I’m not one to watch movies for deep spiritual or humanitarian significance.  It takes me a long time (sometimes days, weeks) to process input, especially when it comes at me in the blitz of a two-hour motion picture zooming (relatively) by on the screen.  For example, I saw Defiance recently, which has a lot of good stuff in it to comment about, but I’m not going to take the time to crunch through it right now.

Speaking of Daniel Craig…
Once a year-span or so, sometime between the end of one baseball season in October (or, more recently, November) and the beginning of the next in April, I watch all the James Bond movies.  Yes, all of them.  In order.  It’s a way to turn off my brain for a couple hours and just be entertained every few days. I obtained a collection of VHS tapes from a friend a few years ago — every one from Dr. No through Tomorrow Never Dies, minus The Man with the Golden Gun. I have since added Golden Gun, plus the VHS version of The World Is Not Enough and the DVD versions of Die Another Day and Casino Royale.

So, since there’s a break in the UEFA Champions League season and thus there’s nothing good on TV, I’m beginning my Bond Marathon with Dr. No now.  I’m not promising (you or myself) anything, but my plans are to comment on each one as I watch them.  Not an official review, not as a film critic by any stretch because I’m too shallow and inexperienced for that, but just as a fly-by commenter.  Some of the good-bad-ugly, some trivia, some quotes, some general or specific observations.  Just for fun.

Happy new Decade!

Wait, not so fast.

I’m not convinced that this is the beginning of a new decade.  I think Jan 1, 2011 will be the start of a new decade, the current one ending on Dec 31, 2010.  My reasoning is manifold:

• We count from 1 to 10, not from 0 to 9; so the decade should go from 2001 – 2010, not 2000 – 2009.
• There is no year 0.  Not that Wikipedia is the final authority for all things, but the Gregorian Calendar entry asserts what we all know: “AD 1 immediately follows 1 BC”.
• Because there is no year 0, the first decade is 1-10; the second decade is 11-20, the third is 21-30, etc.  By extension, the current decade is from 2001-2010, and the next one will be from 2011-2020.
• We have precedent for numbering periods starting with 1 and ending with a multiple of 10.  The 1st Century was from 1-100; the 2nd Century was from 101-200; and so on.

Interestingly, Wikipedia makes mention of a disconnect between the cultural notion and mathematical/scientific notion of when the 21st Century began.  Even Wikipedia concludes that according to math and logic, the current century runs from 2001-2100, but gives mention of some other “cultural” notion of the current century having begun in 2000, basically declaring this cultural notion incorrect (as I do). Elsewhere Wikipedia affirms that the 21st century runs from 2001-2100; furthermore the 20th Century ran from 1901-2000, and the 19th Century ran from 1801-1900, etc.  If we are going to redefine the 21st century as having begun on January 1, 2000, then we have shorted a previous century by one year, making it not a century at all but rather a “99 year period”.

More authoritative is the U.S. Naval Observatory, stating the same thing, that “the 21st century began with 1 January 2001 and will continue through 31 December 2100.”  Furthermore, it defines millennia as well:

Similarly, the 1st millennium comprised the years AD 1-1000. The 2nd millennium comprises the years AD 1001-2000. The 3rd millennium began with AD 2001 and will continue through AD 3000.

Why all this talk about Centuries if the discussion is supposed to be about Decades?  My fourth bullet point above is supported by these definitions: the precedent is that we group millennia and centuries in groups of 1000 or 100 years, beginning with the year 1:

• Millennia: 1-1000, 1001-2000, 2001-3000, …
• Centuries: 1-100, 101-200, 201-300, … ,1801-1900, 1901-2000, 2001-2100, …

By extension, then, a decade should be a grouping of 10 years beginning with the year 1: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, … , 1991-2000, 2001-2010, 2011-2020, …

So, I remain unconvinced by the popular cultural notion of us having just begun a new decade.  In my mind, we’ll have to wait another year.

While checking out a link a friend posted on Facebook concerning the proper spelling of things, I became aware just how awesome The Oatmeal is.  Except for the fact that everything (font, spacing, images) is just so dang big… but maybe that’s what he’s going for.

Consider this gem, an artist’s rendering of the breakdown in the Web Design process. I have witnessed similar things in my experience.  No, I’m not a designer… well, not a graphic designer, not an artist who can create a visual concept from scratch.  But I am somewhat of a ‘technical designer’, someone who can work with a graphics person to incorporate visual and usability elements into the overall design — and by design I don’t mean just the look, but the sensibility also, the flow and relative physical and logical placement of elements.

I thought I knew where things went wrong at first glance… way back when the Client tells the Designer, “just a few minor changes”.  That’s the point where the Designer’s expertise gets usurped by the Client who thinks he knows better, where the expertise of the expert takes a back seat to the whims of one who’s making decisions based on feelings.  Don’t get me wrong – feelings are important. In some cases.  But here, feelings are poison if they’re not seriously diluted with reason.

Which makes me rethink where the whole process goes wrong.  It’s actually a couple steps above, when “you both laugh at how terrible” the current web site is.  I think it’s all about pride. When we get to then end of the process here and look back, the same thing is wrong with this new site that was wrong with the old site: namely, elements are implemented by people stepping outside of their area of expertise.  This could have come about in one or both of these ways:

• Control/Pride: the Client, in this case, the CEO, or often officers or marketing people who are not design people, fancy themselves as design people and thus make a mess of it.
• Distrust: the Client doesn’t trust the Designer to do what he hired him to do, so the Client makes a guess as to what would be better than the Designer’s recommendations.

So, more than being just so dang funny in that “it’s so funny because it’s so true” way, it made me think of how these things can go wrong.  In designing just about anything: a house, dinner party, game plan, school curriculum, or military strategy, it pays for the responsible parties (owners, managers, leaders) to restrain themselves from stepping out of their area of expertise into that of the people to whom they’ve delegated the task.  Shelve your pride, and trust the people you put in place to do what you’ve tasked them with.  Or at least trust them to do a better job than you will yourself.

I got this from AT&T, waiting in my Inbox for me on Christmas morning.

I saw it coming long ago.  In my high school Physics class in 1987-1988, a dude brought a cool new sound medium to class — a Compact Disc, which was better in many ways than the vinyl records we all had been using.  He said, you could throw it around and scratch it all up and it would still play (well, the truth is you have to be more gentle with the scratching), and it was much smaller.  Not to mention, and it was shiny and required a laser to read.

I’m not sure when it was, but back when I started replacing my cassette tape collection with CDs, I began to wonder what the next meduim would be.  Maybe a chip that you would plug in to a player, take out to add/remove songs, then plug back in – potentially hundreds or thousands of songs could fit on this chip of the future.  Well, the chip of the future came about a few years ago, with the iPod and then any number of brand names of media players which would play WMAs, MP3s, etc.

Fast forward to Christmas Shopping Season 2009.  Ginger’s gift wish list included 3 or 4 CDs, complete with links to the product info page for each on amazon.com.  No problem… of course instead of paying for shipping, I would just go to any number of local retail stores and pick one up or look for something similar.

Not so fast.  A local mall used to have a Virgin Megastore right in the middle a few years ago.  There’s no such thing anymore — I suppose they’re out of business or got bought by someone else.  CD Warehouse has a sorta-nearby location.  Instead of being a Warehouse, it’s a little store in a strip center sandwiched between a nail salon and a donut shop, or something like that.  I get coupons for Borders every week, so how about there?  Neither Borders I visited even has a CD section any longer — all the CDs they have fit into a couple cardboard displays in the aisle.  The most promising visit was to Best Buy, who still has a pretty large selection of CDs.

About two visits into these trips, it struck me — the CD is dying.  For years, now, really, people have been getting their music online, downloading MP3s and retrieving music from iTunes and such for storage in their digital libraries, for playback on-the-go on their portable players, with adapters to let them plug them into systems with speakers, like docks or car stereos.

Who needs a collection of four shelves worth of CDs that can scratch or break or warp, and require players with spinning parts, when all those songs will fit onto an 8GB SD card and slip into your media player or phone?

Yessir, the death of the CD is upon us.  What will the next form of media be for music?  I suppose it won’t be stored locally on a portable player, but likely be stored centrally in a worldwide repository, with real-time streaming access across a fast and reliable wireless data stream.

Ingredients:

4 packages cream cheese at room temperature
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
4 tbsp flour
8 graham crackers, finely crushed
1/2 stick butter, melted
2 tsp ground cinnamon

Tools:

9″ springform pan
cookie sheet
big bowl
big spoon
rubber spatula
electric mixer

The Process:

Make the crust: combine graham crackers, melted butter, and cinnamon.  Press evenly into the bottom and 2 inches up the side of the springform pan — this is the hardest part of the whole process.  Bake at 350° for 10 minutes.  Cool completely.

Make the filling: beat the cream cheese, sugar, and flour at low speed until just combined.  Add the vanilla and then the eggs, one at a time, letting each egg combine in before adding the next.

Place the crust pan on a cookie sheet; pour the filling into the crust.  Bake on the cookie sheet at 300° for one hour – it likely will not be completely set yet.  Turn off the oven and open the door for one minute to let a lot of the heat escape. Close the door and let it sit in the turned-off warm oven for another hour.  Remove from the oven and let it cool for another hour.  Loosen the outer ring of the springform pan and remove it.  Cover the cheesecake with plastic wrap and refrigerate it for at least a couple hours.

Variation:

For Chocolate Cheesecake: melt 4 oz semisweet baking chocolate; stir into the filling just before adding the eggs.

Tips & Gotchas:

Hey, I said it was easy (as cheesecakes go — try looking up some other recipes) , not fast.  It takes a long time.  But it’s cheesecake, so it’s worth it.

Make sure your cream cheese is well-softened, at room temperature is best.  And don’t beat the filling too much or too fast – it should be almost like stirring, just to get the ingredients combined — that’s why you start with soft cream cheese.  Beating it too much will whip air into it and cause it to puff up and crack while baking.

Ingredients:

3 lb boneless pork chops
lots of fresh garlic, like 10 cloves
1 onion
2 roma tomatoes
1 8 oz can tomato sauce
3/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp chipotle chili powder
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
1 or 2 tbsp corn starch
1/2 lb fresh green beans
1 can sliced water chestnuts
3 cups cooked rice

Tools

Slow Cooker
Sautee Pan
Big Spoon
Big Knife
Cutting Board

The Process:

Crush the garlic and mince.  Add to a large bowl with tomato sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar, and spices.  Stir to combine into a marinade.

Cut up the pork into large cubes, about 1″; chop the onion into thick 1″ chunks. Might as well wash and snip the ends off the green beans and chop the tomatoes while you have the knife and cutting board out. Add the pork and onions to the marinade and stir thoroughly to combine.  The liquid should cover the meat.  (You can optionally do all this stuff the day before and let it sit in the marinade in the fridge for many hours.)

Put the mixture into the slow cooker and let it go on high till it gets hot (maybe 1/2 hour), then turn down to low for 4 hours.  Stir in the tomatoes about 30 minutes before the time is up.

Just before serving time:
Start the rice cooking — how you do your rice will determine when you start it so that it will be done but still hot by the time everything else is ready.
The pork mixture’s sauce will be quite thin — thicken the sauce with corn starch: dissolve 1 tbsp corn starch in a couple tbsp water and mix till smooth, then stir into the pork mixture.  If it’s still really thin, repeat with a little more corn starch.  It will thicken more in the last step, so don’t make it too thick now.

Heat a large skillet with a little oil.  Sautee the green beans with a little soy sauce and water for about 5 minutes, stirring/flipping constantly.  Add the water chestnuts and continue to cook till the green beans are getting tender.  If you want them softer, put a lid on the skillet and add a little more water to let them steam for a few minutes.

When the green beans are as tender as you want, you’re done except for the combining.  Turn off the heat and add the pork mixture (still hot right out of the slow cooker), stirring to coat everything evenly.  The sauce will thicken more at this point.  Serve over rice.