MrBalky Heavy Industries

I saw this movie yesterday with my daughter and one of her friends. Now, I kind of like movies with a message that isn’t too hard to figure out. This is that kind of movie.

To me, this movie shows a straight line from Afghanistan in the ’80s through 9/11 to Iraq. It illustrates how our relationship with the rest of the world can be both positive and negative.

I want us out of Iraq as bad as the next guy. It’s clearly been a disaster in almost every way, but I think one can use the themes in this film to contend that we now bear some responsibility for fixing the mess we made. I wish somebody really knew how to fix it, without the ridiculous political pandering and posturing.

And though they probably didn’t enjoy it much, I certainly enjoyed the opportunity to discuss the origins and context of our current mess with a couple of 13 yr olds.

As an aside, seeing the girls, the box office guy gave us the stern (and hilarious) warning about sex, drugs and language when we bought the tickets. If you’re concerned about that with your kids don’t go, but basically the sex and drugs were done after the first 10 minutes of the film.

I don’t mean the content, I mean the recording quality.

In the last couple weeks, I’ve been on a CD ripping binge, and simultaneously discovered that our CD changer died. I don’t know when it died.

The binge and discovery were both brought on by the realization that I hardly ever listen to CDs anymore; not since we got Sonos a couple years ago.

I stopped being an audiophile a long time ago (in truth, I never really was), but have been frustrated by why music sounds like shit these days. I’d try to review the rips, and discover clipping and distortion. I’d mess around with the rip settings, but can never get some music to sound good. I’m also guessing I can’t find a pair of headphones I like.

Just yesterday, Stan’s “favorite links” post led me to a Rolling Stone piece, and from there to a very interesting piece comparing Rush albums over the years.

I can only hope the Turn Me Up! movement gains some traction with recording engineers. In the meantime, I’m still looking for good settings for MP3 encoding with Lame. Anybody have suggestions?

Thanks to a post over at Laughing Squid, bookmark MrBalky on your iPod Touch (or the less cool iPhone) and revel in the awesomeness:

Of course, everyone is doing it.

The cheapskate in me loved Djangos.

In June ‘06 I was on vacation in Germany visiting with my wife’s relatives. We were sitting around talking about government scandals, and some in the US. I don’t remember exactly which ones we were talking about, but I piped up and said that the real scandal is the way the act of voting is handled.

Today, The New York Times had a great piece in the magazine on electronic voting machines.

I’ve been thinking about this and its influence on the stability of a nation. right now people in Kenya are rioting and dying over the “results” of an election. They can’t trust that their votes were counted fairly.

Here elections happen like clockwork and few people truly believe that a president would try to retain office after his term by force, or change the rules to do so, as in recent events in Venezuela and Russia. I believe that in 2000 Gore gave up not because he thought he lost, but because of faith in the process. We all knew there’d be a chance to fix the mistake 4 years later. (At the time I never would have believed how badly 4, and now 8 years could go, but that’s a different rant.)

In principle, I very much like the idea of a more accessible voting system, but it is vital that it be open and trusted. Outsourcing this core component of our version of democracy to closed and proprietary vendors is a recipe for disaster.

A brief quote from the piece sums this up for me:

That, in a nutshell, is what people crave in the highly partisan arena of modern American politics: an election that can be extremely close and yet regarded by all as fair. Not only must the losing candidate believe in the loss; the public has to believe in it, too.

The 2000 election left us needing to make the process better; definitely a worthy goal. But rushing to that goal will only make things worse, and the consequences can shatter our stability.

Feh. I feel like I’m writing a 10th grade paper, but this is important to me.

The TiVo now playing list has been a “feature” on the right-hand side of this blog for a couple years now.

Todd has been admiring it for his blog for some time, but the poor fellow only had Series 3 TiVos, which had networking features turned off so he couldn’t do the same. Now that TiVo has seen fit to turn that feature on in the S3s, I found I had to clean up the code so he could use it over on his blog.

As Todd says, sometimes you have to build things just because you can.

When I returned from surgery in Vail, my friends Bob & Becky came by to help set up my living room bed command center, and brought me a fine selection of special brews. Well, call me chicken if you want, but I didn’t want to mix the Oxycontin and alcohol.

Last night I finally got around to one of them. Stone Ruination IPA. Man was it good.

And we made it to midnight! (eastern time)