More on Salam Pax

by

Slate’s Peter Maass offers some more details on Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, after realizing that he knew Salam personally:

Baghdad was hectic when two blogging friends e-mailed me to suggest that I track down “Salam Pax.” I had no idea who or what they were talking about. I could have handed over the job of sorting out this Salam Pax thing to my interpreter — he was a clever and funny Iraqi who never failed to provide what I needed, whether it was interviews or pizza — but I let it pass. I thought I had better things to do.

The day after I returned to New York, reunited with my cable modem, I checked out a friend’s blog that linked to an Austrian interview with Salam Pax. I clicked to it. Salam Pax mentioned an NGO he had worked for, CIVIC, and this caught my attention. I knew the woman who was in charge of CIVIC; she stayed at my Baghdad hotel, the Hamra. Salam Pax mentioned that he had done some work for foreign journalists. We traveled in the same circles, apparently. He also mentioned that he had studied in Vienna. This really caught my attention, because I knew an Iraqi who had worked for CIVIC, hung out with foreign journalists, and studied in Vienna. I clicked over to his blog.

His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading — mine. Poolside at the Hamra — with me. The 24 pizzas — we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about.

Such an amazingly small world at times, isn’t it?

The Animatrix

by

I got woken up this morning at 9am (thankfully, only half an hour before my alarm usually starts blaring) by the door buzzer. “Package for ya.” Rock on. Hauled myself out of bed, tossed on clothes, and stumbled downstairs.

End result — thanks to Amazon, I’ve got my copy of The Animatrix one day before its official street date. As long as I was awake, and didn’t have to actually wander out to my bus stop until around noon, I popped in the disc.

Very, very cool.

The Animatrix (just in case you didn’t catch my earlier posts) is a collection of nine animated short subjects expanding the universe portrayed in the Matrix films.

My favorite two episodes are Final Flight of the Osiris (incredible near photorealistic animation from the team behind Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and the sexiest sword fight I’ve ever seen) and Beyond (nice animation, and a quietly magical story).

Good luck, Larry Wachowski

by

There’s a very interesting and serious story that’s just staring to break on the ‘net, that I’m afraid is going to be presented in extremely unflattering and quite probably derrogative ways once it starts to spread. As reported in a very thoughtful Hot Button article by David Poland, it appears that Larry Wachowski — one half of the team of brothers behind the Matrix films — is starting the process of undergoing a sex change.

Now, tell me whether you would be laughing and picking up the phone to share this gossip if he was a member of your family. Convince me how funny it is when someone finally comes out of the closet to his or her family. Explain how hysterical going to a 12-step meeting and admitting your addiction for the first time is.

Can you imagine anyone who is more emotionally vulnerable than Larry Wachowski is right now, no matter how sure he is and how proud he is to be making this change? Money and fame is obviously a lot easier than poverty and obscurity. Money can ease the burdens of the physical world. But it can’t protect the human heart.

I’m sure that once this story starts to spread wider, it’s going to provoke a number of reactions. Sadly, very few of these are likely to be messages of support. Given the success of the Matrix franchise, Larry is a very public name at the moment, and as such, is likely to catch far more flak for this choice than most people would — and from everything I’ve ever heard, this isn’t the easiest thing for people out of the public eye to go through.

For what it’s worth, I’d like to offer Larry support and wish him the best of luck through whatever may happen in the coming months. Hopefully people take Dave Poland’s column to heart and think about what they say before they shoot off at the mouth.

(via Patrick Sun)

Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux)

by

Adam Kalsey has started a project he calls Newly Digital — a collection of stories about when people first discovered computers, got online, and so on.

In that vein, I’m updating and reposting my “Back in the Day” post from roughly a year ago, to contribute to the project. Enjoy!

The first computers I can remember playing with were the Apple II‘s that my elementary school had. Before long our friends the Burns had one of their own that I got to play with, while my babysitter picked up a Commodore 64 that gave me my first look at the BASIC programming language.

Eventually, my family got our first computer — an Osborne 1. This was a beast of a machine. 64k of RAM, a Z-80 CPU, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and a 5″ monochrome 80×40 greenscreen, all packed into a case the size of a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. The keyboard could be snapped up against the face of the computer, allowing it to be carried around — one of the first, if not the very first, “portable” computers! It ran CP/M (a precursor to MS-DOS) — aside from fiddling with the machines at school or at my friends’ houses, my first real command-line experience! There was a 300 baud modem available for the Osborne 1 computer, however my family didn’t get one until years later (when those of our friends who had also had Osborne 1 computers were giving them to us as they upgraded, allowing me to cannibalize parts from two machines to keep one running).

I first got online sometime in 1990, with the first computer I bought myself — an Apple Macintosh Classic with no hard drive (the computer booted System 6.0.7 off one 3.5″ floppy, and I kept MS Word version 4 on a second floppy, along with all the papers I typed that year), 1 Mb of RAM — and a 2400 baud modem. Suddenly an entire new world opened up to me. After a brief but nearly disasterous flirtation with America Online at a time when the only way to dial in to AOL from Anchorage, Alaska was to call long distance, I discovered the more affordable world of local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems).

I spent many hours over the next few years exploring the BBS’s around Anchorage, from Ak Mac (where most of my time was devoted) to Forest Through the Trees, Roaring Lion, and many others that I can’t remember the names of at the moment. I found some of my first online friends, many of whom I conversed with for months without ever meeting — and many that I never did meet. Most of the Mac-based boards used the Hermes BBS software, which shared its look and feel with whatever the most popular PC-based software was, so virtually all the boards acted the same, allowing me to quickly move from one to the other. After springing the $300 for an external 100Mb hard drive (how would I ever fill up all that space?!?) I downloaded my first ‘warez’ (bootlegged software), at least one of which had a trojan horse that wiped out about half my hard drive. I discovered the joys — and occasional horrors — of free pornography. I found amazing amounts of shareware and freeware, some useful, some useless. It was all amazing, fun, and so much more than I’d found before. In short — I was hooked.

After I graduated from high school in 1991, I had a short-lived stint attending UAA (the University of Alaska, Anchorage). One of the perks of being a student was an e-mail account on the university’s VAX computer system. In order to access your e-mail, you could either use one of the computers in the university’s computer lab, or you could dial into their system via modem. Logging in via modem gave you access to your shell account, at which point you could use the pine e-mail program. However, I soon learned that the university’s computer was linked to other computers via the still-growing Internet!

I thought BBS’s were a new world — this Internet thing was even better! Suddenly I was diving into ftp prompts and pulling files to my computer from computers across the globe. Usenet readers introduced me to BBS-style discussions with people chiming in from all over the world, instead of just all over town. I could jump into IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and have real-time conversations with people in other countries. The gopher protocol was essentially a precursor to the World Wide Web, textual information pages linked to each other by subject. I was fascinated — more information than I had dreamed of was at my fingertips.

By the time I left UAA and lost my student account, the ‘net had started to show up on the radar of public consciousness, but still at a very low level — it was still fairly limited to the ‘geek set.’ That was enough, however, to have convinced some of the local BBS systems to set up primitive (but state of the art at the time) internet links: once a day, generally at some early hour, they would dial into a special node on the ‘net and download a certain set of information, which the BBS users could then access locally. It was slow, time-delayed, and somewhat kludgy, but it worked, and it allowed us to have working e-mail addresses. It wasn’t what I’d had while at the university, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Within a few years, though, the ‘net suddenly exploded across public consciousness with the advent and popularization of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, you didn’t have to do everything on the ‘net through a command line — first using NCSA Mosaic, and later that upstart Netscape Navigator you could point and click your way through all that information — and some of the pages even had graphics on them! It was simplistic by today’s standards, but at the time it was revolutionary, and I joined in that revolution sometime in 1995 with my first homepage.

Since then, there’s been no turning back. My computers have been upgraded from that little Mac Classic to a Performa 600/IIvx, from that to a PowerMac 6100, then on to a 6500, through an original Revision A iMac, and now consisting of a Blue and White G3, a custom-built PC (the first Windows-based PC I ever owned), and currently a Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and currently a 27″ iMac, and now a 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and now an M1 Mac mini desktop and M2 MacBook Air. My website has grown as well over the years, passing through several intermediate designs to its current incarnation hosted off my G3 through the UN*X-flavored goodness of Mac OS X.

To quote Jerry Garcia, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’m only looking forward to seeing where it takes me from here.

Finding Nemo

by

I love going to see Pixar’s movies on opening weekend. Preferably during the day, when the theater is full of children — kids get so wrapped up in the movie, it’s an absolute joy to be able to sit in the midst of all that excitement.

Pixar continues their as yet unbroken string of excellent movies with Finding Nemo, the story of a father’s hunt for his missing child. Quite simply, the movie is flat-out gorgeous — set in the ocean off of Australia, the entire film is a visual treat. Everything from the eye-popping colors of the tropical fish to the depth and fluidity of the ocean is captured perfectly.

As usual, in addition to the pervasive eye candy, Pixar has kept up their usual excellent standards of creating a true family film — one that can be enjoyed just as much by adults (and children at heart) as children. Excellently acted all around, in many ways the real star of the film is Ellen DeGeneres as Dori, a scatterbrained but very sweet and optimistic Blue Tang.

My personal favorite characters, though, were actually secondary characters — a flock of seagulls, whose language and constant squawking consists of a single word: “Mine!” A little hard to describe in print, but they got laughs out of me every time they showed up on screen.

All in all, an excellent film. Go see it — and when you do, sit through the credits. No outtakes this time, but some funny bits with characters swimming around during the credits, and one post-credit gag that’s one of the best in the film.

I really have to wonder just how poorly Disney would be doing if they didn’t have the film deal with Pixar. Seems like lately, the only truly good films coming out of the Disney stable are Pixar’s animated gems, and about the only thing that’s really “Disney” about any of them is the logo on the front of the film!

Other good Finding Nemo reading:

The Bourne Identity

by

A better than average action movie with Matt Damon as an amnesiac secret agent. Rescued while floating in the ocean with two bullets in his back and a Swiss bank account number hidden in his hip, he has no idea who he is or what he’s in the middle of, but he has an unerring ability to spot danger and dispatch any attackers with ease.

Quite fun to watch — more known for his dramatic roles, Damon does a very credible job with the action scenes, and Famke Potente (of Run Lola Run) is very enjoyable as a girl swept up in Damon’s flight and search for clues. One of the better action/thriller flicks I’ve seen.

Traffic

by

Traffic got a ton of good reviews when it came out, but for one reason or another, it just didn’t grab me very much. It wan’t bad at all, and the color tinting technique used to help distinguish the three storylines from each other was interesting to watch, but, while I wasn’t bored, I wasn’t overly involved in it, either. Decent, worth a rent if you’re curious.

Licence plates in The Matrix

by

The discussion thread regarding Matrix: Revolutions on the Home Theater Forum is turning up all sorts of interesting tidbits, including the fact that all the licence plates seem to be biblical quotes!

The Twins’ truck on the freeway: DE2852. Deutronomy 28:52 — “They shall besiege you in all your towns, until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout all your land. And they shall besiege you in all your towns throughout all your land, which the LORD your God has given you.”

Trinity and Morephus’ Cadillac on the freeway: DA203. Daniel 2:03 — “I have had a dream that troubles me and I want to know what it means.”

Agent Smith’s Audi at the beginning: IS5416. Isaiah 54:16 — “Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have created the waster to destroy.”