Hummingbird
While walking to the movie theatre yesterday, Erin and I came across a very tiny little bird that was was sitting motionless, right in the middle of the busy sidewalk. We looked a little closer, and realized that it was a hummingbird!
He barely reacted at all when I touched him, so obviously something was wrong.
Erin ran off to get the bird some sugar water from a nearby coffee shop, and I picked him up and carried him over to secluded tree on the other end of the parking lot. The middle of the sidewalk is really no place for a tiny, semi-conscious hummingbird.
Unfortunately, he wasn't interested in any of Erin's sugar water, and he didn't really like where I put him in the tree, either. He jumped up, wobbled in the air for a second or two, and then landed on Erin's shoulder.
But that was as far as he went, which still seemed awfully sluggish for a hummingbird. Maybe the wind had knocked him into something and now he was just kinda stunned?
There wasn't much else to do, so we just found him a tree that he liked better and left him there with the rest of the sugar water, hoping that a little rest would help him recover.
A few hours later we decided to check up on the little guy. (We were walking back home from the movie theatre anyway.) Unfortunately, there had been a thunderstorm while we were gone. We found the bird exactly where we'd left him, only now he was completely soaked! It was a sad sight. With his feathers all wet, he looked even smaller than before, and he was actually shivering. 
Dr. Horrible
This is freakin' awesome.
It's a bit of an experiment by Joss Whedon, who's one of my favourite writers. I think the idea is to try out other ways of distributing television shows over the internet--perhaps his plan is to release shows for free online, but only for a short time, and then charge for them as DVDs later on?
In that spirit, this show is available for free on the internet for this week only; a new act appears every couple of days. The first act (which is the only one I've see so far) features three actors that I really like: Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day.
Don't waste time reading my blog. Go watch Dr. Horrible!
Bigger, More Complex, and More Violent
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. (Albert Einstein)
That's one of my favourite quotations, at least when it comes to my professional life. It captures what's probably the single most important idea in all of the scientific and engineering disciplines, my own included.
Simplicity.
When it's given any thought at all, simplicity is usually treated as something that's nice to have, but not really essential. This is wrong. In fact, striving for simplicity is so important that it is in my mind synonymous with both striving for perfection and striving for truth. The world is complicated and messy to start with, and the most brilliant ideas, devices, and processes are inevitably the ones that cut through all that complexity and ultimately expose only what is necessary and useful.
Be it an mp3 player, a software product, or an amazingly powerful website, if you want to build something that will be successful, you've got to make simplicity your overriding goal. Always.
Sometimes that's a very hard thing to do, especially when you're trying to build something complicated. That's why a "touch of genius" is sometimes required. Sometimes it even means that you have to take a chance on an entirely new idea, which is the part that requires "courage".
My second favourite quotation on this topic is:
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. (Alan Perlis)
And my third, which is directed specifically at software developers:
... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other. (John Carmack)
Diablo 3
I don't think there has ever been a game that I've looked forward to more than this. And I've looked forward to a few games in my time.
Good Like Sunkist
So we went to see The Happening a few days ago.
I liked it, but then, I expected I would. I've liked all of M. Night Shyamalan's movies. There's just something about the guy's storytelling style that really draws me in.
I won't say anything more about the movie, other than to recommend it to any Shyamalan fans who have a strong stomach for gruesome death scenes.
I would, however, like to make a few comments on The Happening's leading man, Mark Wahlberg.
If you've actually seen the movie, then you already know that Wahlberg is convincing as Elliot Moore, a slightly awkward highschool teacher who's going through a rough patch in his marriage (which will soon be the least of his problems.) He ends up being a surprisingly genuine and resilient protagonist in what is otherwise a very dark story.
I guess what I'm saying is, Wahlberg puts in a good performance.
That's not surprising, really, because these days, Mr. Wahlberg is a well-known actor. He's been a star for long enough that even movie-goers who don't know his name will probably recognize his face:
It's difficult, then, to reconcile Wahlberg's subdued performance in The Happening with his previous career as a ludicrously over-the-top white rapper with an anti-drug message and strong penchant for piano solos. Difficult, and possibly hilarious.
You see, back in the early nineties, Mr. Wahlberg cast himself in very much the same mold as Vanilla Ice, except with much bigger muscles. Back in those days, he went by the name "Marky Mark", and he hung around with a band called "The Funky Bunch". I couldn't make that up.
Marky only had one big hit, or at least only one that I can remember:
I wonder if he still does backflips in the rain, just for old time's sake?
And lest you think that I'm unfairly picking on Mr. Mark...er, Wahlberg, let me confess that at age fifteen, I was a big fan of this song. Not to the point where I ever tried to do bicep curls with whole cinderblocks...but I did use the phrase "the vibration's good like sunkist" a couple of times.
