When I saw the trailer for the new Superman movie this weekend, I realized that I can’t name a single Superman bad guy besides Lex Luther.  There had to be others, right?  I vaguely remember that the guy who killed Superman was some monster with a kryptonite skeleton or something like that, but nothing else.  And yes, I could just look Superman up on Wikipedia, but what fun would that be?  (on a side note, is there a verb form of Wikipedia, like Google?  Could one say “go wiki/wikify Superman” or something like that?).  I guess the reason I don’t know is that there weren’t any Superman cartoons that I watched growing up, unlike Batman, X-Men, and GI Joe.

Without looking it up, can anyone name any Superman villains besides Lex Luther?

if I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?

True story:  A few weeks ago I took Punky out for a walk, and I saw an Asian lady walking her dog without a leash.  Once her dog saw Punky, it began barking wildly (as is the custom among dogs).  The lady then proceeded to yell something at her dog in Chinese.  The first thought that popped into my head: “that’s silly, your dog’s not going to understand you if you’re speaking Chinese.”

On Tuesday I was thinking how totally awesome it would be if there was a major terrorist attack.  I mean, except for the part where lots of people would die and we would launch a poorly planned war against people who had nothing to do with the attacks.  But aside from that, wouldn’t it be funny if people talked about “6/6/6,” in the same manner they speak of “9/11” today?  And events would be dated as pre-6/6/6 and post-6/6/6.  And imagine the number of people who would believe the attack signaled the end of the world because of the date.  It would be deliciously chaotic.  Oh well.  Maybe in a hundred years the next 6/6/6 will be more interesting.

PS: I do know that the actual date was 6/6/06.  But you know the event would quickly come to be known as 6/6/6.

Today I’ll discuss a few movies that I have seen in the last month or so.  As I’m back on Netflix again, I have seen quite a few movies lately, so this isn’t an exhaustive list.

Mean Girls:  I was surprised to find that this was actually a pretty intelligent movie, that was funny even to someone who was never a teenage girl.  I found out later that it was written by Tina Fey, which explains why it’s funny (and why all those SNL people were in it).  This movie just goes to prove my theory that girls in high school are stupid.  Plus, if you don’t like the movie, there’s plenty of incentive to at least continue watching the movie.  I’d give it a 4/5.

The Da Vinci Code:  I had considered making an entire post about this movie but I decided I didn’t really have enough to say.  This movie was decent--not great, but not as bad as the reviews would lead you to believe.  I don’t fully understand the controversial nature of this film--I mean, the Daughters of the American Revolution didn’t protest National Treasure.  A point is made a few times in the movie that this is a secret that could destroy the church, or the church’s validity, or something like that, by proving that Jesus wasn’t God.  It’s true that proving such a thing would destroy the most fundamental aspect of Christianity--but saying that Jesus was married or even that he had a child does not in any way prove that he wasn’t God.  Maybe I’d follow it better if I read the book.  I actually tried to read the book once, but I stopped about ten pages in.  Not because I was offended as a Christian, mind you, but because it was much too similar to Digital Fortress, another Dan Brown book which I didn’t like.  Incidentally, I didn’t like it because it offended me--as a computer scientist--that hardly anything in the book was based on the way cryptography actually works.  I mean, I know a fiction writer is free to bend some truths for the purpose of entertainment, but Digital Fortress went far beyond that.  Kind of like at the end of Independence Day, when Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus to the aliens (naturally they use TCP/IP and Pentium processors), only much worse--more like the magic you’d expect to see computers perform on CSI.  Miami.  But getting back on topic, I’d give The Da Vinci Code (the movie) a 3.5/5.

The Aristocrats:  A touching tale of a heartland family trying to make ends meet with their unique Vaudeville act.  Be sure to bring a box of Kleenex and watch it with someone you love.  I give it a 3.5/5.

Last week I installed Opera for the first time, to make sure my site was usable to Opera users.  Well there is some weird cookie/caching thing that makes it difficult to switch back and forth between text-only and full-graphics versions of my site, but other than that I only saw one thing that didn’t render the same as Firefox (and that turned out to be an ambiguity in my css that is now fixed).  In fact, I haven’t yet found a site that doesn’t work in Opera (of course, I haven’t really been looking very hard).

I was not “won over” by Opera, in the way that I was with Firefox.  Firefox was basically aimed at IE users who wanted a modern piece of software.  I mean, they don’t advertise it like that, but if you look at the keyboard shortcuts and the menu layouts, they’re practically identical.  Opera... not so much.  I mean, I rely on Ctrl+Enter finishing a URL in the address bar-- I can’t remember the last time I had to type “www.” and “.com” in the address bar.  And I rely on URL auto-completion in the address bar.  Opera lists URLs that match what you’ve typed so far, but hitting tab doesn’t select the first item in that list.. meaning, I have to use the mouse too much.  And Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab-- another shortcut I use all the time.  Of course these are all ergonomic issues associated with using new software, and it may very well be that Opera has better ways of doing these things.

The good thing I noticed about Opera is that it’s fast.  I mean, really fast.  It was the first thing I noticed.  I had long thought that something was wrong with either my server or my PHP code because Firefox often pauses briefly during a page load.  Not with Opera.  When I looked around the Opera site, I found that this speed is (not surprisingly) one of their selling points.  I’m still not giving up Firefox, but now every time I use it I am painfully aware of just how slow it is, whereas before I was blissfully ignorant and assumed that’s just how the internet worked.  On the plus side, it looks like the latest Gecko engine has undergone some big performance improvements, so maybe Firefox 2.0 won’t suffer from the same slownocity as 1.5.

PS-  The sky looked pretty cool the other day so I took some pictures of it.  I thought they were pretty so I put them on the site.

A week ago I set out to Guitar Center to get a very small and portable amp, since my current amp (seen blurrily in the background of this photo) is over two feet wide, weighs about forty pounds, and is a little too loud for the apartment late at night.  What I had in mind was a Marshal Mini Amp (which you may have seen in School Of Rock), or something similar.  However, the amps that size did not have very much oomph to them.  The guy there talked me into playing a Roland Micro Cube.  It was incredible that it could put out that much noise and yet be so small.  It can even run off batteries (six AA’s)!  Don’t get me wrong—you’re not going to worry about losing hearing unless you hold it to your head.  But you can very well drown out any conversation or tv in the room.  It also has a pretty wide set of effects:  chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, delay, and reverb.  In addition to that, it has six different amp modelers, including a very nice acoustic simulator.  The link I mentioned earlier has several pictures of the box and its controls.  But if you’d like to see it in action, check out this shot of yours truly rocking out:

See how awesome it looks?  And I had it turned up so loud that the camera picked up those yellow sound waves (betcha didn’t know that’s what sound waves looked like, didja?).  I’m also rocking out a black “teal” shirt (I wanted to put one on my cafepress store, but it won’t let me put up more than one black shirt).  And for anyone interested, I tried to give myself 1980’s hair band hair, but my attempt at doing so was less than successful.

For any who want to hear what this thing sounds like, I recorded a few short sound clips below.  If the audio quality is sub-par, blame it on the free-with-a-gateway-computer-six-years-ago-ness of my recording equipment.

Acoustic simulation
It’s amazing that it was able to get such a bright sound out of my Stratocaster.  Usually without distortion an electric guitar just sounds so flat.  I recorded two samples, both are also using a little bit of the Chorus effect...  I mean, why would you not use that effect with an acoustic-like sound?

• Galapogos (sic) - 0:14 - This song shows off the acoustic simulator with a song that picks one string at a time, rather than chords.

• Shine On - 0:14 - This song uses the acoustic simulation with chords.  Ain’t it purdy?

JC Clean
This is supposed to sound like the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amplifier.  I’m not sure how successful it is, but it does sound very nice with certain sounds (although obviously not as bright as the acoustic simulation).

• Shine On - 0:12 - I played the same song on the clean channel so that the difference would be quite obvious.  This one sounds much flatter to me, which is not my personal preference.

• Hummer - 0:29 - This song will show off an example of when the clean channel would be much better than the acoustic channel.  I’m also using the delay effect on this song.

Black panel
This is supposed to simulate the Fender Twin Reverb sound.  I don’t like it very much, because all it seems to do is overdrive the low end and make it sound like my speaker cone is torn.

• Zero - 0:10 - You can hear how only the low-end is distorted.  I’m not too very fond of this setting.

Brit Combo
According to the manual, “this is modeled on the Vox AC-30TB, the rock amplifier that created the Liverpool sound of the ‘60s.”  I don’t particularly care for this sound, it’s kind of like the “fuzz” distortion that Jimi Hendrix used a lot.  Just sounds to me like the clean signal mixed with a lot of static.

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:53 - This is a rather long clip.  I guess it kinda speaks for itself.  I boosted the low-end on the recording because my microphone didn’t pick it up very well..

Rectifier
This is really the only distorted channel I use on this thing.  It is modeled after the Mesa/Boogie Rectifier.  Much closer to the sounds of the mid-to-late nineties that I liked so much.  Unfortunately, the sound recorded does not match what was actually played very well at all.  In fact, the sound that was recorded is extremely obnoxious—I don’t know where the low end went!  In reality, the distortion is much creamier (that’s the best word I could think of to describe it).

• Welcome To Paradise - 0:52 - Once again, I’ll present the same song on two different channels for you to compare and contrast.  But really, I like the recording of this much less, but in person I liked it much more.  Stupid cheap microphone.

• I Caught Fire (In Your Eyes) - 0:09 - I wanted something that used the flanger/phaser (I can’t remember which I’m using in this song).  This was as close as I could come to the sound in the actual song, but I definitely fell short of what The Used recorded.

Well that’s all.  I know that was a lot of files, but it’s only three minutes of audio.  I wanted to embed the sounds in the page so that you could play them right there, but (from what I could find) there’s not a good way to do so that is standards-compliant and works across most platforms and browsers without requiring a plug-in, Flash, and/or javascript.

PS:  I do know that there is an audio output on the back of the thing.  In the past I have found those outputs to be noisier than placing a mic in front of the amp.  I haven’t tried with this amp though.  But as far as I know, pretty much all professionally recorded music uses a mic’ed amp, rather than the output from the amp.