Whose Faulty Vision

Social Travel

Normally, when I travel, I’m pretty solitary. I chat a bit with people at hostels, but that’s about it. But on this most recent trip, I was being more social than usual. My daily activities were still mostly solitary (when I’m in “photo mode”, the rest of the world goes away), but in the evenings and the in-between times I was really pretty social. Met some interesting travelers from around the world.

Which makes me wonder whether the increased sociality that I turned to after losing Christmas is going to be permanent, or at least longer-lasting than I was expecting. I thought it was a short-term thing–just a way to distract myself from my misery. But I’m down to being miserable only about 20% of the time, and I’m still doing it.

If it is a permanent change, I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Barbra, of course, tells us that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. And normally I would never dream of disagreeing with Barbra, but on this one I’m not convinced. It seems to me that if I enjoy being social, but also enjoy being alone, then I’m happy either way, but if I’m moving more toward really needing to be around other people in order to be happy, then that’s one more way I can be unhappy, you know?

Outdated Plot Device

Stories from the Thailand trip are coming, I promise. But meanwhile, a little rant inspired by the in-flight movie I saw on the flight over, “Rush Hour 3″. (As a side note, it’s sad to see Jackie Chan getting old. He still wants to do all of his own stunts, clearly, but since he’s getting old, they have to be really toned-down, and it’s really not a Jackie Chan-style movie anymore.)

There’s a frequent premise in movies and TV shows that has been rendered completely outdated by modern technology, but you still see it a lot, and it’s getting on my nerves. I’m referring to the plot where the heroes have gotten a crucial piece of information that could bring down the evil organization, and they’re on the run, trying to protect this piece of information, while the bad guys are trying to find them and destroy the information before it can be made public or brought to the authorities or whatever.

Back in the day, this plot made perfect sense. But now, it’s absurd for one copy of a piece of information to be that important. The solution isn’t to protect your one copy of the information, it’s to make a thousand copies, spread them to servers throughout the world, and make it so that the bad guys can never find and delete all of them. If I have a crucial document, and I want to make sure it doesn’t get destroyed, just give me a digital camera, an Internet connection, and 15 minutes, and I can probably put so many copies on so many different computers in so many different countries that there’s no way the information can ever be destroyed. E-mail it to everyone you know. Post it on a bunch of free web servers, and free image hosting services. Create e-mail throwaway accounts in different countries and send it to all of them. Put it on Wikileaks. Send it to some online printing services, to create paper copies all over the world. That’s a much better way of protecting the info than just grabbing your one copy and running.

The frustrating thing is that the heroes never think of this, even when (like in Rush Hour 3) they have plenty of time to do it. But even if the bad guys were actively on my tail, and I didn’t have plenty of time, I could pull out my Treo, snap a picture, e-mail it to a few trusted friends and have them do that whole procedure.

The reason the heroes never think of this, of course, is that it would completely destroy the plot of the movie, but that just goes to show that screenwriters need to scrap this plot completely–it’s hopelessly outdated today.

A recent season of “24″ was particularly bad on this point–Jack Bauer had the only copy of a cassette that contained a key recording, and he needed to get it back to his headquarters. So instead of calling someone on his phone and playing the tape for them, so that they could record a copy, he crash-landed a plane on a highway so as to bring the original in to headquarters. (And yes, he had a phone, or a radio, or something, that worked just fine on the plane and let him talk to headquarters.) And even after all of that, they still didn’t think to make any copies of the recording, so of course the bad guys were able to get in and erase it.

Memo to screenwriters: Information is digital now. It’s really easy to make lots of copies. Please remember that.

Back from Thailand

I’m back! It was a great trip. I ate yummy food, and took something like 500 pictures, and a few of them are even good (I just posted my first one over on the photoblog). And nothing got stolen this time.

I’m sure I’ll be posting lots of stories over the next few days.

Getting ready for Thailand

So yeah, like I mentioned over on the photoblog, I’m heading for Thailand. Leaving this weekend, coming back next weekend. I’m excited–planning to eat good food and take a million pictures.

Posting is likely to be nonexistent until I get back.

Warning: Extreme Geek Reference Ahead

Only the serious geeks out there are going to get this one, but what the hell: GlaDOS from “Portal” should hook up with Durandal from the “Marathon” games. They’d make such a cute couple.

Seriously, I’m tempted to write that as fanfic. Okay, I’m not that much of a geek, but I’d read it if someone else wrote it.

Link: “Making the world a weirder place”

This comic made me laugh very hard.

Horton Hears a Wha?

You know, I remember my parents reading the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who” out loud to me when I was a little kid. I remember really liking it. But I also remember thinking, “you know, this is a classic story, but it would be even better with sex jokes.”

Okay, I didn’t actually think that, but apparently the people who turned it into a movie did. Man, that looks god-awful.