All My Movies

My profile tells you that I have a "sizable" DVD (and now also blu-ray) collection, "most of which I've legally purchased".  How sizable is "sizable"?  Large enough that I don't actually know exactly how many titles I own.  I can tell you, however, that I'm using a movie cataloging program called All My Movies to gradually catalogue my collection.  So far, I've catalogued just over 300 movies, and that's probably roughly half the collection.

As you can imagine, cataloging all those movies takes some time and patience.  All My Movies (AMM) makes the task easier by automatically pulling in most of the information from internet web sites such as imdb.com but, of course, I have to get all anal about it and manually tinker with each entry; the screen shots aren't right or the synopsis needs re-wording and there are several bits of info missing that can't be gleaned from the internet such as where, in my vast collection, the movie is actually stored (in case I want to, you know, watch it sometime). 

Most tedious of all, although AMM does download the cast list for each title, it has a feature that allows me to further download bios, often with thumbnail pictures, of every actor in the cast list.  AMM doesn't automatically pull in this extra info because the program's authors probably assumed, quite sensibly, that nobody could possibly be anal enough to want all that extraneous info.  So, if you want an actor's bio, you need to click on his or her name, which brings up a pop-up that allows you to pull it in, again from on-line sources.  This is still fairly easy, but one does have to do this for each individual name in the cast list and, of course, I do so.

These cast lists often include not just the major stars but every single actor that appears in the film, including minor characters and extras such as "man on bus" or "hotel doorman".  Not even I'm fussy enough to want the full bios of every walk-on character, so I have a rule.  Any actor that shows up in at least two or more titles in my collection gets their bio downloaded.  One-offs do not.  AMM makes this easy by showing me all the titles in my collection in which each actor appears in the same pop-up dialogue that allows me to download their bio.

"Gee, that sounds tedious!" you're probably thinking (along with "Buddy, you really need a life!")  Right on both counts.  One personal trait that I've long recognized in myself is that I have an astonishingly high tolerance for tedium when I'm fully engaged with any project, professional or personal.  I'll doggedly work at the most mundane tasks for hours on end, gradually whittling away at them.  Sometimes, I must admit, I actually enjoy "turning off" my brain (appearances to the contrary, it is active most of the time) and working on some rote task.  This is probably a side effect of having a job that requires mental calisthenics most of the time.

Getting back to the movie collection, I made reference to storage earlier.  Needless to say, all those movies have to go somewhere.  Many of them line a sort of bookshelf in our living room but, with all those titles, this has the effect of making our living room look like a video store, which is fine by me but not so hot with my wife.

Some years ago, I stumbled upon a really neat movie storage solution.  It's an album, of sorts, made by a company called Allsop.  Allsop offers a variety of CD and DVD storage solutions but my favorite is one which they apparently don't make anymore known as the "Faux Leather DVD Album".  It's basically a box with wood-grain sides and a faux leather cover and spine.  At a glance, it looks like a large, bound book.  Open it up and it contains 20 cloth "pages" with transparent vinyl sleeves.  There are two disc-sized sleeves on the back side of each "page", allowing for two discs to be stored, and a large, full-page sleeve on the front side for inserting the movie's cover artwork.  Allsop says that each album can store up to 40 movies, which is true (20 pages times 2 disc sleeves each equals 40) but I insist on including the cover artwork for each title, and each page has only one cover artwork sleeve so, for me, each album really holds only 20 titles.  I insert the cover artwork on the front side and the disc into one of the reverse side sleeves, leaving the second disc sleeve empty, although it does come in handy for those two-disc titles. 

It's the allowance for cover artwork, and the overall book-like appearance that I particularly like about these DVD albums.  Line up five or six of them on a shelf somewhere and your decor changes from "Blockbuster Video" to "Library" or "Study". 

BEFORE

AFTER

Open up an album and you can browse through the titles, enjoying the cover artwork at your leisure.  After all, this is a collection and, as with all collections, presentation is important.

In case you're wondering where I get the cover artwork, I scan scan the DVD jewel case cover with a document scanner, then print the scanned image on glossy paper at the appropriate size and trim it.  I do not destroy the original jewel case or its cover artwork.  Those, I store in big cardboard boxes in my basement and I bring them out if I'm taking the movie with me somewhere or loaning it to someone.  Incidentally, AMM keeps track of who has borrowed your movies, when, and for how long.

There is only one major flaw in the design of Allsop's Faux Leather DVD Album.  The "pages" are glued to the inside of the spine and can't be removed.  Why is this a problem?  Because I also insist on storing my movies in alphabetical order.  Well, I mean, how would I ever find anything if I just inserted them in whatever order I got them?  That means that, If I buy The Avengers, which begins with "A", I have to shuffle all the movies in each album by one page in order to make room for the new title in the appropriate slot.  That means pulling each movie out of its page and inserting it into the next one, starting from the last title and working my way forward until I get to the appropriate spot.  It would have been SO much easier if the pages of these DVD albums had been ring-bound and removable!  But then, I suspect that the good people at Allsop never expected that anybody would buy quite as many of their faux leather DVD albums as I have.  How many is that?  Well, I have twenty of them.  That's twenty albums times twenty titles apiece, giving me space for 400 movies, and I'm not sure if that's enough!  They're not all full yet.  I'm currently working on Volume 16.  But then, I still have lots of movies in their jewel cases waiting to be filed.

So, to summarize, when I picked up a new title, here's what I do:

• Add it to the AMM catalogue, pulling in the bios for all the cast members and tinkering with still shots, the synopsis, etc.
• Scan, print and trim the cover artwork
• Shuffle all the movies in each of my DVD albums one page to the right, starting from the last one and working forward until I've finally freed up a slot for the new title in the appropriate spot
• File the empty jewel case in the basement, where it also has to be inserted alphabetically so that I can find it quickly if needed.

By the time all the movies in my collection have been catalogued and filed, I'll have repeated the above process at least 400 times. 

And you wonder why I don't have time to blog more often...

Deoxyribonucleic Archives

One is tempted to laugh, or at least to smile wryly, when one hears about the infamous shortsighted quotation which proclaimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented".  The statement was made long before rocket ships, computers or the Internet, to name just a few of the marvelous inventions that could never have been imagined when the comment was first made, and which have since come to fruition.  For that reason, I never make the mistake of making the same assumption.  In fact, I like to think that nothing surprises me anymore.  But even I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow and utter an astonished "Wow!" when I learned that scientists are now working on technology to use DNA for data storage.

The concept was proven by a couple of geneticists by the name of Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney who work for the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI); an organization which spends a lot of time mapping out genomes.  Now a single genome consists of the total genetic contents in one set of chromosomes.  For those of you who, like myself, slept through your high school biology classes, a single chromosome stores genetic material in a strand of DNA, the basic building block of all life.  A single strand of DNA stores a lot of information, so mapping out any sort of genome takes a lot of storage; so much so that the good people at EBI were seeing their data storage costs growing prohibitively.

Then, one day, Goldman and Birney were knocking back a few at the local pub, when they started talking about their data storage dilemma.  Most guys, when they go to the local pub, talk about sports or cars or that hot little number in Purchasing, but not EBI geneticists!  Oh no!  They talk about how to store their genome data.  And they wonder why they can't get a date on a Saturday night.  But I digress.

So Goldman and Birney found themselves reasoning thusly: They needed a lot of storage to map their genomes because DNA contains a lot of data.  So, if DNA stores a lot of data, why not use it to store their data?  It's a sort of "Chicken vs. Egg" scenario and it's the kind of imaginative leap that simply cannot be made without the help of alcohol.

So Goldman and Birney started working out a way of constructing artificial DNA that could be used to store information, and they succeeded.  Because DNA is what biologists call "really, really, really small", if you'll excuse the "techno gab", every film and TV program ever made could be stored in high definition in just a single cup of DNA.  It also requires no electrical power to maintain, can be easily transferred from place to place and will last for eons, as anyone who has seen Jurassic Park, in which dinosaur DNA was successfully extracted from fossilized mosquitos, can attest.

Of course, there are some downsides.  Currently, the storage and retrieval rate is very slow.  It took Goldman and Birney two weeks to store and retrieve five files, including a partial recording of Martin Luthor King's "I Have A Dream" speech (broken up into 4 files) and a PDF document,  which  makes its performance roughly comparable to that of a standard personal computer running Microsoft's Vista operating system.  However, with a few refinements, Goldman and Birney assure us that they should eventually be able to bring down the time required to store and retrieve the same amount of data to just a single day, making the performance comparable to that of a standard personal computer running Windows 7.  Besides the slow data transfer, the cost of DNA storage is still relatively high, and there's always the danger that somebody might accidentally drink your entire movie collection (because it fits into a cup, remember?)

I would imagine that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would have some special concerns about this new technology.  Recall that the other unique property of DNA, besides storing a lot of information, is that it's self-replicating.  Imagine downloading music or movies that automatically start making copies of themselves!  We could wind up with porn that makes more porn!  Or, since DNA sometimes makes imperfect or altered copies of itself (known as "mutations"), we may finally have an explanation for what happened to the original Star Wars trilogy.

Since DNA is, after all, the basic building block of life, there's also the danger that our data could evolve into some horrible living mutation of the original data.  The complete works of William Shakespeare could mutate into a rampaging monster, spewing "harks" and "forsooths" as it devours every Stephen King novel ever written and, possibly, Stephen King himself.

The scientists working on this technology assure us that there's no way that  artificial DNA used to store data could ever become a life form.  I'll bet Dr. Frankenstein made the same reassurances as he stitched together his corpse parts.

The Boot Falls Silent

"Stompin' Tom" Connors, a bona fide Canadian icon, has passed away.  This will likely mean very little to most people outside of Canada.  However millions of Canadians who grew up hearing his folksy, uniquely Canadian songs have lost one of their favorite ambassadors.

Connors was an unlikely legend; a foster child who ventured out onto Canada's highways and byways on his own at the tender age of 14.  Legend has it that he found himself in a bar one evening, just a nickel short of the price of a beer.  As he had his guitar with him, the bartender offered to give him a beer in exchange for playing a song for the patrons.  Connors agreed, and that one song grew into a 13-month contract to entertain at the establishment.

First and foremost, Connors was a staunch Canadian patriot who loved his country as much as he did his music and who sang about the everyman and the things that make Canada, Canada; from Bud the spud from the bright red mud (Prince Edward Island potatoes) to Lester the Lobster (again from P.E.I.) to nickel miners letting their hair down on a Sudbury Saturday Night and, of course, the Good Old Hockey Game.

I recently attended a local OHL game between the Kitchener Rangers and the Owen Sound Attack.  Near the end of the third period, the arena speakers blasted Stompin' Tom's "Hockey Song".  As they did so, I heard a young girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, directly behind me, happily singing along at the top of her voice:

OH!  The good old hockey GAAAAME!
It's the BEST game you can NAAAAME!
And the best game you can NAAAAME!
Is the good old hockey GAME!  OH!.....

I can offer no better evidence of Stompin' Tom's wide appeal to everyday Canadians from all walks of life than the sound of that girl, young enough to be his great-granddaughter, belting out his seminal song with a huge smile, revelling in all that's best about being Canadian.

Outsource This!

One of the harsh realities of our modern, globally connected society is that organizations no longer have to restrict themselves to hiring locally.  Many jobs, especially in the technology, communications and marketing sectors, are "outsourced" to developing countries, where salaries are lower and labor regulations are often less stringent than they are in North America.  The result: North American workers must compete for jobs with workers in places like India, China or Korea.

Individuals and unions try to combat this trend through protests, government lobbying and demanding job security clauses in their negotiated contracts.  These tactics meet with varying degrees of success but, on the whole, outsourcing appears to be becoming more and more prevalent.  Standard strategies seem too often tried and too seldom true.  The Halmanator has long been a staunch supporter of out-of-the-box thinking, which is why I applaud the nameless hero who followed the old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

An article originally posted in the Verizon Business Security Blog, later published by "The Globe and Mail" and, finally, brought to The Halmanator's attention by alert reader George Ninos, tells the story of "Bob" (whose name has been changed to spare him having to shake the hands of 80% of western workers), an employee of an "American Infrastructure company" whose name has not been published to spare them being publicly revealed as the putzes that they are. 

"Bob" was a computer programmer.  Being a computer programmer myself, I can state with some authority that the best programmers share certain characteristics.

• They are extremely analytical
• They have excellent diagnostic and problem solving skills
• They have excellent technical and mathematical skills
• They are lazy S.O.B.s

You may find that last one to be dubious, but it`s true!  A lazy programmer is a good programmer, because he will devise all kinds of creative and elegant solutions for getting the computer to do as much of the actual "work" as possible, leaving nothing for the "users" but to click the "Go" button.  This is why mouse-based computing and, consequently, the Apple MacIntosh and Microsoft Windows, became so popular and quickly replaced the old command line interface.  Actually typing "Go" and pressing the Enter key was too much work for most users.  But I digress, as always.

Getting back to "Bob", he is described as "...inoffensive and quiet.  Someone you wouldn't look at twice in an elevator"; another important computer programmer attribute.  In fact, he was such a good programmer that the organization for which he worked paid him over $250,000 a year, a salary that's well above average for computer programmers and almost rivals that of an apprentice plumber.  We know, from the Globe and Mail article, that "Bob" had all four of the aforementioned qualifications in spades.  His performance reviews were invariably positive, being laced with adjectives such as "conscientious", "reliable" and "keyboard god".  His programs were clean, well-documented and error free.  And he did absolutely no work whatsoever for at least six months; probably much longer.

You see, "Bob" had decided to use outsourcing to his advantage.  "If corporations can do it, why can't I?" he reasoned (there's that analytical mind at work, folks).  So he hired a developer from northern China to write his programs for him, a service for which he paid $50,000 a year, which still left "Bob" over $200,000 in the black (and there's that keen grasp of mathematics).  If`"Bob" had any accounting knowledge whatsoever, he likely claimed the $50,000 as a business expense on his income tax as well. 

So what did "Bob" himself do at the office each day besides dent a seat cushion?  Well, he did what countless office workers all over North America do; he surfed the web, updated his Facebook page and browsed a disturbing quantity of cat videos (although The Halmanator suspects that "The Globe and Mail" may have made the editorial decision to substitute the word "cat" for "pussy").  The only difference between "Bob" and your average office worker is that:

a) He spent a lot more time doing these things than most office workers
b) He was much better paid for it

And this, my friends, adds the last of those vitally important programmer qualifications to "Bob's" impressive résumé. 

Sadly, Bob's little deception was discovered when an internal computer systems security audit revealed that someone had been logging into the system daily from China using "Bob's" User ID and password and, well, one thing led to another.  Of course, "Bob" was immediately dismissed for "violating company policy".  Which specific company policies "Bob" violated aren't specified but The Halmanator is pretty sure that they had something to do with not making your bosses look like a bunch of idiots.

You may think The Halmanator is out of line for condoning "Bob's" fraudulent activities.  Well, let's examine that for a moment.  Obviously, I don't know the details of "Bob's" employment contract, but we can safely assume that it boiled down to something like this; "Bob" agrees to provide the company with reliable computer software to run their business, in exchange for which the company pays "Bob" approximately $250,000 a year.  From where I'm sitting, "Bob" made good on his side of the bargain.  He did nothing to harm the company.  By all accounts, they were happy with the quality of the work that he provided.  I'm pretty sure that they were just sore at discovering that they could have gotten the same productivity for about 1/5 the amount that they were paying "Bob". 

Also, since "Bob" was considered the company's best programmer, we can conclude that the anonymous Chinese programmer did better work than any of the other programmers in that company's employ who, while they may not have been paid quite as much as "Bob", were most likely paid more than $50,000 per year.  And that, my friends, is why China will own America before this century is out.

The End Of The Smartphone

I recently stumbled upon a headline on-line that proclaimed "The End of the Smartphone Era Is Coming".  This immediately caught my interest, because smartphones are a pet peeve of mine.  I think we've become far too engrossed by them. 

Seems that no matter where you go these days, and no matter what you do, you're surrounded by people whose noses are buried in their smartphones.  A world full of people, and none of them are actually "there".  When poet Hughes Mearns wrote:

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...

...I`m sure he was talking about a guy with a smartphone, which was pretty forward-thinking of him considering that he wrote those lines in 1899, when smartphones were still in the very early stages of development.  How has a communications device managed to become such a barrier to communication? 

In case you're wondering about my hypocrisy level, I'll say for the record that I don't own a smartphone.  I have a cell phone, and even that doesn't follow me around everywhere.  It stays in my car in case I need assistance while on the road, or in case I come across a fellow motorist who needs assistance and doesn't happen to have a phone of their own (which is practically unheard of these days) or in case my wife needs me to pick up something from the grocery store, or perhaps pick up dinner, on my way home from work (which is heard of practically every other day these days). 

So I was eager to learn more about anything that might finally break this obsession with smartphones and get people actually talking to each other again.  You can imagine my disappointment when I read the prediction that, if smartphones are indeed to become less ubiquitous, it will only be when they're replaced by some other, even more grotesque, distraction, such as computerized eyeglasses.

Seems both Google and Microsoft are working on eyeglasses whose lenses are augmented with computer displays that will have the ability to overlay information on top of whatever you're looking at, sort of like the "Heads Up Displays" or HUDs used by fighter pilots.  For instance, you might be watching a hockey game, and your glasses could display a little computerized tag next to each of the players, showing their names, plus/minus ratings, annual salaries and favourite brand of underarm deodorant, because you just know that the marketers are going to harness this as just another medium through which to constantly bombard people with non-stop advertising pitches.

I have to admit, I can imagine some interesting uses for this type of technology.  When mingling at boring cocktail parties, the glasses could use facial recognition technology to superimpose names over everybody in the room, eliminating the possible embarrassment of being cornered by people to whom we've previously been introduced, but whose names we proceeded to forget almost before they left our peripheral field of vision.  "Bob!" we could say, as we warmly extended our hand for the obligatory greeting, "Bob Finster!  It's great to see you again!"  This could even be augmented with a small database of key factoids about the person such as their age, where and when we met them, and personal interests, allowing us to impress them by continuing with "It's been, what, three months?  I remember you from our encounter at the clinic.  How's that hemorrhoidal swelling of yours?  Any better?"

Maybe those of us who, when verbally insulted or otherwise mistreated, lack the ability to quickly think up clever responses could be presented with a list of witty, snappy comebacks from which to choose, Terminator style.

I can see potential problems too.  Just as smartphones have a way of causing people to stand right in front of you without actually talking to you, these computerized glasses could allow them to stare right at you without actually seeing you.  And if these glasses are really going to replace smartphones, then they have to enable you to talk to people remotely, but how would you hear what's being said, and could any built-in microphone pick up your voice when it`s situated no-where near your mouth?  I suppose the glasses could communicate with one of those bluetooth earpieces.  Then again, that gives rise to another potential problem...

Things We Lost In The Fire

The title of this post happens to be that of a movie starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, and directed by Susanne Bier, but I'm not here to talk about that movie today.  I'm here to talk about the massacre of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conneticut. a scant eleven days before Christmas.

Much has been written about the tragedy.  The never-ending debate about gun control in America will certainly shift into high gear over the next while.  But I'm not here to talk about that, either.

There has been and will be much speculation about the motives of gunman Adam Lanza, who first killed his own mother before going on his killing spree.  Was he insane?  Could anyone in a rational state of mind do what he did?  Were there perhaps others behind the scenes, goading him on to commit his gruesome, unspeakable crime?  Beats me, and I'm not here to talk about that, either.

Upon reflecting on this incident, I was reminded of something that Mark Twain once said.  "When a man's house burns down, the smoke and wreckage represents only a ruined home that was once dear to him.  But, as weeks go on, first he misses this, then he misses that.  Like the death of a loved one, it takes months before he realizes he's lost everything."

As saddening and as shocking as the immediate impact of this tragedy is, I don't think anyone yet understands the full impact of what has been lost. Was one of the children who died that day a future Einstein, Beethoven or Ghandi?  Did the doctor who would someday find a cure for cancer die that day?  Perhaps it was the person who would finally find a way to reconcile the Arabs and the Jews and bring a lasting peace to the Middle East.  The first person to walk on Mars might never go there now.

We may never know just what was lost in the "fire" that engulfed Sandy Hook Elementary on the 14th of December, 2012.  Perhaps that's just as well.  Otherwise, who could bear it?

Peter's Pipes

Let me tell you about my good friend, Peter Karwowski.  Peter is a big-hearted, big-bellied bear of a man who, to my eye, looks more Scottish than Polish, owing largely to the large, woolly sideburns that cascade down either side of his face.  In fact, at risk of digressing, I once got Peter a book entitled "The Tartans of Scotland", just as a sort of gag gift, and his first reaction was "Ìf I find a "Karwoski" tartan in here..."

I first met Peter in high school, in the eleventh grade which, if you read my previous post, means that our friendship now goes back many, many years.  Peter was always fascinated with media.  In those days, he had gotten hold of a multi-track tape recorder and, after school, he would hole himself up in his bedroom at home, making the most amazing home recordings, just for the heck of it. 

The fascination with voice recordings naturally lead to an interest in broadcasting in general and it wasn't long before Peter found himself working as a volunteer announcer at the University of Waterloo campus radio station, CKMS FM.

He certainly had the voice for the work.  Peter was blessed with a clear, strong, broadcaster's voice, mingled with the creativity to convincingly mimic various ethnic accents (Scottish, Irish, East Indian, Southern U.S., etc.) as well as celebrities and other well-known voices (I always particularly enjoyed his "Pete Puma" and "Marvin the Martian" from the old Warner Brothers cartoons).  So it was no surprise to me when Peter decided to study broadcasting in college. 

As it happened, Peter`s fascination with electronics of all sorts soon had him dabbling with computers and, being an intelligent individual of many talents, he actually left the field of broadcasting behind after a short stint as an announcer at a Guelph radio station right after graduating and instead spent many years working in the Information Technology field.

Recently, however, Peter has returned to his first love and has been doing some voice acting work for various companies.  One of his earlier gigs was that of the voice of "Otto" the ottoman, for Pier 1 Imports. Here it is...



Okay, it was only a single word but, hey, you have to start somewhere!  Even so, a mutual friend told me that Peter spent an entire day, and many, many takes, just on that one word!  He recorded it with a huge variety of different inflections, giving the Pier 1 people a large repository of takes from which to choose exactly the right one.

I recently had the chance to touch base personally with Peter after a long absence, and he gave me his new business card.  He has dubbed his new voice services "Peter`s Pipes" and, thanks to his business card, I learned that he has even set up his own web site, where you can hear some entertaining demos of his work.  Here`s the link...

http://www.peterspipes.com/

If you, or anybody you know needs the services of a gifted voice actor for television, radio, an audio book or even just a professional or entertaining message for your voice mail greeting, I highly recommend you get in touch with Peter.  Besides being vocally gifted, he`s a just plain great guy to deal with.