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I’ve read three or four blog posts around the web recently that detail people putting up Christmas decorations. They all seem to have an air of guilt about using artificial Christmas trees. What’s the deal? A decent artificial tree runs around $200. A decent real tree runs around $30. That’s a 7 year payback if you don’t count the added cost in headaches of dealing with a real tree. Are they worried about the environment? Do people actually throw away their old fake trees? Growing up I’m pretty certain we had the same fake tree for about 15 years, maybe more and it got donated to a needy family when we were done. The first 8 or 9 years we were married we used a tree that was donated to us after serving for at least a dozen years in other capacities. I certainly don’t plan on throwing ours away for a long long time, and I will definitely recycle it when the time comes. Maybe I’ve missed the boat, but I stand proud and tall, just like my 7.5 foot imitation spruce.

Erica took me to Quantum of Solace last Friday night as a late birthday present. We saw it at Larry H Miller’s Megaplex Theater at Thanksgiving Point. We’ve seen several movies there lately and can I just say how impressed I am with his theaters? They are well designed technically (Save for the digital projection, which I still have not managed to get used to. Doesn’t anyone else see the pixels?) so the experience of watching a movie is top notch, but the real killer feature is reserved seating. We bought our tickets online a few days ahead, chose the seats we wanted, right in the middle of the theater, went to dinner at Thanksgiving Point and then entered the theater about ten minutes before showtime, retrieved our tickets from the kiosk and went to our seats. No waiting in endless lines on premier night, FTW! Erica and I had the same experience watching Mamma Mia at the Thanksgiving Point theater and Jon and I saw The Dark Knight in IMAX at the Jordan Commons theater that way. Kudos to Mr. Miller for removing my biggest gripe from the theater experience.

Now that I’ve covered the theater, as far as the movie is concerned I went in with both high expectations after Casino Royale and low expectations after reading a couple of reviews and a smattering of fan reactions online. Quantum of Solace would have worked as a generic action movie. I can see it easily as a one-off, like The Rundown, or even as part of a sort of internationalized Die Hard-type franchise. It’s not worthy of being called a James Bond movie, and it’s especially unworthy as a successor to Casino Royale.

First off, the quick cutting has got to stop. I don’t know what the average seconds per shot was in the pre-titles scene, but it has to be somewhat less than the 2 seconds per shot average the The Bourne Ultimatum achieved, and that movie made some people sick in the theaters. The opening scene of Quantum is a car chase through the Italian Alps. It would have been ages better with even just a couple of wide, 8 or 9 second establishing shots thrown in as the cars careen around precarious curves set atop 100 foot high cliffs. As it is, it’s extremely difficult to understand what’s going on inside the cars or when the vehicles are seen maneuvering around each other.

The opening titles song by Alicia Keys has been much maligned across the web, so I won’t repeat any of that here. Suffice to say it is less than memorable at best, and complete drek at middle.

After the titles we’re treated to a foot chase under the ongoing Palio di Siena and across the rooftops and through the houses of that beautiful city. Of course, it’s cut so quickly that it’s near impossible to tell who is chasing whom and how far ahead the chasee is at any given moment. Some of the stunts were ingeniously put together, and evidently Daniel Craig performed many of them himself, but you’d have to watch it in slow motion to really appreciate the work he and the crew did. Erica’s comment was “Can’t they at least put one of them in a light colored suit so we can tell who’s who?” Hear, hear.

I could go on and on, but how about something positive? I like a couple of the throwbacks to previous Bond traditions, like the gathering of the baddies out in the open at a packed opera performance, and the bad guy’s lair (a pretty pathetic lair, however) exploding around him as he has a final duel with Bond, and the pretty local operative with a colorful name sent to escort Bond from the airport. The problem with that one, however, was that they never revealed her full name (Strawberry Fields) in the dialogue. You’d have to watch the credits to get the joke, and who, besides Erica and I, stayed to watch the credits?

What the film really lacked in comparison to Casino Royale, though, was the wonderfully slow and deliberately paced character building scenes. I missed Bond just chatting with his co-stars like he did his last time out. The filmmakers need to put a little more trust in their audience. Don’t force feed us quite so much exposition. We’ll figure out the plot on our own, just give us a hint or two every few minutes. Don’t spend quite so much time on mindless action. We know Bond can best just about anybody if you give him enough time.

When we walked out of the theater I had to do a double take when I looked at my watch. The showtime was 7pm and even after seeing trailers up front and staying through the credits, we were back in the car by 9:00. Quantum of Solace is 38 minutes shorter than Casino Royale.  It clocks in at 106 minutes, making it the shortest Bond film yet. I think it suffers for that. I want to know what was cut out. Was it the very element I missed? Maybe they shot those scenes and they just didn’t work. Maybe they listened to the couple of whiners on the internet who complained that Casino was too long? Hopefully we’ll get some idea of that when Quantum is released on DVD. In any case, I was disappointed even considering my lowered expectations going in.

So here’s the new look for thunkgeek.com. It’s the Fluid Blue theme. I have to get a couple of bits and pieces working, but for now I think it looks pretty good.

The internet is the most powerful collaboration and connection tool ever created by man. Here’s a short video talking a little about how the network is being used to connect people with each other and with ideas.

It’s not a New Year’s Resolution, because I have been telling myself I should be writing more on this site for months, but I am going to post more frequently. I think it’s about time for a redesign as well… gotta clean this sucker up a bit. It’s busy. Too busy.

Back soon.

Got a laptop this week. Put linux on it. Yep, linux. Mandriva 2006 to be exact.

The machine is a Dell Inspiron 6000. The initial install of Mandriva went very smoothly. As far as I could tell, everything worked except WPA on the wireless card (Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG), the SD Card Reader and suspend/hibernate/resume. The card reader doesn’t bug me too much, since my camera uses compact flash and when I plugged in my USB CF reader it popped right up and asked if I wanted to import pictures. The WPA support issue was important because our wireless network at work uses WPA and I need to be able to connect at work. The suspend/resume thing is also important cause who wants a laptop that you have to power down and then boot from scratch everytime you take it somewhere. Not very portable.

As it turned out, getting WPA to work was just a matter of installing a missing package (wpa_supplicant), which I guess must have been missed in the initial install, or it is not part of the Mandriva 2006 install at all? Ironically, the KDE wireless network manangement software was actually writing a config file for wpa_supplicant when I configured the connection as wpa, complete with the SSID and pre-shared key. Of course a config file for a piece of software that is not installed doesn’t do much good. The connection manager must have been trying to turn things over to wpa_supplicant and just sitting and waiting forever. In a perfect world, it would have given me an error messsage saying it couldn’t find wpa_supplicant. Open source software is not a perfect world.

I still haven’t been able to make suspend/resume work properly. There is quite a bit of info on the web about kernel patches and things to help with this situation, so I expect I will be able to make it work at some future point. It’s more of a simple inconvenience where the lack of WPA was more like a deal-breaker, so I can live with having to power down completely for a little while.

I woke up this morning having been mired in a more than usually surreal subconcious vision. In my dream I had an innate understanding of the task at hand, which was to install a Cisco ethernet switch into an equipment rack… a straightforward task to be sure, and one with which I am well familiar. The odd thing, you see, was that the switch, which plainly sported the Cisco logo, bore a striking resemblance to a window mounted air conditioning unit, witch an umbilical that connected to a bank of ethernet ports. Oh yes, and the “rack” was the closet in the upstairs bathroom at my parents home in Lindon.

Well it is done. It went a lot smoother than I expected, due to some fairly professional installers who deemed my advice worthy of their time. Thank heaven for that. This post is hitting the site via my brand spanking new 15 megabit UTOPIA fiber to the premises connection. And when they say FTTP they really mean it. The fiber comes right through my kitchen wall and into a CPE that is screwed to the wall. From that thing a piece of CAT5 goes back out through the wall, over the door and window and through the wall again into my computer. The only unfortunate wiring they did was the connection for the phone, which goes all the way from the CPE to the other end of the building and into Qwest’s wiring. If I had thought they’d be so speedy with the wiring I would have told them on the phone that I had a wiring block in a closet in the apartment and they could use that for the phone service. Oh well. They showed up at about 2:30pm and were done by about 4:15. Not bad at all. Now to test out the speed a bit. I’ll report back on that and have some pictures and more details later.

Our UTOPIA install is scheduled for this afternoon. After hearing numerous horror stories, I am extremely interested to see how our setup goes. When they came and trenched from the fiber box in the corner of the lawn, across the lawn, under the driveway and up to the corner of the building, the landlord and his managers were less than ecstatic. I got a frantic call at work wondering who the people were that were “digging up all the grass.” The manager wondered if we had asked them to come dig up the yard. Well, no, not exactly. We did order a public utility connection, though, so there was nothing that they could do about it, I explained. That was an interesting day. Luckily, the workers doing the trenching were fairly careful to put the lawn back together, so it is unlikely there will be any kind of lasting damage. At this point, there is a little bit of conduit sticking up at the outside corner of our kitchen wall as the only evidence that anything has changed.

The install is supposed to include the fiber termination box and router and a small UPS. Presumably this is to ensure that the phone service will still work (to provide for 911 capability) when the power goes out. I have heard from a couple of people, however, that the phone service over this network is less than stellar even when the power is on, so, really, why bother?

The company providing the internet connection over the municipality owned network requires that the end user have “something called ethernet.” This is to make it so my computer can connect “faster.” That’s what they told me on the voicemail they left the other day reminding me of the scheduled install. I can only hope that the person actually coming to perform the labor of installation is slightly more capable than the trained monkeys that I have worked with so far. We shall see.

I had the privilege last Friday night of seeing a true living legend perform. Brian Wilson was one of the (arguably the only) creative geniuses behind the Beach Boys. He’s been compared to George Gershwin and called a one-man Beatles. He spent close to thirty years plagued by emotional problems compounded by drug abuse and has finally in the past few years been able to present himself to the public again. His return has been glorious and I got to partake of just a bit of that with my wife the other night.

I’ve always been a fan of the music of the 60s, and particularly of the Beach Boys. My mom started me on the journey when I was only a couple years old. I grew up hearing all of the surfing, cars and girls hits from the early years. When I was in early teenage, though, a tape showed up from my mother’s sister in England. She said she had been going through some old boxes and found a few Beach Boys records so she copied them to tape in case we wanted them. One of the records was Pet Sounds. I’m fairly certain I had heard a song or two from the album before that point, but I had never heard it all the way through, and those first few listenings will stick in my mind forever. People have called Pet Sounds the best pop album ever, and they have good reason. It’s difficult to look back almost 40 years ago without a jaded eye, especially since the music is now so well known, but I can recall 17 years ago the time when I first experienced its magic. I think I got a little taste then of what it must have been like to hear Pet Sounds when it was first released. It’s been almost 40 years and there is still nothing quite like it. Every song is magic.

After Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson embarked on an even more ambitious album. It began life with the title Dumb Angel, but soon became Smile, because they thought people would want to buy an album with a name like that. The story of the project is well documented on the internet, so I won’t go into it here, especially since I am by no means an expert on the history. The album was not released, and so became the stuff of legend. It was supposed to be better than Pet Sounds, aside from being just more ambitious. In the words of it’s creator it was a “teenage symphony to God” and a musical voyage across America. After the collapse of the project a few pieces from the album made their way onto studio albums, live shows and various bootlegs. The legend grew over the years as Brian’s sickness deepened.

After I got married I sort of lost touch with that part of my life. I am embarrassed to say that I had no idea Brian Wilson had put his personal and professional life back together during the latter half of the 90s and was even touring again. He brought Pet Sounds out of the closet and toured the complete album as part of a live show. Then evidently he announced that he would be finishing Smile and premiering it at a concert in London. I discovered all of this after seeing the SMiLE DVD at Costco in the beginning of July. Needless to say I was a bit surprised.

I bought the album and I have probably listened to it on average 2 or 3 times a week for almost two months now. It’s difficult to say whether it is better than Pet Sounds because of the time separation and the fact that it is so different. It’s a much more conceptual album than Pet Sounds. There is no doubt in my mind or anyone else’s, according to what I’ve read on the net, that SMiLE is a true masterpiece. I experienced the same elation on hearing it the first few times that I did with Pet Sounds. It’s a sonic journey unlike anything else I know of. It’s pop music, certainly, but also extremely symphonic. The lyrics, by Van Dyke Parks, are poetic and in many cases completely abstract. The music is daring and different, but reminiscent of previous Brian Wilson work. He incorporates a few snippets of past popular songs and little themes from well known American music to help give the work the feel of a truly American journey. And it does work as real musical Americana.

Anyway, gushing aside, the reason for this post is to report on the concert we saw Friday night. I’ve taken a few days to collect my thoughts. After having read many many glowing reviews of previous shows on this leg of the tour, I was duly excited as we packed the car for the drive to Denver. We left at 6:30 Friday morning, stopping at Daylight Donuts in Pleasant Grove to grab some morning sustenance. We drove north to Salt Lake, then west through Wyoming to Cheyenne, then south to Denver, arriving around 4:00pm. We took a short nap in our hotel then it was time to get to the Universal Lending Pavilion for the show. The venue was pretty good, especially considering that it is essentially a tent that they set up during the summer for shows like this, then take down for the winter to provide more parking space for the nearby sports venues. It reminded me a lot of the old amphitheater at Park West/Wold Mountain, where I saw numerous acts growing up and whose absence is in my mind a terrible loss. There were approximately 3000 seats, and I would estimate about 3/4 of them had been sold, so definitely not a full house. The band hit the stage about 10 minutes after the posted start time due to a bit of begging from local celebrities on behalf of the athletic department of a community college. The first set included a string of Beach Boys songs, including many huge hits from the early period of their music, a couple of later songs and even a Christmas song (Little St Nick), which though out of place in the 85 degree heat was lots of fun. As the first set wound down with Sail On Sailor and Marcella I found myself wanting them to go back to the beginning and start over again. It’s amazing how good those old sun and sand songs make you feel. Brian himself was a bit sullen during the first set. He didn’t smile at the audience till about halfway through California Girls as I recall. This is kinda par for the course for him, though, so I wasn’t terribly concerned. The music sounded great, though the mix seemed a bit tinny to me, with occasional blasts of bass. Anyway, the band was really ripping into those songs, and they are certainly not without skill. Brian’s voice was in good shape. All good.

After a 20 minute intermission the band filed back on stage and the place went dark. This is the beginning of the SMiLE section and it starts with a truly heavenly a cappella harmony called Our Prayer. The lights then came up and the rest of the album washed over us. It is in three movements of about 15 minutes each, like a symphony, though it could also loosely be divided into songs. During this section of the show Brian was obviously in a better mood. The music can’t help but bring your spirits up, and it is endearing that its creator is affected the same way listeners are. After the first movement I looked around a bit and noticed how many people either didn’t come back after the intermission and were milling around outside the tent or just left entirely. This leads me to my one overarching complaint about the show: the audience. It was fairly evident to me that many of the people there were either there to be seen, or cause they knew it is hip now to like Brian Wilson’s music, or they came for the early Beach Boys stuff then left. Of those who remained it was also pretty easy to see that only a select few really appreciated the SMiLE section. They all applauded at the right points, but I felt bad that the band didn’t get more positive feedback. In any case, I loved it. Some have said on the Internet that seeing SMiLE live is better than the CD, and I can see where they are coming from. It’s very emotional music, and that feeling really flows from the stage. Producing music of such complexity in a live setting is difficult at best, however, and there were a few compromises that had to be made. I must have a programmer’s attention to detail, because I missed a lot of little things that have become favorite moments from hearing the CD. All in all, though, the feeling of wanting the whole show to start over again stuck with me right till the end. It was that good.

The encores included a few more Beach Boys hits, a band intro, and a pretty rocking cover of Johnny B Goode. People got up to leave after the first encore set, but the band took the stage again and offered a glimpse of a Brian Wilson work-in-progress, which served as an intro to Love & Mercy, one of his biggest solo hits. The new song was obviously not finished, but is set to be a hauntingly beautiful gospel number. It’s obvious that Brian has a lot left to say and I am looking forward to hearing it.

We ate dinner Friday night after the nearly three hour show at a downtown place called Rocky Mountain Diner, which, ironically, is situated diagonally across the street from the building where my father would have worked if we had stayed in Denver when we moved there 19 years ago next month. I’m glad we didn’t stay, though the drive to the concert wouldn’t have been bad. Exhausted, we made it back to the hotel and hit the mattress already asleep. The alarm sounded at 5:30am for the trip back home to relieve my brother James and his wife Chevon of our two children. We drove back through the beautiful mountain canyons of western Colorado, stopped in Moab, Utah for lunch, and made it home by about 4:30pm.

Overall, I think my impression of the experience was summed up by a poster on the smileysmile.net message board, who said he thought the concert in Denver was bittersweet. It wasn’t as good as I hoped and believed it was going to be. The band is at the end of their tour and I am certain they are feeling the many miles they’ve covered. The audience wasn’t as appreciative as they should have been, and driving 20 out of those 48 hours was brutal. That’s the bitter. The sweet was to see a real musical hero perform live, something I never thought I would be able to see in the case of Brian Wilson. His story is inspirational. His music is too. Thank you, Brian!