The Czechs love beer, but is it the best?:

Czechs and the millions of tourists who flock to Prague every year seemingly agree that there is something special about the local brews. The Czechs are the largest per capita beer consumers in the world, downing 1.58 billion liters last year. (That's 320 16-oz glasses of beer for every man, woman and child.)

That's a lot of beer, even if you factor in the tourists to the city.

If you go to Staromestske Namesti (Old Town Square) in the center of Prague you definitely see a lot of tourists sitting at the restaurants and drinking beer (even in winter). I remember one of the first times in downtown Prague wondering what Staropramen was and my wife telling me that it was a beer.

I am not the biggest of beer drinkers, but I have had Pilsner Urquell and have to admit that it quite a nice beer. But I guess "the best" is always a subjective term.

I never thought I would say this, but my wife just watched Fight Club with me. With the baby and my hectic work schedule this week it took us 4 days, but she made it through. To be honest, I never thought she would make it to the end. Fight Club is such a guy's movie and I thought she wouldn't relate. But after 7 years of me talking about the movie, I guess she was ready to see what all the fuss was about.

I haven't got a definite thumbs up or down from her, but she definitely seemed to enjoy bits of the movie. Mostly the bits before Project Mayhem starts. I know I met my mate for life because she laughed out loud at the one scene that always gets me laughing. It is the part of the movie where the homework assignment is to pick a fight with someone and lose. So what gets me every time is the one guy who is spraying a water hose pretending to clean a sidewalk, sprays down a priest as he passes by. The priest is at first very calm and reserved, but then you just see him progress to the point where he takes a whack at the guy when he sprays water on the bible. That part in the movie is so funny for me because it is not the disrespect that is being shown to religion, it is the utterly human moment that is released even in someone so pious. I didn't catch this until I'd seen the movie a couple times, but in the next scene you see the priest in the basement during a Fight Club meeting railing on a guy.

This wasn't my first viewing of Fight Club this year, but each time I see it I get something different out of it. It was kind of fun to experience it with my wife when I had the misconception that she would totally hate it.

Now that it is fall and some books are out, I am back on a fiction kick.

Last weekend I finished WWW: Wake by one of my favorite Sci-Fi writers, Robert J. Sawyer. I somehow missed it in April when it was released. I guess I had my mind on other things 5 months ago. :)

The plot of the story felt unique. A 15-year old girl who is blind from birth gets an implant behind her eye with the potential to let her see. Instead it opens her mind up to the Web via the network interface. She can now see servers and websites as points and connections as lines. Within the mosaic, she ends up discovering something unexpected.

There are also two other threads going on in the book. One thread in China where the government is trying to control the flow of information out when there is a potential pandemic. The other thread has to do with gorillas and monkeys who use sign language to communicate. Considering that WWW: Wake is the first in a trilogy of books, I am guessing we'll see the other two threads get more ingrained with the main thread.

What I like about Sawyer is that his novels get techie, but not over the top techie where you have to know things about quantum mechanics. In this book he really delves into how humans learn and the modern theory on how sentience is attained.

The first book I ever read of Sawyer's was about 5 years ago when I first moved to Florida. It was FlashForward, which coincidentally is being made into a new TV show for the fall. ABC is trying to create buzz on the show by calling it the next Lost. From what I see of the trailer though, the show took liberties with the original source material. Instead of jumping 20 years into the future it looks like 6 months. I'll give the TV show a chance, but I have a feeling I may be disappointed.

I give the book 3 out of 4 stars. I am looking forward to the sequel next year.

It is great that Steve Jobs is back in action and even giving presentations. You can't keep that man down.

What a busy Apple week. I upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.1, iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1 this week, but haven't had that much time to play with any of it. Maybe this weekend.

The one thing I have noticed is OS 3.1 is definitely faster (response-wise) for my 1G iPhone. I'd get stuck pretty often in Mail trying to delete or switch mail accounts. Now, not so much.

Category: Computers,History]

About damn time.

Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science. A genius. His room size decrypting machines at Bletchley Park are usually deemed as one of the major reasons the Allies won World War II. Unfortunately, in the 1950s he was brought up on criminal charges for being gay in a very public fashion. Soon after he committed suicide.

The first I ever heard of Turing was in college. I was fascinated by his concept of a Turing machine and the possibility of a Turning test. It was that kind of vision back than that helped usher in all of this modern technology.

It wasn't until I read Cryptonimicon in the late 1990s that I learned that he was a gay and committed suicide. It is nice to know that even after all these years that the British government did the right thing and recognized him for the hero that he was.

Category: Movies,Review,Movie Review]

Amazingly we got through another movie this weekend. We saw the movie Doubt with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Coincidentally it was the second movie we watched this weekend with Amy Adams. And yet another movie tie-in with The Devil Wears Prada with Streep being in both movies.

The movie is set in 1964 around a Catholic church in New York (I first thought it was Boston). It definitely brought back memories of going to church. It was funny to explain to my wife about all the things that I used to do when I was an altar boy.

The film itself is rather riveting. We got lucky in that the kid went to bed early so we got to watch the last hour uninterrupted. That hour went by pretty quickly. Hoffman and Streep aren't in many scenes together, but when they are together you can really feel the tension between these two characters. What I also liked about Streep's character is that she has that personae around the kids where she is a hard ass, but when she is around her peers you see a little bit of the humanity. For example, she's very protective of the nun going blind.

The big twist concerning Donald's mother was pretty shocking. It really wasn't what I was expecting. She was a totally believable character as a mother just trying to keep her family together in the mid 1960s.

I give the movie 3 out of 4 stars. A very surprising and interesting flick. Maybe not repeatable to watch, but the acting and story really make it an above average movie.

Category: ]

The wife and I went to go get a movie on Friday. It was the first time we brought the kid to the video store. 6pm on a Friday was probably not the best time to go, but at least we found a flick.

My wife loves, loves, loves The Devil Wears Prada. I have to admit after a number of repeat viewings the movie has grown on me. Our favorite character from that movie is Emily played wonderfully by Emily Blunt. Blunt doesn't have that big of a role in Prada, but she is definitely a scene stealer. So at the video store we come across this movie where Blunt is listed above the title and so we thought we'd give it a try.

The movie is unique in that it tells a story of a woman (played by Amy Adams) and her Sister (Blunt) who are down on their luck relationship and career-wise and decide to get into the post forensic cleanup business. Basically that means that after a homicide or a suicide and the body is taken away they do the cleanup. There are some scenes in the flick where blood is splattered everywhere, but otherwise it is not too gruesome. You don't actually see anyone killed (although you do hear a shotgun blast go off just after the scene fades to black).

In essence the flick is about re-defining yourself and coming to grips with your past. Emily Blunt's character is the eternal screwup. Amy Adams' character is the sister who always fixes things, but can't seem to fix her life. In that regard this fare isn't unique, but at least it wasn't boring.

The movie was pretty enjoyable even though we had to watch it in starts and stops (that's life with a 3 month old). It was more drama than comedy, but there were some funny bits.

I give it 3 out of 4 stars.

Category: Visualization]

Last week I bumped into this blog called Information Is Beautiful. The owner of the blog, David McCandless, showcases visualized data (both his own and other's work) in unique and fascinating ways. This site is totally my cup of tea. I quickly added it to my RSS program.

Visualizing data was one of the reasons I focused in college on Graphics and UI programming. One of my first UI projects was working in X Windows/Motif on a Physics program that dealt with stresses on beams. The user could put a variable amount of horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or rotational forces on a beam and the program would show a 2D view of where the stresses would be. Black would be low stress. Red would be the highest stress with various shades of the rainbow in between. For my first graphical UI program it was really neat. It made me realize two important things:

1. How important color is to representing data.
2. How a good visualization could allow the user to intuitively figure out how the program worked.

Nowadays most of the UIs that I do are a lot more simplistic. Tabs, tables, buttons, and check boxes are usually the extent of my designs. But every once in a while I get a nice little tidbit of UI to create that reminds me of my first program.

Category: ]

I have had some speed bumps with Snow Leopard the last couple of days, but nothing that makes me want to downgrade.

My wife got the Mini to hang with the spinning beach ball of death. She said it hung trying to do something in Safari and Skype at the same time. The only thing I could do was a hard reboot.

Flash has been crashing big time. Sometimes I get the error dialog saying that a plugin in not working. Other times Safari just crashes.

Update 09/03/2009: Snow Leopard downgrades Flash.

1Password has been giving me some problems. I am not sure how happy I am that the program is going to stop using the OS X Keychain for the backing store for the 3.0 version.

Snow Leopard is installed on both my MBP and Mini.

One of the minor new features I think is cool is the ability to minimize an application to its dock icon rather than next to the trash can (System Preferences->Dock->Minimize windows into application icon).

I have never been too much of a fan of task switching via Cmd-Tab. I never really liked Alt-Tab on Windows either. Since I use Spaces pretty frequently, I have a tendency to just click on the dock application icon to switch to the space that the application is running in. With Expose being "exposed" on the Dock, it has made navigating even easier.

So far I haven't had really any major issues. It seemed like it took a lot longer to install Snow Leopard on my MBP than on the Mini. And once I had it installed Spotlight indexing churned again sending the CPU and fan activity way up. However that was only for 15 minutes or so.

Overall it has been a pretty nice upgrade so far. I love the fact that I got 15 GB in HD space back on both machines. When was the last time you have upgraded an OS and actually gained GBs of space?