One would be forgotten for passing on this film after having viewing the absolutely atrocious trailer (the in-theater previews were much worse) and the lackluster reviews. But Drillbit Taylor is a Seth Rogen / Judd Apatow movie, which gives it its sole redeeming factor.

Like other films made by the duo, Drillbit Taylor is about humans' ability to change for the better. In the film, perhaps as in real life, this begins with wanting to change. At a time when 4 out of 5 Americans are seriously worried about the country's direction, a film about hope would probably fare much better than another comedy with physical humor. America needs the Three Musketeers, not the Three Stooges.

About a month ago, I got tired of waiting NeoOffice's ridiculously long load times for networked files, and switched to Microsoft Office 2008. Office 2008 and its Windows counterpart, Office 2007, use Microsoft's new OOXML file formats, at the expense of backwards compatibility (owners of older versions of Office have to install non-obvious plugins in order to open documents created in the new format). Microsoft describes OOXML as "an open, royalty-free file format specification [that] maximizes interoperability in a heterogeneous environment."

Excel 2007 and 2008 include many new functions, including COUNTIFS.^[1] While at work, I created a column of cells that used the function, but was dismayed to see an error, since I was following the function's documentation to the letter. I was even more dismayed for it to display perfectly fine on a colleague's computer running Excel 2007. Even more strangely, it displayed normally in Excel 2008 once it had been saved in Excel 2007.

I suspect that none of this would have happened if we were using OpenDocument.
–
^[1] See the help for Excel 2007 and Excel 2008, respectively.

While the screenshot at the right looks similar to that of Photo Exporter, the application has several new features, including the ability to download your friends' albums. Unlike the previous version, v0.0.2 now lets you select which album you want to download, as opposed to trying to download all of them.

If you notice any bugs, run into any issues using the application, or suggestions for improvement, please let me know by commenting here or sending me an email using the Contact page.

I initially tried to add OpenID support by using the OpenID Comments for WordPress plugin, simply because it was the only WordPress OpenID plugin that I could find that also implemented an OpenID server (which allows you to authenticate to sites that accept OpenIDs). Installing it was very annoying, since it was more complex than a standard WordPress plugin installation (which consists of simply putting the plugin file or folder into wp-content/plugins), requiring confusing modifications to the code that controls the display of comments. After it was installed, I was disappointed to find that it did not seem to support the SREG extensions, which allow you to do cool things like attach your name or email address to your OpenID (so when you login with it, you do not have to re-enter your information again).

The entire exercise reminded me of why I do not like PHP, and by extension, WordPress (because many of the customizations are not clean and so make your code very difficult to maintain). I considered giving up and putting some time into writing a Django-based CMS to replace WordPress. After some serious thinking, I eventually decided to keep things as they are for the time being - writing a blog in Django is probably still a good idea, but I have no time.

As a result, I ended up just using phpMyID as the OpenID server (in retrospect, there was no good reason to integrate the OpenID server into WordPress to begin with) and the wp-openid plugin for commenting. To comment using your OpenID, just enter it in the field marked "URI or OpenID."

Having learned that the screenplay was based on Upton Sinclair's Oil (which I assumed was like The Jungle, but involving oil in California instead of meatpacking in Chicago), I thought Daniel Day-Lewis would lead his gang of oilmen into various California towns, sowing murder and mayhem in their zeal for oil, leaving them the small communities empty and broken. Eventually, his comeuppance would occur at the hands of a charming Socialist organizer. This movie might exist somewhere, but it is not There Will Be Blood.

There Will Be Blood is not about oil, socialism, nor even how turn of the century California was some kind of pastoral utopia. The "blood" in the title is that of familial ties, not that spilt in war. As a result, much of the movie was slow and brooding, without much action. When events did occur, they came quickly and without much warning (fitting in well with the chaotic - and almost atonal - instrumental music that made up the movie's score).

This film was ultimately very confusing. Barely able to tell a coherent story, it moved too slowly for much of its duration and too quickly during its most interesting scenes. While partially redeemed by its impressively beautiful cinematography and scenery, it was ultimately disappointing. The film is intellectually interesting (both suggesting and dismissing that true rapport among humans can only be found with blood relations), but not the must-see that film critics suggest it is.

While I could have continued using Ubuntu 6.10 until its end of life in 2011, I wanted to use newer software that was not available in 6.06 (including exotic VPN options and Python 2.5). The process was more difficult than it should have been, because 6.06 is so old (three versions behind 7.10) and the next LTS release (which I would be able to directly upgrade to, as opposed to upgrading to 6.10 and then 7.04 and then 7.10, each time risking breakage) will not be released until April 2008.

As a result, I ended up backing up all of my data and doing a clean installation. It took me three tries, but only because I started too late in the night and got tired in the middle (leading me to restore the previous configuration from Slicehost's integrated backups), not because I ran into technical issues.

Thanks to the Unix underpinnings of OS X, configuring my VPS in St. Louis to relay all of my network traffic was as simple as running the command ssh -D 9999 marteydodoo.com [via] and configuring proxies in System Preferences (see screenshot).

Since JetBlue requires you to stay logged in through a browser popup window (so they can figure out when to reassign your IP address?), I ended up taking advantage of the fact that Firefox has its own network proxy preferences (Right now, Safari is connected to the JetBlue hotspot, while Firefox is tunneling to my server).

This gives me my first New Year's Resolution: set up my own VPN server. If I had VPN already set up, or access to an existing VPN, it would not actually help in this situation (because of the aforementioned popup window), but there are several other situations where it would be useful.

–
^[1] JFK is significantly more "exotic" than Heathrow. For example, for the majority of the time I was writing this mini-essay, I have been intermittently listening to "Who Let the Dogs Out?," because someone does not know how to answer their cell phone.

Earlier, I was accosted by a gentleman who inquired if I was traveling to Pittsburgh. Who travels to Pittsburgh for New Year's Eve?

Fast-forward to this morning, when I run across a comic involving the attempted theft of several penguins from a zoo. Since I was sure that I had seen this specific comic before, I began to wonder if my memory had somehow transformed the comic into the tale told by a friend. This disturbed me.

Even more troubling was when I found a Snopes page which described the penguin tale. Was it possible I read the Snopes page, and somehow subconsciously turned into a memory of a humorous story, complete with ancillary details (like remembering that the story was told while my friend and I were on the escalators at the Harvard T station)? Or was I actually told the story by someone who had been forwarded it by email?

The concern that this raised in my mind dissipated when I read about Toga, a baby African penguin that disappeared from an English zoo almost exactly 2 years ago. Unlike the penguin in the urban legend, Toga was not returned unharmed. From the news page of the zoo where he lived:

Unfortunately we have never discovered what happened to TOGA our stolen Penguin however he is always still very much in our thoughts and we are so grateful for all the support and well wishes the public have given us.

RIP Toga.

One issue with the feature is that it can break already-existing redirects in your .htaccess file. For example, when I got tired of hosting the music video for 16 Military Wives and wanted to direct people looking at it to the Internet Archive's page for it, I inserted the following line into .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^video/16militarywives.mp4 http://www.archive.org/details/TheDecemberists16MilitaryWives
Before I upgraded to WordPress 2.3, people who clicked on a link to www.marteydodoo.com/video/16militarywives.mp4 would automatically go to the Internet Archive.

Since I wanted these redirects to keep working, but wanted to keep the cool Canonical URL feature at the same time, I had to figure out a way to modify my custom redirects to keep them working. Looking through the comments on Mark Jaquith's page, it did not seem like anyone had found a solution. Through trial and error, I found that I was able to get it working by using the 'L' parameter, which stops any further redirecting from occurring. The previous redirect, in its new form:
RewriteRule ^video/16militarywives.mp4 http://www.archive.org/details/TheDecemberists16MilitaryWives [L]

Further Reading

• Simon Willison explains why having your information accessible through only one URL is important.
• Apache's mod_rewrite documentation. Without mod_rewrite, the redirects in my .htaccess would not work.

Still, it had its good points. The cinematography was particularly visually stunning, properly conveying the loneliness and noble decay of an Manhattan abandoned by its human inhabitants. While I initially assumed that the film's setting would be relatively boring (your generic Manhattan cityscape digitally decayed by removing all of the people and adding tatters - see any episode of Heroes where they journey to the future), I was surprised to find myself waiting for pauses in the action so I could lose myself in the background.^[1]

Just as the Manhattan of the film is more interesting that the drab Midwestern suburbia that is the setting of the book, Will Smith's Robert Neville is substantially more likable than the character found in the book. When we first meet him, Smith's version of Neville is driving around the city with his dog, trying to lead a productive post-apocalyptic life: get gasoline, hunt deer for dinner, wait at the pier for other survivors who are not coming, try to figure out a cure for the disease that has infected most of the world's population and turned them into bloodthirsty vampire-like creatures that ate all of the other human survivors, wash the dog, etc. In the book, Neville is spending a quiet evening at home: drinking whiskey, listening to classical music, and freaking out about the mob of vampire women exposing themselves to him outside the house in a kind of macabre Girls Gone Wild designed to entice him to go outside and be devoured.

While the latter Neville's lack of motivation in face of his more depressing circumstances is understandable, it also prevents the reader from empathizing with him. The film's Neville is a soldier-scientist (important enough to have made the cover of Time) determined to find a cure for the disease afflicting the world, and unwilling to leave Manhattan until he does so. "This is my site," he says repeatedly throughout the film, taking a responsibility for his environment that most of us do not. With his lack of such aspiration, one could claim that the book's Neville represents us as we are,^[2] while the film Neville is us as we would wish to be.

This leads to one of the most annoying themes of the book I am Legend, namely that man is a creature ruled by habit. The book's Neville realizes that his lower middle class "habits" of alternatively drinking him to death and wallowing in despair are unproductive, so he procures a microscope and lots of stakes, in order to both better understand and destroy the vampire menace. After discovering that vampirism is spread by bacteria (and is therefore theoretically reversible), Book Neville continues to spend his days killing vampires. After a visit from a vampire who warns him that vampirism is becoming a liveable disease and that his days are numbered, Book Neville still spends his days killing vampires, unable to change his destructive lifestyle.

At the end of the book, Book Neville retains some measure of satisfaction at the fact he was the killer of hundreds, if not thousands, of vampires. Personally, I was a little bit disgusted.

But the ending is also where the film version of I Am Legend ultimately fails. When I think of the film's ending, the phrase deus ex machina comes to mind. From the sudden appearance of other sympathetic human survivors^[3] to a cure that appears just as our heroes are about to be overwhelmed, to a voiceover ending that suggests that the cure has ended the disease and Neville is a martyr, having saved all humanity, reeks of that smarmy Hollywood serendipity one expects of sports movies, not horror films.

This film would be worth seeing on DVD, especially if alternative endings (including one more faithful to the book?) are included. Hopefully they will be less fortuitous than the theatrical ending, although I hear that in one of them, the aliens turn out to be vulnerable to water and the protagonist's dead wife's dying words provide inspiration for their defeat.
–
^[1] In one such scene, a billboard with both Batman and Superman logos appeared, advertising a film that most people assumed would be Batman vs Superman. You could hear excited whispers ripple throughout the audience (who had previously enjoyed a trailer for The Dark Knight).

Wired suspects in its excellent review that it was a guerilla advertisement for a film about the Justice League (supposed to be released in 2010; the year on the billboard). A MTV blog claims that it was just a prank by Akiva Goldsman, one of I Am Legend's writers.

^[2] This might be the reason why his cause is championed by those who cannot spell…

^[3] Like Jenna Wortham, who reviewed the film for Wired (link in the first footnote, above), I assumed that these people would actually turn out to be vampires. The idea that they, like Neville, are members of the 12 million people who were immune to the disease that somehow avoided being eaten by the vampires that outnumber them 20-to-1, is infinitely less interesting.