My Life and Code

I'm a huge fan of most things 1970s, and I recently heard of this movie via a post on Reddit. It's about a sniper who has his sights set on the crowd at a football championship game (they're careful to never refer to it as a Super Bowl). It's sort of in the vein of those 1970s disaster films, except it's not really about a disaster. But it has that same vibe. While I liked the film, here's the problem with it: editing. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. I have no problem with character building. I have no problem with a movie taking it's time to establish a plot, or characters, or whatever. But by the time this film actually got along with the plot, I paused it to see how much time had passed, and it was halfway through the film.  In fact, at the time of this writing, if you look the film up on Wikipedia, the summary of the film written there starts at the midway point of the film . The opening credits sequence was an early red flag. A long....long.......

In 1982's Blade Runner , Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with hunting down four renegade replicants , humanoid robots which are virtually indistinguishable from real people. And fans of the film often debate whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant. The debate originates with director Ridley Scott, who has gone on the record by  saying as much , years after the film's original release. But here's the thing: one of the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher, says that Deckard is not a replicant (though he likes the ambiguity), and Harrison Ford, until recently, has been adamant that Deckard is human (a recent change of opinion on his part seems... paid for , so to speak, in my opinion, and it's well known that he and Scott disagreed vehemently on it). The filming of a scene, post-production, with a unicorn that ties into a scene at the end of the film is meant to imply Deckard is a replicant, and to be fair, there is a line which was cut from the film where the chara...

I used to know this girl named Crystal, who was a friend of a girlfriend back in the day. For some reason she crossed my mind recently. On Fridays and Saturdays we’d hang out with my girlfriend at the time’s circle of friends, and Crystal appeared in that group near the end of our relationship. Kind of like when a new character is introduced in the last season of a TV show, she just sort of showed up near the end. Crystal didn’t like me and was pretty open about it. She’d say to my girlfriend, right in front of me , “You can do so much better than him.” I’m not sure why she disliked me so much, and as for doing better, granted, I was no Brad Pitt, but I was a decent enough guy, albeit with faults. Crystal had a boyfriend, and he too was no Brad Pitt, so I don’t know who she was to judge. And as for him being a decent enough guy: pin in that. Even though she was always openly critical of me, I never said anything about it, and just rolled with it. I’m not really sure why. I was always...

If you're cursed with nostalgia and sentimentality like I am (and I only jokingly refer to it as a curse), you may have found that there are two things that can immediately take you back to a time and place long gone. At least, for me, there are two things that easily trigger that: scents and music. I'll talk about the latter here. Not every song does it. But some are just so engrained in a memory that the reaction is immediate: there I am again, the feeling of a time and place returns, I'm a certain age again, reliving a time long gone. And it's often bittersweet -- maybe it's just me, but a lot of those sorts of memories are a mix of happiness (for the experience at the time) and sadness (for the fact that it's over, only to be relived as a memory -- "you can't go home again", they say). There's something that Alex Van Halen once said, that I was trying to find the source for as I wrote this, about there being comfort in the past because it n...

Working in IT, I've met and worked with a lot of recruiters, both as a job seeker and as someone involved in the hiring process. They've run the gamut from "a pretty good person" to "practically a car salesman". But one in particular stands above the rest. Joel is the recruiter who placed me at my current job almost 10 years ago. And he's stayed in contact with me ever since, but not to try to poach me to another company, or to find new candidates to shop around, but rather just to keep in touch . I've never known another recruiter like him. Every few months I get an email from him, asking how I am, asking how my family's doing. It's always social, never business. Every few years we get together for lunch. He's a truly good, decent, human being. I'm grateful to every recruiter who helped me along my career path, and for every recruiter who helped out when my employer was looking for a candidate. And I'm thankful to still hear from...

I've learned some things in life. Granted, I don't always put them into practice , but I do actively try . I try not to repeat mistakes, and to learn from my mistakes and experiences. Here are ten things I've learned, and lessons I try to keep in mind. 1. You can be 100% sure of something, and still be wrong. This is something I've experienced myself and witnessed in others. And it can be a good or bad thing. Unlike some of the other things I'll list here, there's not much you can really do about this one. If you have concrete evidence of something, that "100% sure" probably isn't going to change. But in other cases, you may find that you were completely certain of something yet still wrong. 2. Actions taken out of emotion (especially anger) tend to be mistakes. I'm not a biologist, scientist, or psychologist, but as far as I can tell, the only "purpose" of emotion is to influence behavior. And often, influence it not for the better ....