My friend Ken Stanley and I created a song for the times, and posted it everywhere.  

My wife told me it felt like the Apocalypse; I realized it was Tuesday and contacted my friend the ace songwriter Ken Stanley, and suggested that he create a song called "Apocalypse Tuesday", in the vein of the "Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society".  A couple of hours later he had finished the song.  I sang it and played guitar and bass on it.

Then Ken created a great video for it in the space of a couple of days!  So here it is:

Apocalypse Tuesday

Film Frame Rate

I think it's high time for people to get used to high frame rate video.  The "Soap Opera Effect" seems eerily realistic because it IS MORE REALISTIC.  24-30 fps was a way to make film cheap enough to use, but just barely fast enough to make action less jerky.  We don't have to do that anymore; we don't use film stock anymore.  Realistic video is a GOOD thing!  It's time to start working with it!

The only movie I’ve heard of that was actually filmed to use a high frame rate was Ang Lee’s “Gemini Man”.  A kinda standard action movie starring Will Smith.  And the thing is, it looked pretty cool!   It bombed, but it looked cool.  But I agree with Lee: digital is not celluloid, and we don’t need to be limited to what celluloid can do just because of movie audience nostalgia for a crappy motion format.


https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/james-cameron-disagrees-ang-lee-high-frame-rate-avatar-1202184115/

Containers

[geeky]
Containers.  The new buzzword.  The latest iteration of the desire to make applications invulnerable.

I've been working with Docker a lot recently.  I have to admit: I'm basically offended by containers.

Containers simply gather a lot of technology that already exists into one place and let you use it all at once with yet another interface and set of commands.  Some parts of virtualization, some parts of more advanced, kernel-based security features, all bundled into a single thing called a container.

The thing is,  we could have made running apps on single unix machines much safer and easier to do.  For instance, let's just admit that dynamic libraries were a bad idea.  They were meant to save space when hard disk space and RAM were expensive, but the price was library/DLL hell.  We don't need to deal with this anymore.  One time I begged my manager to let me statically link the older version of OpenSSL to a program.  It would save so much time and effort on the customer's side to not have to install our antiquated version of OpenSSL themselves, but the manager didn't want the responsibility for having to issue new binaries if another "Heartbleed" was found.  Fair enough.  But boy, does that manager want to get us working with Docker!  What?  Now we're not going to just be responsible for our own binaries, we're going to be responsible for the entire OS installation in the container?

Star Trek

I like many aspects of the new Star Trek series, but ... the writing.

SPOILERS!

The entire premise for the series is that Spock has a previously unknown adopted human SISTER.  Does that sound like a fanfic from a 15-year-old girl?

The first season is yet another trip into the “Spock’s Beard” universe.

The premise for the second season is that Spock (the real one) and his sister have to, um, save the universe. Yes, Mr. Spock is a really popular character.  Does he really need to dominate yet another series?

I mean, I often think about writing sequels to my favorite tv episodes.  Doesn’t everyone?  What most people DON’T do is write original stories.  I would think that’s what you pay actual writers to do.