I'm not as into "new" music used to be - unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day, and I don't have the time to seek out cool music the way I once did. Still, I occasionally manage to stumble upon some good stuff, usually based on reviews in Rolling Stone (which I've been reading since high school).

British group The Go! Team is one of my recent finds. They're really unique - according to the band's Wikipedia page, founder "Ian Parton conceived the project after wanting to create music incorporating his favourite things including Sonic Youth-style guitars, Double Dutch chants, and car chase horn music." If I had to describe their music, I'd say it's like a hip-hop pep rally set to Saturday morning cartoon music. Sounds bizarre, right? I love it.

I enjoyed their 2005 debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike and have been listening to their new album Proof of Youth nonstop. In particular, my favorite song from the album is "Doing It Right", which has compelled to me wander around my place mumbling "Do it, do it, uh-huh". Any song that makes me do that is all aces.

I'm tired of movies/books/TV shows about serial killers. It's such an overdone idea - I think there must be 100 times as many movies about serial killers as there are actual serial killers in the world. I don't get off on morbidity, so I skip most of it.

That said, what makes Zodiac (directed by the awesome David Fincher, released in March 2007) so compelling and different? The biggest reason is that it's real. The movie is best described as "historical fiction" - it bends some characters around to help create a good story, but the man who called himself "The Zodiac" at the middle of it all really did terrorize the San Francisco bay area during the late 1960s / early 1970s, and was never caught. The film stays very true to the facts of the case - not hard to do, as the story of the Zodiac is more captivating than most crime fiction.

The movie gets through the Zodiac's killings fairly quickly and then shifts its focus to the people that try to unravel the mystery - first the police, and years later, amateur Zodiac-phile Robert Graysmith. He becomes obsessed with the Zodiac and in some ways, that's what the film is about - the drive to find a concrete answer to a long-standing mystery, when in reality, we may have to learn to live with the fear and ambiguity. Graysmith seems certain that the Zodiac was Arthur Leigh Allen, but it's never been proven (beyond a mountain of circumstantial evidence), and since Allen died in 1992, we'll likely never know for sure. And there are more than a few people who disagree with Graysmith's conclusions.

When I saw this movie, I became temporarily obsessed with it too. I devoured Graysmith's best-seller about the Zodiac killings, along with anything I could find online.

There's also the matter of the still-unsolved 340-symbol cipher that the Zodiac mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle on 11/8/69. Graysmith (and a few others) have submitted what they feel are solutions to the cipher, but they've never been accepted by the authorities (they're sloppy). I fantasize about cracking the code and revealing some previously unknown fact that points more conclusively to Allen as the Zodiac - and I even have a way to try it that may not have been attempted before (writing a computer program that uses an evolutionary algorithm to figure it out). One day, when I get more time, I'm going to give it a shot.

Memorable moments from the movie:

-- "Hurdy Gurdy Man" by Donovan, played during the first Zodiac killing, at the very beginning of the movie. I'll never be able to hear that song again without getting chills (including during the film's credits).

-- The second killing, which I can't watch - it's just too disturbing. Reading about it in the book almost made me pass out (it's much worse in the book than in the movie).

-- SFPD Inspector Armstrong attempting to coordinate via phone with the Napa and Vallejo Police Departments. What a jurisdictional and information-sharing nightmare - is it any better, today?

-- Dave Toschi losing it when the evidence (handwriting, fingerprints, ballistics) says that Arthur Leigh Allen is not the Zodiac; much later, Toschi accepting Graysmith's contention that Allen must have been Zodiac: "Jesus christ."

-- Graysmith staring down Allen at the hardware store. This is the "money shot" scene of the movie.

-- Mike Mageau (Zodiac survivor and only person to have seen the killer's face) finally turning up in 1991, in the movie's final scene, and identifying Allen as the man who shot him. How would the Zodiac case be different if that had taken place twenty years earlier? Wow.

All in all, I love this movie. Definitely worth checking out, if you haven't seen it.

EDIT: Boy, this site really pokes a lot of holes in the movie's (and the book's) facts. Maybe it really wasn't Allen. Maybe the Zodiac is still out there...

A lot of people are up in arms about the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who's in New York to visit the United Nations and participate in a debate at Columbia University. Even more people are incensed that Ahmadinejad asked to lay a wreath at Ground Zero.

There's no denying that Ahmadinejad is an extremist - he's very anti-Semitic, would like to dissolve Israel, and calls the Holocaust a "myth". In addition, his regime supports anti-Israel groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that are widely regarded as terrorist organizations.

Some people say that Ahmadinejad should be barred from visiting Ground Zero, which is hallowed ground in New York. Others go further and say that he also shouldn't be given an opportunity to speak, and even others (like presidential candidate Mitt Romney) suggest that he should be arrested upon arrival.

I really don't understand why this is sparking such outrage. Yes, Iran is considered a state sponsor of terrorism, and Ahmadinejad is obviously not on board with our Western values and has some dangerously ignorant views. But what do we gain by muzzling him? Repressive regimes (such as the Taliban) keep people in line through ignorance and censorship. There is no free market of ideas - there's what the leaders want you to think, period. How would silencing Ahmadinejad be any different? Aren't we supposed to be better than that? Rather than suppress his speech, why don't we let him talk, so everyone can hear what a zealot he is, in his own words? Why are people afraid of the words that will come out of his mouth?

And beyond objecting to giving him a chance to speak - how is this the issue where you decide to speak up? We've spent over four years making people despise us in Iraq, providing tons of ideological ammunition to our enemies, losing more Americans than died in 9/11 (and killing FAR more Iraqis), leaving us less safe (and substantially further in debt) than when the conflict started, and yet this is where people draw the line? At a visit to our country by the president of Iran?

The way I see it, the huge mistake currently happening in Iraq is a much more pressing problem than allowing a fanatical Middle Eastern leader to visit. How does his ability to speak take precedence over the lives being lost daily in Iraq? Let's put our "freedom and liberty" rhetoric where our mouth is and let the guy speak. Then we can discuss how wrong he is, while we get back to figuring out how to get out of the quagmire that the Iraq war hawks got us into.

Asking me which Advance Wars CO is my favorite is like asking a parent (with a couple dozen kids) which child they favor. There are some I never use, but many I like. Still, while some maps favor certain COs over others, everyone has that one CO they keep coming back to, the one they use when a map doesn't seem to call for anyone else specifically. For me, at this stage in my AW evolution, that CO is Hachi.

(CO means Commanding Officer, BTW.)

When I first started playing AW1, my favorite CO was Max. I was willing to accept losing indirect units in exchange for his strength boost, which allowed me to strike with overwhelming force (my initial strategy) more effectively. If I thought I'd have enough funds coming in, I'd sometimes use Kanbei, since he's even stronger than Max, has no indirect limitation, and has amazing defense.

When AW2 came out, I stuck with Max and Kanbei until I got to know the new COs. After unlocking Hawke, I thought he'd become my new standby. While I did use him a lot, and liked the fact that he was stronger (without Kanbei's extra cost penalty or Max's indirect limitations), I hated how long his CO power took to charge. Plus, as one of the "bosses" in the campaign, it seemed like he was designed to be stronger than everyone else - making me feel guilty when using him, like I should be using a "normal" CO instead.

It was around this time I really started to get into Advance Wars. And by "get into", I mean, realize that the game was about finesse and tactics, not simply "surround the enemy and crush them as fast as possible". This led me to start using Colin. At first I thought Colin was useless - his units are so weak! But I soon realized that his diminshed unit cost would allow me to almost always have the production edge on my opponent, and with a little smart planning and unit combining, I was usually able to overcome his weakness while taking advantage of his strength (a weak Neotank vs. a normal Medium Tank is still a favorable matchup). Plus, his CO power stores quickly, and his Super CO power is killer.

So then AW:DS came out, with its 25+ COs. I started with the old standbys (Max, Kanbei, Colin) but quickly became a Grimm fan. His massive strength boost is awesome - though his weak defense can make it easy to lose units (and miss out on that S-rank). Plus, his CO power is uninteresting - he's already strong, and it just makes him stronger. COs with truly "disruptive" powers seem more versatile.

As I was playing through the AW:DS War Room maps, I ran into Banker Hills. In this one, your opponent is Hachi, and there are rows of missiles to lob at each other. I tried all my usual COs, but I couldn't beat him - you're on an almost equal footing, resource-wise, but his cheaper unit cost, combined with his CO power (see below), would always give him the leg up on me. I grew increasingly disillusioned with my AW abilities... until I decided to fight fire with fire and play using Hachi.

Suddenly, I realized how mighty Hachi is. Almost every AW battle I'm in comes down to a war of attrition - whoever can produce stronger units faster usually wins. As I discovered, Hachi's CO power is unparalleled in this regard. Every time you use it, you can build units at half price for one turn! This is an amazing benefit - instead of struggling to keep pace with an opponent, you just have to store up your CO power, use it, and then build a Neotank (for $11,000!!) while your opponent can only afford to build much weaker units. This gives you a huge edge and because his CO power charges up so quickly, you can do this often throughout the battle.

Now I use Hachi pretty much all the time, except for certain situations (like if there are 3+ Comm Towers, you'd be crazy not to use Javier). Hachi's been around since AW2 - I can't believe it took me so long to realize what a beast he is. So, for all you AW junkies out there who've never given Hachi a fair shake - check him out.

(UPDATE: As if I didn't have enough reasons to be a Hachi fan... I just used him to get an S-rank on Ridge Island! Giving me an S-rank on all 44 War Room maps.)

I'm into comics, but not much into webcomics. There are a few (like This Modern World and Red Meat) I read occasionally, but there's only one I read regularly: Jerkcity.

Jerkcity is sort of an anti-comic. There's no plot or narrative flow - it's mostly a bunch of characters who stand around, spout random things, and make dick jokes. The strip allegedly originates in chat transcripts from an IRC room somewhere. And it's made using Microsoft Chat, an ancient piece of software that represents a chat room with comic characters and backgrounds drawn by Jim Woodring.

Sounds bizarre right? It definitely is - Jerkcity is an acquired taste. When I was first introduced to it by my friend Tomas, I thought it was dumb and didn't pay much attention. Then I looked at some more, and one about programming made me chuckle. Then I read a bunch more. Then I read even more, and suddenly it all made sense in some sort of grand, twisted way. Now I read it daily and it frequently makes me giggle. The dialogue in the comics is extremely NSFW, but happily, being at a place like Newgrounds, I can cover my workarea with it to my heart's content.

Jerkcity also taught me the meaning of "HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL" - always useful.

There are lots of good ones, and here are a few: Sir Fagsalot, Sea Cucumber, Wikipedia, and Why We Wake Up In The Morning.

Tonight is the kickoff of the 2007 NFL season! (Yes, by "football", I mean the American version.) For those of us who are "into" football, this is an exciting time of year. Finally, we're done over-analyzing the draft, no more speculative training camp reports, the farce that is the pre-season has ended, and we can get down to business.

This time of year is always extra busy for me because I run MyFootballPool, a side project where I host other people's football pools and also run a few free ones of my own. For the uninitiated, a football pool is where everyone pays a small amount of money, and then you have some variation on correctly predicting the outcome of weekly games, and the winner gets the money. (Note that "fantasy football" is something else entirely.) Despite the fact that their legality is questionable in this (annoyingly Puritanical) country, football pools are becoming something of an American tradition, at least for those of us who follow the sport.

As for the pools I run, they're both free to join, and I offer $100 prizes to the winners. I've never made a dime off of MyFootballPool - it's a "for fun" project, and I offer the prizes as incentives to get people using the site, which is good from a testing perspective, since it's just me doing it and I might overlook something.

Originally my free pools were my friends only, but these days they're open to anyone who finds my website. If you'd like to play (and remember, these are free), here they are:

1. The Eliminator - a survivor pool where you have to pick one team each week of the season to win. If that team loses, you're out. Last person standing wins (it's never gone the full 17 weeks of the season). And you can't pick the same team twice.

2. Free Spread Pick 'Em - a pick 'em pool where, each week, you pick the winners of each game, against the spread. The person with the most right at the end of the regular season is the winner.

Click the links if you'd like to sign up. And of course... GO EAGLES!!!!

Recently I saw The King of Kong [trailer], a documentary about the two best Donkey Kong players in the world and the one-upmanship that ensues when a long-standing high score is surpassed.

The film starts off by profiling Billy Mitchell, considered to be one of the best classic arcade game players alive. He made headlines in 1999 for getting a perfect score in Pac-Man, and as the movie starts, he's generally regarded as the best Donkey Kong player in the world (proclaiming himself the only player good enough to make it to the kill screen at the end). Mitchell is pretty full of himself, but seems to have the skill to back it up.

Enter Steve Wiebe (pictured below), a perennial runner-up who decides, during a period of unemployment, that he's going to take his already impressive Donkey Kong skills to the next level and set a new world record. Steve seems like an everyday, likable kind of guy.

We also meet Walter Day, the eccentric founder of Twin Galaxies, the worldwide authority in video game high scores. It's his organization's job to painstakingly verify and validate every score and record that's broken. The film draws the viewer into the uber-geeky culture of classic arcade game fixation, full of the most hardcore nerds you'll ever see on a movie screen. To them, Mitchell is a god, and Wiebe an outsider who slowly wins their acceptance.

It might sound like a strange premise, but, simply put, this movie is a masterpiece. You might wonder how the battle between two grown men to set the world record in a 25-year-old arcade game could be so compelling, but that's the magic of the thing. At some point the movie switches from being about two guys and a video game to the "new guy" vs. the establishment, the fight to stay on top, and the obsession to reach the goals we set for ourselves (regardless of why we set them).

As the movie progresses, it becomes apparent that Billy Mitchell's cult of personality has run amok, and he refuses to even acknoweldge the affable Wiebe, who travels across the country to Mitchell's hometown just to play him. When Wiebe is playing his last game, with his one last chance to beat Mitchell's score in-person - I've never been more on the edge of my seat, or wanted so badly for the "good guy" in the movie to succeed.

This documentary is a real-life roller coaster and definitely worth checking out. And, as a postscript, apparently Mitchell set another Donkey Kong world record last month. While the validity of his score seems to be in some dispute, my first thought when I read it was - I hope there's a King of Kong 2. (Though I've read that many of the people in the movie felt they were portrayed inaccurately and are somewhat upset, so I guess there won't be.)

Almost exactly 10 years ago, in August 1997, I started my first programming job: a college internship at the National Weather Service in Silver Spring, Maryland. I learned a huge amount of stuff there, and came away from it knowing that programming was what really interested me. When I got the internship, I'd had a grand total of two college programming classes (one in C, one in C++) and that represented the extent of my programming experience since toying with BASIC in elementary school.

I know a lot of people whose high school offered AP Computer Science, among other programming classes. Sadly, growing up in rural Pennsylvania, my high school offered none. As a kid back in the Apple II days, when every computer had BASIC built-in, I spent a lot of time tinkering with code but never did anything serious. Then when my family upgraded to a Macintosh, I remember thinking, "But how do you program it? There's no BASIC on here." I had no idea what a compiler was, let alone how to get one, and my interest in programming faded, along with my enthusiasm for computers in general (until we got the Internet in 1995, my senior year of high school).

So then I went away to college, majoring in electrical engineering. My thinking was: I like math, I like science, why not? Maybe I can design computers or something. My first semester, I was given the chance to take an elective programming class for engineers in place of Calculus I, since I'd placed out of it (more on that below). I liked that class a lot, and it's what reawakened my interest in programming and led me to switch majors to math & computer science once I realized I didn't want to be an engineer. If I hadn't taken that class, I would've been behind when I switched majors, and I probably wouldn't have gotten a programming job for my first internship, and I never would've had the mind-expanding experience I had at the Weather Service. It's not a stretch to say that class is directly responsible for where I'm at today. (Thanks, Dr. Brooks.)

But there's one catch - I never actually placed out of Calculus I. Only people who had taken AP Calculus (which my high school also didn't offer) and scored highly enough were allowed to place out; I got lumped in with them due to a clerical error and wasn't supposed to have been in the programming class at all. However, the mistake wasn't caught until the very end of the semester when Dr. Brooks attempted to give me my final grade (I got an A, the only one in the class - *pats self on back*) and found I wasn't on the roster. By all rights, I should've had to take Calc I the following semester, and maybe even forfeited my credit for the programming class. But Dr. Brooks lobbied on my behalf, and, miracle of miracles, I got credit for the class and never had to take Calc I. Drexel is famous for its administrative gridlock, but I managed to win that round.

I like to think about the chain of events that led to me being a programmer, and often wonder how things would be different if I hadn't accidentally been put in that programming class, or if I hadn't gotten credit for it in the end. If I hadn't worked so hard and gotten the A, would Dr. Brooks have fought for me to get credit for it? If I had never taken the class, would I have switched into computer science when I decided I didn't want to do engineering? So much of my career was determined by that one paperwork snafu in Drexel's College of Engineering - it's amazing how pivotal the little things in life can be.

(Title quote from Vanilla Sky.)

I like The Daily Show. I'm not as big of a fan as I once was, but their "media roundup" type segments are gold. This recent "Daily Show" piece on Karl Rove's stepping down was funny, and "Karl Rove's Greatest Hits" made me laugh out loud:

"John McCain's Black Baby"
"Ann Richards Likes The Ladies"
"Max Cleland The One-Limbed Pussy"
"I Didn't Know Her Name"
"The Queers Are Coming!"
"Oops! I Lost The E-mails!"
"Schiavo A-Go-Go"

Good stuff. I'd almost forgotten how loathsome that guy is.

At Comic-Con I ended up buying stuff from this one dealer on three separate occasions (he was friendly, way into comics, and sold all TPBs at 20% off). He recommended The Walking Dead, and I picked up the first two TPB collections based on that.

I like zombie stuff, but I wouldn't say I search it out. I've seen the George Romero zombie movies and thought they were enjoyable enough. I saw 28 Days Later in 2003 and liked it; then I saw the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and loved it - the film's bleak mood and uncompromising ending (everyone dies!) stuck with me long after the movie ended.

So I gave "The Walking Dead" a read and... wow. Just wow. I got really into it and had to run out and get the next two TPBs (which I flew through in one sitting). I love the way Robert Kirkman (the series's creator/writer) explores what would happen if the traditional zombie movie didn't end, and people really had to find a way to not just survive, but to live out their lives in this desolate and deadly world.

It's almost misleading to think of it as a "zombie series". They certainly spend time fighting zombies (the ones that stumble around, NOT the athletic sprinter zombies from recent movies) but the real meat of the story is in the development of the characters in the group of survivors - and Rick, the group leader, in particular. Amidst this background of zombie apocalypse, the characters are exposed to some of the most extreme situations imaginable, and we get some really well-written stories that mix morality, desperation, and sheer horror. Once you become familiar with the cast of characters, it becomes hard to put down.

I think the switch in artists after the first TPB works well, too. Tony Moore's art, while nice to look at, seemed too smooth for zombie stories - whereas Charlie Adlard (TPB #2 onward) seems a little rougher, a little closer to the bone. I like it a lot, and the gray-tone coloring is perfect.

All in all, this series was a great find, and I've got to get the remaining TPBs to catch up. It's published by Image and should be in stock at any decent comic book store.