Fun Stuff - 3 D Tetris.

Fun 3D version of Tetris. I haven't been able to get one single layer to collapse yet. But it's nifty.

Tim Masters.

Looks like Tim Masters, the Fort Collins version of the West Memphis Three, is going to be liberated this week, in part due to exculpatory DNA evidence.

Very cool.

(I wonder what the jurors who convicted him have to say for themselves.)

Get er done.

At a team meeting last Thursday, the Director of IT said, 'Blah, blah, blah....That's why when you say you can do ten reports, I say, "make it 15". It encourages you to extend you abilities, it gives you something to strive for.'

Right. And this is why when we think we can do 10, we say we can do 5.

Our Director is famous for saying things can be done much quicker than they actually end up taking. He once said it should only take a day or 2 to write any report. The 20 odd reports we have in our project have been worked on, off and on, over the past 2 years.

What I like about You's.

Anyone can be negative. Here's what I like about the current crop of Presidential candidates:

I like that both the hard left and the hard right can't stand Hillary. She strikes me as pragmatic. She's for national health care (or whatever it's called these days).

I like that Obama actually wrote his own book instead of hiring a ghost writer.

I like that Edwards talks so much about poverty and that whole other America thing.

I like that McCain actually said we may be in Iraq for 100 years. (Makes my decision making very easy.)

I admire Romney's smooth demeanor and adaptability.

I think it was funny that Giuliani dressed up in drag on SNL.

A lot of people are religious, pro-life and are not particularly prosperous financially. Huckabee seems like he would represent them well.

Labeling is a bad thing.

J. Hoberman, the movie critic, in writing about There Will Be Blood said this, "Plainview is a visionary materialist and the loneliest of lone wolves, not to mention a self-invented entrepreneur and the very embodiment of D.H. Lawrence's formula for our essential national character: 'hard, stoic and a killer.' "

The part that gets my attention is the phrase 'essential national character'. I don't believe in this sort of thing. What does it mean anyway? Are most Americans 'hard, stoic and killer'? Or is it that our national or corporate leaders are that way? Are these traits more prevalent in US citizens than in citizens of, say, France? What is France's national character? Does this sort of thing only apply to countries? How about generations, genders, regional populations? Can ethnic and racial groups have essential characters? Isn't that line of thinking called racism?

Anyway, this National Character stuff is a cheap way to make your movie review sound more sophisticated, (so is quoting D.H. Lawrence), without, you know, saying anything meaningful. When I read or hear someone labeling a group, I get suspicious, thinking that the speaker is a lazy thinker, or a bigot, or is assuming that I will go along with their received wisdom.

More debatable, I suppose, than National Character is Personal Character, which I am not sure I believe in either. But I'll save that for later.