There’s nothing like a good bit of OnDemand movie madness to spark a review or two on my blog.  This dynamic duo of time travel movies is brought to you by HBO.

But first, let’s take a step back, to the wonderful sci-fi notion itself: Time Travel!

The Time Machine

It’s a genre that really epitomizes and polarizes the very essence of science fiction.  On one side are the clear-cut scientific efforts to truly provoke thought on just what conundrums traveling through time might entail, as well as the science behind how it might even be possible.  And then on the other side you have the more fantasy-oriented side where time travel is simply a given, not a great feat, and becomes a vessel to make a story whilst completely neglecting the actual science.  Frankly, it’s the latter side that we see far more often than not, and that probably has something to do with modern science rather being of the opinion that time travel, at least functionally useful, is impossible.  It’s something that could be argued until everyone is blue in the face and get nowhere, hence why the science side is perhaps more often than not completely neglected.  But that doesn’t stop writers everywhere from being inspired by the “what ifs” of time travel, often times providing great entertainment in the process, even if the science is a bit on the wonky side.

The TARDIS from Doctor Who

So, frankly, to be a decent time travel movie, you really have to try to provide some kind of new perspective, some creative inspiration, just to get anywhere interesting.  Because it pretty much has all been done before.  Some of it brilliant.  Some of it not so much.  And perhaps repeated attempts going after the not so much might finally get those angles right.  Certainly however, trying to go after the ones that were already brilliant are just going to fall short of that.  Time travel is a dangerous business.  You really have to know what you’re doing to get anywhere with it.  So let’s see how our dynamic duo did.

Our first movie is The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The Time Traveler's Wife

How can one put such a movie into words?  Boring, mostly.  Sorry, but it’s true.  Boy spontaneously and uncontrollably pops about through time.  Boy meets girl.  Girl becomes wife.  Boy continues popping about uncontrollably.  Marriage gets stressed.  Girl cheats on boy with … earlier version of boy.  It’s all very quasi-dramatic, and all very ridiculous, and all very boring.  Seriously.  It fails to be all that engaging.  The time travel lacks any sense of realism or adventure.  And the drama, frankly, falls flat with so many missed opportunities to create any real drama.  I’m sure it was a great effort to be all thoughtful about concepts like free will and the existential issues of time travel … except that it really wasn’t.  Even the movie poster pretended to portray more than was actually there with its creative viewpoint.  In actuality however there just wasn’t even an effort in there to change anything, to inspire in the viewer that someone really tried.  In fact there are only a small handful of scenes that actually provoke thought or wrest an emotional response from the lame horse of a script.  It’s a shame.  If only someone had bothered trying, perhaps there could have been a happier ending.  Maybe there’s a director’s cut coming with scenes that were left on the cutting room floor that give it a better go, but I doubt it.  If you like dramatic romance movies, you might enjoy it enough if you watch it for it to have been worth your while, but it’s a promise I definitely cannot make.  For all of the romantic notions in theory, in practice it felt very unachieved.  And if you’re not overly impressed with dramas, you’ll be killing yourself before you even get halfway through.  I’d hope sincerely that the book is better, because it’d pretty much have to be.  But I’ll probably never know because after watching the movie, I don’t think I can drum up enough interest to actually be bothered to find out, and I love a good read.  I can really only give The Time Traveler’s Wife two genetic-disorder-induced miscarriages out of five.

Our second movie for review is Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel

First off, obviously, this is not a serious movie.  In spite of its long title, it’s quite the comedy, and one that really hits the mark.  Though it does miss a few opportunities to poke fun at paradox and other time travel tribulations, it does quite well with the ones that it does tackle.  It doesn’t try too hard and end up campy, or at least not enough to make you cringe like most time travel comedies do.  It simply flows, makes you laugh, and sadly, reminds us how much better those folks across the pond are at making people laugh than the ones here in the States are these days.  And it actually does try to engage you with the complexities of “what if” without going too far and making your head actually hurt, a finely achieved balancing act that in itself deserves some applause.  But combine that with the enjoyable journey in a pub through the ages, and it’s a real winner.  My only fault with it is that having done such a good job with pondering the perplexities that it did, it’s a real shame that it didn’t go the distance to include the few that it didn’t.  So in spite of being such a laudable creative work, it falls slightly short of the amazing movie it could have been.  Which is why I can only give Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel four bags of crisps out of five.  But, if there’s ever a sequel, the combined movies could become more than the sum of their parts, and I very much hope to see that in out future.

So, that’s it then.  Those are this review’s two movies.  But I’ll leave you with one parting though:  The effects of the storage of information, can they induce time-travel-like effects?  Whilst searching for a classic TARDIS pic, I ran across this little gem, which Google has captured, at least for now, but has been removed from the actual entry:

Doctor Who is a flying green rabbit that drives a red Ford fiesta. Really! The interwebs said so!

Doctor Who is a flying green rabbit that drives a red Ford fiesta.  Huh.  Who’d have guessed?  It’s a little gem frozen in time.  A tiny piece of alternate reality otherwise already vanished from the constant state of flux that is the information superhighway.  Purged from the annals of reality … and yet not.  A bit of time travel flotsam more interesting in point perhaps than in content.  If it could happen there, what else might be out there?

Normally I don’t comment on anything political because, well, a number of reasons really.  Which I won’t go into.  But suffice it to say, it’s intentional.  But last night’s presidential address was just so loaded with manure that I felt like a freaking mushroom!

The war in Iraq is over.

But troops are going to stay there to protect our civilians for another year.

But it’s not a war.

What is it then, a “police action” for the next year or more?!?!  When will the troops actually leave Iraq?

I’m glad Afghanistan was at least mentioned in there somewhere.  Seems like we’ve somehow forgotten about that little blunder.  But I swear more time was spent on talking about the US infrastructure and schooling than Afghanistan, the start of this whole war, was mentioned.

I know Barack Obama came into his presidency with a big steaming pile to sort though.  And a part of me doesn’t blame any normal person for being so hesitant and wishy-washy on digging into the dirty mess and getting things done, one way or another.  Because you just can’t do it without getting a heapfull of dirt on you.  But, and it’s a pretty big “but”, that’s how any normal person would deal.  No one who sits in the big chair should be “normal”.  They should be superior.  They should have a deep well of resolve.  And if they don’t they shouldn’t even be running for the job in the first place.  This isn’t some promotion that snuck up on them.  This is running for the presidency of a superpower nation!

President Barack Obama - As He SHOULD Be!

This is the man we should have gotten when we elected him.  Strong.  Thoughtful.  A real leader.  A man who doesn’t even have to have the “right” answer, because whatever his answer is, he’ll make it the right one through sheer force of will and determination.

So where is he?  Where’s the man who promised change?  Where is the strength of character born of the pride of being the first black American president?

I don’t see him.  All I see is a man like anyone else, too afraid of stepping on toes to make strong decisions.  Too wrapped up in his own agendas to even devote himself to the messes left behind by those who “led” before him.  Too uncertain in times that need definitive action.

I am … unimpressed.

When you go to Comic Con or E3 you really rather expect to see a few “booth babes”, scantily clad women trying to lure people in.  It’s a common enough occurrence for a semi-professional environment.  But when Microsoft hired the Meter Maids booth babes for the 2010 TechEd in Australia, it was perhaps the wrong venue for scantily clad T&A.

Meter Maids, the booth babes for Microsoft at TechEd Australia 2010

There were, of course, objections from the attendants that the gold-clad hussies were objectifying women, blah blah politically correct rambling blah.  I mean yeah, they’re right.  But are women such a protected species that they’re no longer allowed the right to objectify themselves if they want to?  A more reasonable argument would simply have been that the blatant use of T&A does not belong in a fully professional environment.  Even if it is Australia, where people actually have a sense of humor.  And even if the Meter Maids are in fact local talent and even arguably a part of Australian history.

What really got Microsoft into trouble though was not this one questionably poor choice in attracting customers at the event.  No, it was Microsoft’s big mouth when they reportedly claimed to have had no knowledge that the Meter Maids ladies would be scantily clad in gold lame bikinis.  They claimed, and I quote, that they were, “unaware of their exact costuming until the day of the event, at which time it was too late to be addressed.“  Umm … what? One quick look at the Meter Maids website not only reveals all, as it were, but also the history of the Meter Maids is right there, explaining their historic costuming from Surfer’s Paradise on the Gold Coast.  So right off the bat, Microsoft’s words were somewhat less than believable.

To top that off however, chief Meter Maid Roberta Aitchison rebutted Microsoft’s denial with her own side of the story, which was that, “The garments were chosen specifically by them over a period of 2-3 weeks of them looking at photographs of the girls,” and that, “They came back to me by email stating which garments they would like the girls to be wearing.“  Right then!

Microsoft still refused to admit that they simply made a mistake, standing by their word that they somehow had no idea that the Meter Maids would show up in something so provocative.

Un huh.

Yeah.

Who are you going to believe?  A Meter Maid, or Microsoft?

But wait, that’s not all! In a strikingly similar story of sexy women and male egos, we have the (in)famous rapper 50 Cent being booted from Twitpic for failure to adhere to their pictoral guidelines when he uploaded the following picture of a Kim K burger:

50 Cent and his (censored) Kim K Burger pic that got him booted from Twitpic

It’s actually a kind of funny picture, if, you know, you’re adult enough to look at it, somewhere not at work.  Searching for the uncensored version should be easy and entertaining.

The sad part is, I’m not even entirely sure what part of the picture is violating the terms and conditions.  You’d certainly have seen just as much had she been wearing a thong bottom.  And at the beach, that happens.  Kids are seeing that much every day.  She even has her bikini top on, not that it matters from that angle.  It might be “in bad taste”, but I’m rather failing to see where it could actually harm minors.  Still, this is a (supposedly) professional blog, so I’ve censored the image for you, just in case little Timmy is looking over your shoulder.

Now, again, just as with the Microsoft story, the looky looky was perhaps a poor choice for the venue.  It’s a simple enough mistake to own up to, and certainly wouldn’t have been any big deal if that had been that.  But this is 50 Cent we’re talking about, so of course that wasn’t that.  Open mouth.  Words come out.  It’s what he does after all.

The saga is, of course, on Twitter, where 50 Cent tweeted his suspension angst, amongst other pearls of wisdom.  The following quotes are, of course, censored.  They began with, “Twitpic just suspended my account damn They got 30mns to get it back or ima go haywire,” and went on with such wonderfully colorful tweets as, “Man they took my twitt pic down I told them motherFriends put it backI run twitter nWord don’t touchin my sh..Stuff.“  If you want the uncensored … stuff … just follow the previous link to his Twitter page, but be warned, it is most definitely not safe for work.

So there you have it.  Yes, parading women around like objects can indeed catch you some flack, especially if you’re doing it in a place where that’s really not the proper dress code.  However, opening up your big mouth to say anything other than, “Mea culpa,” is just going to make your little faux pas ten times worse.

We all make mistakes.  Own up to them.  People will respect you more for it.

Castaic, California, a quiet little jaunt from Los Angeles, has just gotten a new toy for their jail, a raygun.  More accurately the Assault Intervention Device or AID is a microwave beam emitter projecting an invisible beam about as wide as a CD, for a distance of up to 100 feet.  The microwave beam penetrates the skin by only 1/64th of an inch, causing minimal damage, but a whole lot of pain.

It’s a downsized version of the Active Denial System developed for the military in their search for non-lethal weapons, mounted on a Humvee or truck to use in crowd control / riot suppression.  Now it’ll be used at home to suppress prison riots instead.

AID is fairly simply to use.  The raygun is mounted in a turret on the ceiling, along with a CCTV camera feed.  From a safe room a guard can aim and fire the pain gun to stall or suppress a fight while guards move in.  In normal circumstances, without AID, precious time stopping the fight is lost while guards prep and move.  With AID fights will hopefully be stopped sooner and safer.

It’s an interesting concept, and as its first deployment, will no doubt provide admirable testing during the six month deployment.  One has to wonder however at the cost.  The National Institute of Justice provided it free of charge, no doubt in exchange for the invaluable human testing information that will be provided by using it in a jail.  After that, can it really be something that modern prisons can afford?

It’s the big buzz right now: Intel is acquiring McAfee!

A lot of people are asking why.  Goodness knows that was my first thought too.  It answered itself pretty quickly though.  I mean how many motherboards these days come with heat, fan speed, and voltage monitoring built into the hardware and BIOS?  How many come with hard drive checking and detailed memory checking as well?  Heck, I’ve even seen some with crappy antivirus that I wouldn’t trust in the past.  So as a selling point, an antivirus that you could trust makes a kind of sense.

More than that though, one of my favorite features of old nVidia motherboards was the built-in hardware firewall with a web interface.  A personal firewall that doesn’t eat up all of my PC’s resources?  It was a great idea as far as I was concerned.

And what eats more resources today than anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, email, etc. protection suites all rolled into one?  Some of those are real beasts!  As McAfee well knows, since their antivirus is one of the most resource consuming monstrosities out there.  So if anyone can hardware-accelerate your malware defenses, who better than Intel?

Heck, with virtualization and abstraction layers abounding as new means of defending your computer from hackers, again, who better a partner than Intel to add some hefty unique specialized hardware into your northbridge?

Okay, so I guess AMD might have been a good second choice.  Maybe even nVidia a third.  But we all know that if you want to reach the world at large, you aim at Intel.  So who better than to sell yourself out to than Intel directly?

And these days Intel is looking to bundle everything they possibly can into their CPUs and chipsets.  From 3D graphics now even going into CPUs, to memory controllers (finally catching up with AMD there), to disk security, to serious RAID disk controllers, it’s all being packed up and bundled in.  So it comes as no surprise then that Intel is looking to bundle in one more specialized bit of hardware – the Malware Defense Unit.  (Or something equally trite.)

Whatever makes them happy.

And maybe it’ll even work out well for them.  It certainly makes a kind of sense.

My only concern is that I’ve personally never been a McAfee fan in the first place.  Every time I’ve used their software, it’s sucked up valuable resources.  Sure, it protects you, but at what cost?  And then look at Intel’s idea of 3D graphics acceleration.  It’s hardly top-notch.  And while their RAID disk controllers are okay, they’re not exactly the ones I go to when I need something professional either.  So is that the kind of aim that Intel is going to take with their new security division as well?  Is their Onboard McAfee going to just be another, “It’s better than nothing, but for anything serious I’m still replacing it,” product?  That might work great for casual users and small offices, but I can’t see Intel’s usual approach to anything not directly CPU related winning over any serious business buys.

But hey, I guess that’s a worry for another day.  First we have to see what Intel even does with McAfee in the first place.

One does have to wonder though …

I mean with CPUs having so many cores these days, not to mention Intel’s famous HyperThreading…  Then you add in to that the virtualization being built into CPUs as well…  Does anyone really need hardware acceleration to run their PC’s security suite anymore?  Seems to me processors these days can do it all with plenty to spare, so much so that you’d probably never even notice a resource hog anymore.

With so many unused cores in most desktops you could probably even do software RAID without noticing.

But maybe that’s just me.