complaints about the wireless guitars for GH3, the PS3 in particular. There are some really dumb design decisions with this thing. First off, it has a detachable neck that has lead to some connection issues — but the boxes are still the full length, so the separate pieces didn’t actually save them any space at all. A single unit with more robust connections would have served them better. Then there is a widely-reported problem with the wireless for the PS3: supposedly bluetooth “wasn’t ready” so they instead had a wireless dongle that is apparently horribly prone to interference from home wireless networks. I’ve sent my siblings some tips others have given on the internet (including the inconvenient step of turning off the wireless internet while playing), and if none of those work we may be returning the guitars and looking at getting a PS2 or Wii set.

Of course, that leads into another topic that probably deserves its own rant: what is up with the wireless craze in consoles? There is a wireless crazy in general in our society which I don’t fully understand. Cordless phones: sure, I like to have the freedom to walk when I’m on the phone, and while almost every room in my parents’ house has a phone jack anyway, it’s a lot easier to not have to switch phones as you walk, to not have to keep those jacks populated, and in other houses (such as mine here in London) there aren’t as many free jacks. Wireless internet: I actually don’t care for it. Prone to interference, snooping, power-hungry and not a very scalable technology; however, houses these days (even brand-new houses) aren’t wired for convenient plant-my-laptop-anywhere networking (and even then, there’s still a cable to trip over… though the power cord is somehow not prone to that) so it’s an easy way to get internet access for many family members. Wireless controllers I just don’t get. A wireless keyboard or mouse sometimes have lag issues, but more importantly, battery issues. Not only is it a huge pain to have to swap out batteries that always seem to go flat at the wrong moment, but batteries tend to be heavy. Who wants a heavier mouse to flip around the pad all day? Or a heavier game controller? Granted, the two AA’s in the Wiimote don’t add much to the weight since those vibration motors are pretty hefty, but still: what happened to the goodness of cords? For a guitar game in particular one would think that a cord would add to the authenticity (granted, I don’t play, but I do believe electric guitars plug into their amps) in addition to fixing the many woes of the PS3 wireless implementation.

One final weird kick in the pants is that the PS3 guitar dongle is “USB”. Like me, you might then think that you could take it and plug it into your computer or another console with a USB port and get it to work… sadly, that’s not the case :(

PS: I’m looking for a working used PS/2 to have as a second unit for our family. If anyone out there is selling one (in Toronto, London, or points between) let me know!