Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I was prepared to like Broken Flowers, a movie starring Bill Murray as a leftover 1990s computer business guy.  The portrayal of Don Johnston, retired computer guy, is not very flattering.  Johnston sits and/or lies on the same sofa all day watching movies or listening to music.  One could admire him for his monk-like patience and stillness but by American Ben Franklin-style self-improvement standards he is reprehensibly incurious.  Johnston never reads books or seeks to meet anyone new.  Johnston’s only apparent achievement was appealing to women over the years (“I was in computers and girls,” he explains to a young guy).

Johnston receives an anonymous note informing him that he has a 19-year-old son.  This spurs him to take a four- or five-stop commercial airline trip around our great nation.  Unfortunately the film makers lacked either his budget or his energy and stayed firmly within New York and New Jersey.  All parts of the U.S. appear to be right off the New York State Thruway in the fall.  One of my literary-minded friends says that a bad movie is better than a bad play because there is more to look at.  Why couldn’t one of Johnston’s ex-girlfriends have flaked out to Sedona, Arizona or Santa Fe?

One interesting detail was how Johnston’s world was inhabited by attractive women.  If he goes into a store the clerk is an attractive young woman.  When he is walking out of the airport the terminal is filled not with paunchy business guys as you might expect, but with young leggy females.

For a movie with no tragic deaths, characters becoming paralyzed, sex, violence, or special effects it holds one’s attention fairly well.  My companion, the typical overworked Harvard medical slave (she’s an ob-gyn but sadly has not yet bought her Piper Malibu or Turbo Commander like my more established gynecologist friends), did not fall asleep.

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Here’s a snapshot taken in New Orleans in 1994. I was driving out to take a summer job at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Some additional potentially interesting photos:

• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/new-orleans-funeral.tcl
  
• http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200504-legoland/french-quarter-new-orleans.tcl
  
• http://photo.net/summer94/new-orleans-zoo.html

My one friend down there is safe and sound: http://ernieattorney.typepad.com/

It is worrisome that the zoo and downtown Aquarium of the Americas have not updated their Web site with any news about the animals: http://www.auduboninstitute.org/aoa/index.php (this news story is hopeful, however).

Best wishes to any readers from New Orleans and good luck with the rebuilding.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-6.tcl shows an especially deranged Samoyed.  http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-7.tcl and http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20050825-alex-roxanne-mvy/playing-in-airport-grass-8.tcl will interest lovers of the breed as well.

We’re off to Montauk, Long Island today in the Cirrus (beach at one end on the runway; restaurant at the other).  Westchester County Airport (HPN) tomorrow for a family 50th wedding anniversary.

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Maybe these guys who say that women have lower IQs are only able to do so because they live in a country where it is tough to buy a gun (“an armed society is a polite society”).  This part seems less likely to get Professor Lynn killed:

“He published a controversial study in 2003 that identified a clear correlation between the levels of prosperity in 60 countries and the average IQ of their populations.”

[Stop the presses:  Countries in which all of the smart people have emigrated don’t do that well.  Actually that sounds like the U.K. (many of whose smartest citizens are working at American universities where the pay is vastly higher, or have emigrated to Australia for a bit of sunshine).]

It will be interesting to read the full paper when it comes out.  One challenge to this research is the fact that women do better in school than men, even at pretty high levels.  Could it be that a slightly lower IQ helps people get A grades at top high schools and colleges?  What would professors have to say about that?

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Google has offices for its developers in Silicon Valley, New York City, Paris, various spots in Asia, but nothing in Boston.  In theory Boston has a lot of good software engineers, most of whom are happy to work for lower salaries than those paid in Silicon Valley.  It might be easier to retain workers here in Boston due to the fact that a wage slave can afford a family-sized house if he or she is willing to live in an unfashionable suburb.

Google has obviously decided that right now we’re looking at some combination of (1) not enough smart people live in Boston, (2) most of the good people in Boston would be willing to relocate to the land of strip malls and traffic jams, (3) there aren’t any small companies worth acquiring in Boston, and (4) Google is having enough trouble digesting growth that they can’t handle geographic sprawl.

What do folks think?  Should Google be in the Boston area?  If so, what should they specialize in and where should the office be?  If not, should we be depressed that we have nothing to offer an innovative software company?

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Commenters have been talking about how it is worth spending extra $$ to have a Macintosh instead of a Windows machine, or, more likely, in addition to because one still needs the Windows machine.  The implication is that money is infinite that there is nothing better to spend it on that a high-style personal computer.  So what would I buy in the next month or two instead of the Mac?  (We can call this “the straight guy’s dividend” — money that one saves by not having to invest in a fancy wardrobe and an iBook.)

• an Infrant 1 TB network-attached storage (NAS) device to hold my music collection and photos (700 GB in RAID 5 so you’re protected from a hard drive failure)
  
• a Canon EOS 5D full-frame digital camera and 24-105/4L image-stabilized lens (both just announced; finally we have a reasonably light almost cheap full-frame digital camera that lets one’s wide angle lenses be truly wide), not sure about the lens actually because f/4 is kind of slow and will make the viewfinder dim even if the L quality is very good
  
• maybe a brand-new liquid-cooled silent PC, as long as I’m shuffling files around (Sony VAIO seems to be the only major-brand liquid-cooled silent PC; does anyone know of another?  The VAIOs are supposed to be kind of flaky and hard to deal with due to custom drivers.)  Though maybe it is better to wait until there is a stable release of Windows Vista available (anyone know when beta 2 is supposed to be ready?) and do the reinstall of the apps only once.
  
• a Sonos whole-house music system
  
• a Gigabit Ethernet switch to complement the NAS box and all of its clients, including the Sonos (which brand of switch is best these days?)
  
• a Zen Vision from Creative to show off photos when I’m walking or driving around — also good for backing up CF cards though lames out when it comes to displaying Camera RAW format images
  
• Samsung CLP-510 color laser printer, only $300 at the local Microcenter
  
• exercise machine that controls video games from http://www.powergridfitness.com/ and an Xbox to go with it

(There are other toys that would be nice to have, e.g., a Eurocopter EC120, but I’ve excluded them from this list due to the fact that they cost a lot more than a Macintosh.)

Would these be more or less fun to own than a Mac?

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Just downloaded the new Google sidebar software and am playing with its Weblog aggregation features.  It installed and started doing useful things within about 2 minutes.  Yet another impressive showing from our former classmates and students.  In other computer news, Dell is now offering laptops for $499.  These aren’t nearly as good as IBM’s $599 laptop in some ways (only 1/4 GB instead of 3/4 GB; no built-in wireless; on the other hand it does come with a CD burner/DVD combo drive) but it is nice to see the $500 threshold cracked. 

[One wonders if it is a good time to short Apple stock.  A Macintosh is not only 2X the price of one of these IBM or Dell laptops but it can’t run any of the software being put out by the world’s most innovative software company (Google; all of their stuff has been Windows-only so far).  If MP3 jukebox prices start to fall and iPod-like devices become a commodity like all other portable music players, it might be “game over” for Apple shareholders.]

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If you want a free T-shirt, free parking, free snacks, (from Children’s) and a free lunch (from me), come to Boston Children’s Hospital today around 12:15 pm and we’ll all donate blood together.  The blood center’s Web page has directions, a phone number for questions, etc.

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I’m about 200 pages into 1491, a new book by Charles Mann about the civilizations of the Americas before the Europeans and European diseases came in.  The book is very interesting for

• its discussion of the Indian tribes in New England and how their conflicts played into the hands of the English


• the history of an advanced society in Norte Chico, just north of Lima, Peru, dating back to around 3500 B.C. and possibly earlier, all based on research from the last 30 years or so and much of it based on research from the 1990s


• the texture of Indian life that comes through


• the texture of the debates among scientists trying to piece together the histories of these almost-extinct cultures


• lots of great maps, photos, and illustrations

Highly recommended to all residents of and visitors to the Americas.

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The disposable laptop computer is finally here:  IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpads are $600 with 3/4 GB of RAM, wireless networking, and a 14″ display.  I’ve always liked the Thinkpads because of the TrackPoint, the little red button in the middle of the keyboard, which I find much easier to use than the trackpads standard on most other laptops.  Thinkpads are also remarkably resistant to dropping and other abuse.  The only thing that one could say against this configuration is that it doesn’t include a CD/DVD burner.  So the price of a decent laptop is now converging with the price of an expensive cell phone.  I wrote about this possibility about one year ago: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/09/09.  Will people still want to pay $1000+ for a laptop that they will have to guard from theft and impact when they could just buy a Thinkpad for $600 now and replace it two years from now for $450?

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