There’s a scene in “Quantum of Solace” where James Bond tells one of his enemies to sit down in such a commanding voice that I took a moment to make sure that I was still in my seat. Daniel Craig is a scary scary man when he wants to be. He’s really the only reason I’d willingly watch a Bond film at this point - the franchise had become pretty tired out by the final days of Pierce Brosnan. The new Bond is a bit less adolescent and a bit more kinetic: lots of close-filmed hyper-active chase scenes in the style of Jason Bourne, and a dearth of gadgets. I really don’t miss the gadgets - I mean, once James Bond got a car that could turn invisible, what else could Q possibly give him?

While I largely approve of the new “smart action movie” Bond formula, I do worry that “007” is in danger of becoming a clone of the aforementioned Jason Borne. I think Daniel Craig has more charisma than Matt Damon, and plays a much more believable espionage super hero (he’s not a man, he’s a seething hulk of barely-restrained muscle), but in this movie he didn’t stand out enough from the rest of the action hero crowd. Missing were some good Bondian one-liners, and the lack of Bond’s wit made this installment weaker than Casino Royale, but it was fun without being silly, which is good enough in my books. I’m sure Daniel Craig will get a third kick at the can, and I look forward to it.

On another note,we saw trailer for the latest Brendan Fraser cgi monstrosity, and it left me wondering: is Brendan Fraser cast in all these dumb but flashy films because the producers feel assured his blandness won’t distract from all the expensive computer effects?

Here’s a song for your old president, and your new one.

Let’s hope he lives up to his promise.

From CNN.com: “Palin’s ‘going rogue,’ McCain aide says”.

Apparently there are complaints from within the McCain camp that Sarah Palin is trying to position herself for a 2012 run at the presidency. Unfortunately for McCain, this means she’s been going “off message”, promoting a “Palin/Joe the Plumber ‘12” ticket at the expense of “McCain/Palin ‘08”. I know she isn’t the first VP candidate to do this kind of thing, but given how much of a liability she’s turned out to be for the McCain campaign already, it’s surprising she’d actively try to compound things. I wonder if McCain is still happy with his choice of running mate…

There’s an article in the New Yorker called The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin, and it lets the air out of the popular notion that McCain found an outsider-governor to pluck out of obscurity and place on the national stage. It seems Sarah Palin has been working on getting noticed by conservatives in Washington for some time. This puts her in a new light, but doesn’t change the fact that she’s not remotely qualified for the presidency. I can’t imagine she’d manage to win the nomination in 2012, and if she did, I can’t imagine Obama wouldn’t wipe the floor with her in the general election, unless his first term ends up being a disaster. But the prospect of Mrs. Palin “sticking around” past this November if McCain loses is going to take some getting used to.

We’re having to learn all sorts of already well-known truths for ourselves. To whit: A CNN “Citizen Journalist” (read: anybody at all) “reports” that Steve Jobs of Apple has has a heart attack. Apple’s stock falls. Apple shouts loudly that this is a hoax, the SEC starts investigating, and now, according to CNET, the whole concept of “citizen journalism” needs some scrutiny.

Ya think? While I’m all for everybody having a voice (you are reading this on my blog, after all), we should only take those voices as seriously as they merit. That one anonymous user posting on a website can set all of the above wheels in motion is clear we’ve forgotten what we already supposedly know: be careful of your sources, especially on the internet.

One could perhaps hope that enough fuss (the SEC is involved, for crying out loud) of this kind could lead to the revelation that actual journalism, backed by reputation, transparency, and fact-checking is useful, and can cut through the noise to provide mostly-reliable information (nobody is perfect, I am the first to admit). If we’re really lucky, we might even rebuild the news-gathering systems we’ve so blithely torn down in favor of the “entertainment news” of Fox and the Daily Show, and the helter-skelter “citizen journalism” of blogs. And if we do rebuild them, it’ll probably be for all the same reasons we built them in the first place.

From the above PCWorld article:

“The frame ‘citizen journalism’ itself is a little on the toxic side for me,” Tompkins says. “Can you go down to the bus stop and talk to a ‘citizen physician’? If I work on my garbage disposal, am I a ‘citizen plumber’? The whole notion that anybody can be a journalist I think is wrong-minded, because journalism as a craft does mean something. It actually embodies a conduct and a standard of truth-telling that I think still are important.”

She didn’t even answer the questions. She was like one of those dolls that spouts a random canned phrase every time you pull the cord. By the end, the doll seemed to be breaking down.

Is anyone else getting tired of the word “maverick”?

I just watched the first of the US Presidential debates, streamed live on the internet. (Yes, American politics is considered a spectator sport up here in Our Home And Native Land.) I thought McCain was strong in this debate, and I thought Obama started poorly but rallied towards the end. Hard to pick a winner, but if I had to I would say McCain had the better performance.

I was struck by one difference of style between the candidates. Obama tended to say “we” a lot, as in “We need to make sure our veterans are taken care of,” while McCain tended to say “I” - “I’ll make sure our veterans are taken care of”. This different manner of speaking cuts to the heart of each candidate’s approach. Obama has put healing the rifts between red and blue America at the front of his platform. He wants to restore America’s image in the world, and rebuild alliances. When he says “we”, he means a unified America with himself as her leader. McCain, on the other hand, has always presented himself as “the right man for the tough job.” When he says “I will deal with America’s enemies”, he emphasizes what he himself can do in the White House.

McCain’s manner of speaking carries more rhetorical force. It is more definite. It sounds better in a debate. It sounds, well, more Presidential. Obama sounds less direct, less like a Commander in Chief and, dare I say it, more like an Organizer. This is not necessarily a bad thing for Obama, and a strong organizer might be precisely what America needs to help it out of its present difficulties. But Obama, in choosing this style, is taking a great risk: he has to overcome the deeply-held picture of what a president should sound like, and convince the voters that the next president must be one who sounds different.

Somebody recently put me on to a neat monospaced font called Inconsolata. A monospaced font is one where each letter takes up the same amount of horizontal space (meaning that ‘l’ is the same width as ‘w’), and programmers love them because they make it easier to read source code. I’m not entirely sure why this is, beyond the obvious reason that it makes formatted text line up cleanly. What I do know is that when I started using Inconsolata in my code editors I felt… well… suddenly happier.

Looking at the screen became easier on the eyes, and the code seemed to flow more effortlessly out of my fingers. Amazing what a font can do for you. If you, like me, are in the habit of doing a bit of haxoring, go download this font and give it a try.

Hello faithful blog reader. I have been unable to blog lately because I was viciously attacked by a lion during an Olympics parade in Ottawa.

Hopefully I will be back to my old bloggering ways soon.

I unexpectedly found myself on the side of the road Friday when my bus driver declared “last stop” rather sooner than usual. Making the best of it I walked down to the grocery store, and my route took me past Chapters. I have a hard time walking past a bookstore. My poor-studenthood used to keep the bibliospending in check, but now it takes all sorts of mental effort. As I neared the entrance I started enumerating all the reasons why I shouldn’t stop: I still have books I haven’t read from the last Amazon order, I have one more library book to finish and two more I’m planning to borrow, I just bought a copy of The New Yorker the other day, etc. As I passed a group of patrons sitting outside the attached coffee shop, a young woman turned to her friends and articulated the reason she wouldn’t be going into the bookstore:

“I haven’t read a whole book since like grade 4.” How could I argue with that? I walked on.

A couple weeks ago in the wake of the aforementioned amazon order, I signed up for an Ottawa Public Library card. I’m not sure why I didn’t do so sooner; public libraries are awesome, especially in the age of the interweb. The library catalog is searchable online, books can be requested online, renewed online, etc. The chance to read widely and with no risk (don’t like the book on the history of parsnips in 18th century France? Take it back and get one about the frogs of the Amazon) is something I’m quickly going to be unable to live without, I’m sure.

I am a little puzzled about how libraries are allowed to exist in our capitalist society. The intellectual property giants scream and cry against file sharing, but never seem to complain about libraries: state-sponsored institutions that will lend you as many movies, cds, and books as you want, for free. Perhaps, because libraries traditionally deal in books and, as such luminaries as Steve Jobs well know, books don’t matter, they are given a free pass? Who knows. Don’t knock it. Get a library card.

It’s not exactly a secret that “Chinese food” as often experienced in North America (egg rolls, chicken balls, fried rice, fortune cookies, etc.) is not something a typical Chinese person would be familiar with. Finding out exactly where and how this particular deep-fried cuisine originated would probably make for a fun project, but it isn’t my project today. I’m going to talk about the food I ate while I was in China. Thanks to Shengrong’s cooking and the occasional trip to a more authentic Chinese restaurant (they exist), I didn’t find the food to be totally outlandish, but there were a few strange bumps in the culinary road.

In Beijing, we stayed on the campus of the China University of Geosciences, and ate a few of our meals at one of the University restaurants, “LocalFood.com”. One of my favorite things there were battered chicken wings heavily spiced with cumin. Shengrong ordered those on our first day since they’re more like the kind of food I’m used to. That was really the only meal in which I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to manage the food without any trouble, as I was really tired and jetlegged at the time. After that I ate everything happily, and when I got back to Canada I found my own cooking kind of boring for the first few days. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot better at handling chopsticks.

At the entrance of “Local Food” - it was pretty large and usually full of diners.

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