There are some movies you see and even as you leave the theater you want to see them again. The Star Wars movies are a good example. They're light pop-corn flicks. Other movies are powerful films that are well crafted, sometimes considered master pieces. But once you see them, you don't want to see them again.

Troy is closer to the latter. I don't know if I'd call it a masterpiece but I would definitely call it a really impressive film work. It holds up pretty well to some of the classics of all time such as Sparticus or Bridge over the River Kwai. It has that majestic feel to it.

On the other hand, the bar has been raised quite a bit. As much as I like Sparticus, the movie could not compete today because it just doesn't have enough..punch to it in my opinion. It's still one of my favorites but that's partly because sub-consciously I'm cutting it slack because of when it was made. I think a lot of people who like classic movies do that as well.

Troy, as it is, would be one of those great classic movies if it had come out in 1965. As it stands, however, it is 2004 and as well crafted as the film is, it just feels like it is missing a certain something.

The movie is the adaption of Homer's famous tale of the Trojan Wars. A beautiful Greek queen has run off with the Prince of Troy. In retaliation, the Greeks mount a 1000-ship fleet. Amongst this fleet is Achiles, the greatest warrior of all time. Imagine a world where there's ONE Jedi Knight. He's him. One problem though, Achilles loathes the king of the Greek forces which creates some intereting dynamics.

The most compelling thing about the movie was the character development. Ironically though, the least compelling thing for me was the battles -- the movie's supposed strong point. They feel sterile and distant. They feel and look like battle sequences from those classic 1965 movies but with computer generated extras instead.  That was fine then but we expect more today. Specifically, we expect to see the actual people battling, not super-close ups so that we just see swinging and flailing.

There just wasn't that sense of feeling like you're there. It was, again, like watching a classic movie from long ago but with special effects employed for better backgrounds. After The Lord of the Rings, I guess we are a little spoiled.

That isn't to say I didn't like the movie. I did. I just liked it for different reasons than I had anticipated. So I would recommend going to see this movie, especially if you do like classics like Sparticus. But don't go expecting to see brilliant battles.

This evening on the way back from my son's little league game I turned on NPR. I was greeted with an incredibly sympathetic report on a Mexican immigrant who was on death roll for his roll in double homicide commited during an armed robbery.

The report gave air time to every member of his family. Father, mother, sister, etc. It provided a sound bite from his attorney and talked about all the support he had received from various organizations.

Missing from the report was a single word or mention from anyone related in any fashion to the vicitms. Victims as in the people who were murdered. Nothing at all.

The entire piece was essentially a propaganda piece against the death penalty and played this criminal as the victim. It talked how he had been denied rights because he was a "foreign national" in that that arresting officer didn't follow the Viena convention about informing him that his national government could be contacted. This isn't some diplomat we're talking about folks, this was an illegal alien who came into the US and started robbing people with guns and during one of those armed robberies, 2 innocent people were killed.

My problem isn't that I think he should be executed (or not). My problem is the completely unbalanced reporting. This guy ISN'T the victim. The people who are already dead are. Not having even a single word or statement from the families of the victims (there were TWO victims, it shouldn't be hard to find someone) is just rank propaganda.  Wouldn't want anyone to feel sympathy for them as it would get in the way of NPR's rather crude anti-death penalty propaganda piece.

Disgusting.

Ever notice that anti-americans usually have no idea how hypocritical they sound?

Anti-Americans use words like "alleged" or "assumed" to qualify evil deeds done to Americans.  But even the most far-out theory or assumption of something an American has done wrong is taken as a literal fact.

And they wonder why so few people in the mainstream have any respect for them.

Bad things don't need to be qualified. If you do a bad thing, it doesn't matter where you're from. There can be extenuating circumstances, but it doesn't change the bad thing. 

Zealots have the problem in that they can't see straight. They see one side as ultimately evil and the other side totally justified.

Limbaugh, who exuses despicable abuse of Iraqi POWs by a handful of American soldiers and contractors is an example on the right.  There are plenty of examples on the left where the events of 9/11 and other atrocities done to Americans is swept under the rug so that they can fixate on some particular american misdeed or blow it up to gigantic proportions.

Most zealots, in my experience, are people who are out of touch. Sometimes due to their success (Limbaugh) or their failures (check out an anti-war protest sometime to see the carnival of losers). They have lost any sort of attachment to objective reality.

Let us know what you think!

Like most nerds or at least pseudo-nerds I have fantasized about being able to go back in time, knowing what I know now, and right wrongs.

Over time, the fantasy has gotten increasingly less tempting.  The first problem came after I got married. I didn't want to do anything that might cause me not to meet and marry my wife. After I had children, I realized that the whole fantasy was really doomed because even if I could go back in time and make sure to meet my wife at the right time, I would never be able to have the exact same children I have since even a nanosecond later I'd have different results.

Like I said, I'm a nerd. Which part is the nerdiest is subject to debate: Having the fantasy at all or trying to resolve the time stream issues of wife/children as if this entire scenario were somehow plausible in the remotest sense.

Of course, now that I'm "rich" I'm told I'm just eccentric but let's be real, I'm a geek.  Relatively speaking, I'm ultra-cool now compared to how I was when a teen (which is, after all, the origin of these kinds of time travel fantasies to begin with).

Still, there are so many things I wish I could go back and change. Not the least of which is how I dressed. Picture this: short sleeve sweatshirts that were one size too small on someone who was very very thin. It goes down hill from there.

But the example that inspired me to write this was the wrong I did to my first girl friend. Her name was Sherry Blankenbaker.  Almost literally the girl next door. We had been "going together" (remember that term?) for over 2 years. She was beautiful. Nice. Kind. Gentle. But she also had parents who were very very protective (and in hindsight, for good reason). They wouldn't let her date. Not even to a dance.

What's worse, she went to a private religious school.  So you can picture this: I'm a 15 year old geekoid with this beautiful girlfriend who doesn't, as far as people can tell at school actually exist. I might as well been the kid that says "Oh yea, I have a girlfriend..she's in Canada!" 

We had hoped that when she turned 16, her parents would let up a little. Let her go to the dance. Something. Anything. But no, they still refused to let her go anywhere public with me. I don't think her parents had anything against me in particular (though they were certainly less restrictive with her future boyfriends). They just didn't want to let their daughter have too much freedom to get into trouble. 

We broke up for rather selfish reasons that I still feel bad about. It's not that I wish we had stayed together, gotten married had kids. Rather, I feel ashamed that I was so shallow. We were each other's first loves so to speak and after yet another time of her getting in trouble for sneaking off to see me we broke up.

But that's not the reason for the time-travel scenario per se. It's not that I thought we were meant to be, but rather by breaking up with her when I did, it ultimately led her to meeting the guy she ended up marrying who I knew, even then, was bad news.

That's because I knew this guy better than she did and knew him before they'd met.  They met through the BBSes (think of websites but available only in a local phone area). BBSes that I had introduced her to.  I knew this guy was bad news and I also knew how well he could pretend to be a nice guy. 

Now, maybe he's changed (it's been 17 years). He might be a great guy now for all I know.  But I knew then he wasn't and I never really warned her. I was too afraid of interfering when I should have told her.  I'm told they had a couple of kids and later divorced.  I don't know the exact details but if that's the case, I feel responsible for that since I could have warned her.  The guy was, at the time, so loathsome that the normally gentle T-man (who is the real power behind JoeUser, I'm just his front man, his lackey, his pawn who pays the bills ) actually wanted to do bodily harm to him. And believe me, she could have found any guy she'd wanted to (once her parents let her off the leash).

I don't know where things have gone since then with her. I lost track of things in our old neighborhood years ago. I was good friends with her brother and her younger sister was, in my opinion, had a gifted level of intelligence. Just one of those things where you think you should visit, and if you don't visit for long enough, it gets increasingly awkward to pop in.

So that's one wrong I would right. To set things up so that Sherry would have been on the path to find her real Mr. Right earlier. Or at the very least, help her avoid Mr. Wrong.  I wasn't her Mr. Right but I was the boy next door. The boy who should have been her friend.

This was over at Right Wing News today. Thought it was hilarious. Here's an excerpt. Read the whole thing at the link below.

Dan Koppel: I'm your announcer Dan Koppel here with my co-hosts Peter Brokaw and Laurie Malkin. It's late in the third quarter and the Damascus Jihadis have the LA Lakers on the ropes. It has been a dominating performance by the Jihadis...

Peter Brokaw: You said it Dan! Nothing has gone right for the Lakers tonight and coach Phil Jackson's gameplan is the likely culprit. Do you agree Dan?

Dan Koppel: Absolutely! This whole game has just been an embarrassing travesty for Laker fans...

Laurie Malkin: Guys, I hate to disagree but the Lakers are leading 108-24...

Dan Koppel: Come on Laurie, show some professionalism and stop your mindless cheerleading for the Lakers...

Laurie Malkin: Ok Dan, what you need to understand is...

Peter Brokaw: OH MY, OH MY, OH MY! Karl Malone has fouled one of the Jihadis! That is his second foul of the game leaving with him with only four more to go before he fouls out!

Dan Koppel: This thing is over without Malone, I repeat OVER! If Malone fouls out, the Lakers are DOOMED to go down to ignominious defeat!

Peter Brokaw: Holy Moly, Yassir Bin Laden, point guard for the Jihadis has made his free throw! That's another point on the board for the Jihadis and a huge, huge, failure by the Lakers! Did I say HUGE failure?

Dan Koppel: Yes you did Peter and rightly so! It's Lakers ball again. They're going down the court and it's a pass to Shaquille O'Neal and as he dunks, he's fouled by Jihadi center Muhammad Al-Sadr who is out of the game with his 6th foul.

Laurie Malkin: Wow! That's Shaq's 15th dunk of the night!

Peter Brokaw: Yes, yes Laurie -- like anyone cares about how many dunks Shaq gets.

Dan Koppel: (Yawn) Oh, I'm sorry everybody, I was falling asleep hearing about Shaq's dunks. Like there's anyone in the audience who'd want to know about that.

Peter Brokaw: MY GOODNESS, Shaq has missed a free throw! Shaq! Has! Missed! A! Free! Throw!

Dan Koppel: How can these Laker fans be expected to sit through this type of drubbing Peter?

Peter Brokaw: I just don't know Peter, I just don't know....hey, wait a second! Jihadis small forward, Deir Atta, has run into a group of small children in the crowd, yelled something about "infidels", and has blown himself up! What a tragedy...

Laurie Malkin: Oh my God! What sort of psychopaths are these Jihadis?

Dan Koppel: Now Laurie, I didn't want to say anything, but earlier today as I was coming in the building I noticed that Gary Payton turned down a young Jihadi fan who requested an autograph. So can we really say that the Lakers haven't done anything just as bad as the Jihadis here today?

The underlying model and algorithms for The Political Machine are pretty good. Ultimately, the model is a mishmash of polling data from dozens of sources combined with demographic data. What, I think makes The Political Machine special is that it makes heavy use of demographic data rather than just looking at polls. What that means, fundamentally, is that at the end of the day, conservatives tend to vote for Republicans and liberals tend to vote for Democrats and once you understand that, it's really a matter of turn out on both sides. There really aren't nearly as many "independents" as are sometimes claimed. Independents tend to be conservative or liberal in their views and as such, they tend, on a macro-scale, to vote one way or the other consistently enough to model with some degree of accuracy.

And that's bad new for Bush. Because barring a miracle, Bush has already lost. Not by much but the issue is electorally.  We've run the simulation countless times in house and we come up with different results:

First of all, there really aren't that many toss-up states.  The media has states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Washington State and Oregon as toss-ups. The only possible way they're toss-ups is if Ralph Nader is able to get a significant share of the vote. But even there, people who think Nader is going to get 6% of the vote aren't realizing the infrastructure involved in getting onto the ballots in all the states and maintaining some semblance of momentum.

So who should be Kerry's Vice Presidential pick? If he's smart, he'll pick Richard Gephardt. By bringing him in, he gets Missouri and probably Iowa (our model doesn't yet handle the VP pick effect very well). So write this prediction down so that if we're right we can be oowed and awed appropriately:

Without Gephardt VP choice:

Kerry 279 / Bush 259

With Gephardt VP choice:

Kerry 290 / Bush 248

Now, you say to yourself, how can you be so sure? We're not. We're confident we'll be close but there are a few real toss-ups in which the events between now and election day will matter. Here are the real toss-up states:

1. Ohio
2. Missouri
3. Iowa
4. West Virginia

Bush has to win all of these to win. Barely.

States that COULD become toss-up states based on events:

1. New Mexico
2. Arkansas
3. Wisconsin

Bill Richardson as a VP pick could shore up NM if something causes it to be a toss-up, but that's unlikely. General Clark could bring Arkansas into play.

Some pollsters have said that some blue states have become "purple".  I'd like to know which ones they think are purple now. I can't think of any blue states that have softened since 2000. Wisconsin? Possibly. But only if Nader becomes a major factor there again. We do think Florida will be much more solid for Bush this time, for what it's worth.

But go ahead and look at the map above, which states do you think Bush will win that we're wrong about?

We'll keep making predictions, after all, what good are computer models for? And you can then check the accuracy after the election to see how well we did.

With the GUI Olympics well on its way, if you want to make YOUR desktop be able to use these cool skins and themes, WindowBlinds 4.3 is now available!

WindowBlinds is a program that lets you change the look and feel of the entire Windows GUI. If you're running Windows XP, it has some significant advantages over the including skinning features such as the ability to skin non-theme aware apps. It can skin a lot more controls (log off, toolbar icons, progress animations, command prompts, etc.) and has a host of extensibility features that can improve productivity.

You can download WindowBlinds at http://www.windowblinds.net

Here is a blog that highlights some of the features of WindowBlinds, many of which you may not have heard of before. WindowBlinds 4.3 Microsoft Certified for Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98!